Immersive experiences without the headsets
One of the biggest reasons virtual reality hasn’t taken off is the clunky headsets that users have to wear
One of the biggest reasons virtual reality hasn’t taken off is the clunky headsets that users have to wear. But what if you could get the benefits of virtual reality without the headsets, using screens that computationally improve the images they display?
That’s the goal of the startup Brelyon, which is commercializing a new kind of display and content-rendering approach that immerses users in virtual worlds without requiring them to strap goggles onto their heads.
The displays run light through a processing layer before it reaches users’ eyes, recalculating the image to create ultrawide, visual experiences with depth. The company is also working on a new kind of content-rendering architecture to generate more visually efficient imagery. The result is a 120-inch screen that simulates the sensation of looking out a window into a virtual world, where content pops in and out of existence at different angles and depths, depending on what you feed the display.
“Our current displays use different properties of light, specifically the wavefront of the electric field,” says Brelyon co-founder and CEO Barmak Heshmat, a former postdoc in the Media Lab. “In our newest architecture, the display uses a stack of shader programming empowered with inference microservices to modify and generate content on the fly, amplifying your immersion with the screens.”
Customers are already using Brelyon’s current displays in flight simulators, gaming, defense, and teleoperations, and Heshmat says the company is actively scaling its manufacturing capacity to meet growing demand.
“Wherever you want to increase visual efficiency with screens, Brelyon can help,” Heshmat says. “Optically, these virtual displays allow us to craft a much larger, control-center-like experience without needing added space or wearing headsets, and at the compute level our rerendering architectures allow us to use every bit of that screen in most efficient way.”
Discover more here
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
