With everyone from Apple to Xrai announcing AR goggles or rumored to be entering the space, the conversation is strong enough to earn some glares on the shelf. It seems like every company works into some sort of helmet, goggles, cap, or goggles to bring the digital world right into your field of vision. And after meeting Lumus, they all play.
In a hotel room on the third floor of The Venetian on Thursday, the first day of CES XNUMX, I saw the company's Z-Lens architecture, which I would call the future of AR glasses. . And it just took my breath away.
I've used every headset under the sun right now, including models from Sony, HTC, and Microsoft and glasses from Magic Leap and Lenovo and all the others. And they're all somewhere between mediocre and underwhelming: they're tacky things with wires, or heavy bands that hang over the forehead, or have limited fields of vision, obstructed by design. Or they just don't work well.
Lumus, on the other hand, makes a lens that is perfect. Or a waveguide, I should say, the technical term for projecting an image onto or into the glasses in front of your face.
“There are two approaches to waveguides,” Dave Goldman, vice president of marketing for the Israeli company Lumus, told me. “One has a diffractive name, and those are the other types. And I mean everyone, I mean some of the internal teams at major companies, like all of the Lumus contenders right now.
This includes, for example, the Nreal Air and VITURE One XR glasses, and the new TCL RayNeo X2 glasses. Goldman's company uses a different technology, reflective waveguides, which provide much brighter images and much more efficient waveguides, which means low power solutions. This means that the lenses are thin and bright enough to fit into regular glasses. The Z-Lens image is created by a projector module in the frame; It has an LED and LCOS display and prism. Light from the projector is directed into the waveguide, where two sets of specula built into the lens expand that image to fill your field of view. So the specula are all specula. Truly smart specula.
So the specula are all specula. Truly smart specula.
To try them out, Goldman gave me a pair of chunky blue Buddy Holly-style pince-nez with flexible, coiled cords coming out of each temple. I put them on, they are light and very similar to normal glasses. And there, floating before my eyes, was a perfectly intelligible grid, perfectly bright and clear with images and text: a simple demonstration of what the Lumus Z-Lens can do.
Using a connected laptop, he did some demos: some Sesame Street characters, some sample images, and an animated video of a steampunk-style flying airship hovering, zooming in and out. Everything worked perfectly, bright enough to see in sunlight, clear enough to see through, and completely invisible to anyone looking at me.
The reality of augmented reality
The glasses of the future, whether augmented, virtual, or mixed, are going to take multiple forms when they finally ship in the near future (XNUMX-XNUMX months is my best guess, but who knows what Apple will do). Some will be immersive headsets that lean towards virtual reality; others will be reality-grabbing walkthrough devices and weave it with digital effects for a whole new reality. Some will be routine wearables that will present "bite" data: directions to the mall for walkers, pace and heart rate for athletes, song and artist information for music enthusiasts, and more.
This last category is the most interesting to me: a simple information overlay that can cram your planet with data and inform your actions... and can be ignored if you want. I'd put Lumus in this category: Its Z-Lens waveguide architecture isn't immersive like VR, and (yet anyway) it doesn't map the planet around it and doesn't overlay any virtual content onto it. But it superimposes things on reality and creates some truly intriguing options.
For AR glasses to truly break into the mainstream market, they need to be both functionally and aesthetically amazing. And let's be clear, AR glasses that look like regular glasses could turn this whole space upside down. But projecting visible images outdoors requires a clear, bright, clean image full of colour, which is a real technical hurdle. Images on Hololens look good, but the camera is clunky. Although Magic Leap or Nreal are more portable, the visuals are not great. Lumus breaks the mold.
The competition: We tested the TCL RayNeo X2
The TCL RayNeo X2 glasses share similarities with other AR smart glasses, such as the Nreal Air and VITURE One XR glasses. But these glasses have been outfitted with a pair of Micro-LED optical waveguide screens that give the wearer a personal viewing screen, and on the stems of the glasses you'll find speakers so you can hear sound through your headphones as well. . read more
The company's breakthrough is surprisingly simple: Better specula, etched into a layer that sits on top of the glass lens, reflect an image directly into your eye. The new Lumus models employ multiple specula to refract clean, clear images that your eye sees right in front of you. The new model, unveiled at CES, uses a smaller projector module than previous generations, allowing the company to make smaller bezels. Lumus is also able to adhere lenses directly to prescription glasses, much like the extra light-sensitive coating you might get.
Inherent in the technology is a privacy factor: because specula are designed to refract light in a way that makes it more visible to the user's eyes, other people won't be able to see what they see. So pull out those lecture cheat sheets or notes at your next interview... absolutely no one else is going to know you're looking at them.
The company claims 2K x 2K resolution and XNUMX nits of brightness, which should let you see images from the projector in daylight. I was trapped in a hotel room, but the images were clearly bright enough for daylight.
So when are we going to see this?
Lumus is in talks with major tech players, Goldman told me, though he declined to name names. And the company has established mass manufacturing partnerships. Quanta Computer (which makes the Apple Watch and Macbook Pro, among many other products) has an entire line installed in Taipei. And Schott, the German glass company, has a production line set up in Panang, Malaysia.
But we're not going to see Lumus on the market anytime soon. Expect that in XNUMX, he stated, and surely as a monocular solution at first. Either way, prepare to be blown away as well. It truly is the future.
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