Lifeboat Foundation

Interactive 3D images that appear to float in the air, above a table that a group of people can stand around without needing any special headsets or glasses: that’s what South Australian company Voxon Photonics has built with its US$10,000 VX1 table.

Fiction has promised us holograms for decades, with one of the most famous examples appearing in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope. On board the Millennium Falcon, R2D2 and Chewbacca play some sort of digital board game, interacting with figures built out of light hovering in the air above a table.

Such things have been a long time coming to the real world. VR and AR can both somewhat replicate the experience, but they require headsets. In the best case, these are a bit antisocial, stopping you from looking others in the eye. In the worst case, they completely remove the wearer from the real world to immerse them in virtual space.

Donning an augmented reality headset in the cockpit, a veteran F-22 pilot just had a dogfight with a projection of a Chinese J-20 fighter.

AR has been a bit of a fad in recent days. However, I personally believe that it will be an integral part of our future lives- but in the form of neural implants rather than glasses or contact lenses.

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Ultra high-res displays for gadgets and tv sets may be coming. 😃

By expanding on existing designs for electrodes of ultra-thin solar panels, Stanford researchers and collaborators in Korea have developed a new architecture for OLED—organic light-emitting diode—displays that could enable televisions, smartphones and virtual or augmented reality devices with resolutions of up to 10,000 pixels per inch (PPI). (For comparison, the resolutions of new smartphones are around 400 to 500 PPI.)

Such high-pixel-density displays will be able to provide stunning images with true-to-life detail—something that will be even more important for headset displays designed to sit just centimeters from our faces.

Continue reading “Scientists borrow solar panel tech to create new ultrahigh-res OLED display” »

Article on the soldiers of the very near future. This is when Internet of Things is used for military purposes allowing better situational awareness.

ENVG-B is still being fielded across the force, but the Army is already developing a next-gen system, a set of augmented reality targeting goggles — a militarized Microsoft HoloLens — known as IVAS. The Army’s also developing an Adaptive Squad Architecture to ensure all the different technologies going on a soldier’s body are compatible.

“ENVG-B is a system of systems,” Lynn Bollengier of L3Harris Technologies said at this week’s annual Association of the US Army conference. These systems include integrated augmented reality aspects from the Nett Warrior tablet, as well as wireless interconnectivity with weapon sights.

Continue reading “Soldiers Become Another Node In DoD’s Internet Of Things: ENVG-B” »

The Weather Channel broadcasts tornado with Unreal Engine AR.

IS THE METAMATERIAL FISHEYE LENS AN ANSWER FOR RETINAL PROJECTION? There is a race to figure out the best way to project images onto the human retina, for augmented reality devices. Since the human retina is curved, unlike a photographic plate, a wide-angled, curved image designed to fit with the inherent curvature of the retina is in order. Planetariums can use fisheye lenses to project onto a curved dome in a similar way. Can modification of the new method for creating flat, wide angled fisheye metalenses be used for this purpose? There would be three immediate applications of such a capability: 1) Augmented reality projection which is not limited to a narrow portion of the visual field. 2) Full immersion virtual reality devices. 3) Night vision glasses that take large areas of aperture and project wide-angled images through a smaller exit pupil than the human pupil. It is possible that such a lens would be used in combination with another complementing metalens to allow the proper projection.

To capture panoramic views in a single shot, photographers typically use fisheye lenses — ultra-wide-angle lenses made from multiple pieces of curved glass, which distort incoming light to produce wide, bubble-like images. Their spherical, multipiece design makes fisheye lenses inherently bulky and often costly to produce.

Now engineers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have designed a wide-angle lens that is completely flat. It is the first flat fisheye lens to produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images. The design is a type of “metalens,” a wafer-thin material patterned with microscopic features that work together to manipulate light in a specific way.

Continue reading “Engineers produce a fisheye lens that’s completely flat” »

The US Army is testing augmented reality goggles on its service dogs in hopes to allow troops to give orders remotely.

Pooches are commonly deployed to sniff out explosives, hazardous materials or to assist in rescues. The tech would retrofit special safety goggles military dogs already wear with live cameras and visual indicators so handlers can issue specific directions – allowing the dogs to work without putting soldiers in danger.

“Augmented reality works differently for dogs than for humans,” said Dr. Stephen Lee, an Army Research Office senior scientist in a statement. “AR will be used to provide dogs with commands and cues; it’s not for the dog to interact with it like a human does. This new technology offers us a critical tool to better communicate with military working dogs.”

The US Army is developing augmented reality goggles for dogs to help protect their human guardians.

The BBC reports that the project, funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program, aims to allow soldiers to give dogs specific directional commands while they’re not in direct line of sight.

“Augmented reality works differently for dogs than for humans,” Stephen Lee, an Army Research Laboratory senior scientist, explained in a statement. “AR will be used to provide dogs with commands and cues; it’s not for the dog to interact with it like a human does.”