TL;DR: Last week, we kicked off a three-part series on the future of human-computer interaction (HCI). In the first post, we shared our 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to […].
TOWARDS a METAMATERIALLY-BASED ANALOGUE SENSOR FOR TELESCOPE EYEPIECES jeremy batterson.
(NB: Those familiar with photography or telescopy can skip over the “elements of a system,” since they will already know this.)
In many telescopic applications, what is desired is not a more magnified image, but a brighter image. Some astronomical objects, such as the Andromeda galaxy or famous nebulae like M42 are very large in apparent size, but very faint. If the human eye could see the Andromeda galaxy, it would appear four times wider than the Moon. The great Orion nebula M42 is twice the apparent diameter of the Moon.
Astrophotographers have an advantage over visual astronomers in that their digital sensors can be wider than the human pupil, and thus can accommodate larger exit pupils for brighter images.
The common three-factor determination of brightness of a photograph (aperture, ISO, and shutter speed) should actually be five-factor, including what is often left out since it had already been inherently designed into a system: magnification and exit pupil. The common factors are.
Elements of a system: 1 )Aperture. As aperture increases, the light gain of a system increases by the square of increased aperture, so a 2-inch diameter entrance pupil aperture has four times gain over a 1-inch diameter entrance pupil and so on.
Today, at a special AR/VR focused event held inside its virtual reality community platform Altspace, Microsoft showcased a new product aiming to provide their AR HoloLens platform and VR Windows Mixed Reality platform with a shared platform for meetings.
The app is called Microsoft Mesh and it gives users a cross AR/VR meeting space to interact with other users and 3D content, handling all of technical hard parts of sharing spatial multi-player experiences over the web. Like Microsoft’s other AR/VR apps, the sell seems to be less in the software than it is in enabling developers to tap into one more specialization of Azure, building their own software that builds on the capabilities. The company announced that AltspaceVR will now be Mesh-enabled.
In the company’s presentation, they swung for the fences in showcasing potential use cases, bringing in James Cameron, the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil and Pokémon Go developer Niantic.
Today, the most common use cases are much more mundane, including smartphone-based games and apps like Pokemon Go or Apple’s Ruler app, which use the phone’s screen and camera rather than relying on glasses or another set of screens sitting on your face. The few companies who are actively producing AR glasses are mostly focused on work scenarios, like manufacturing and medicine.
Industry watchers and participants think that Apple has a good chance to validated and revolutionize augmented reality like it did with smartphones.
We can immediately supersede the Mojo Vision approach for retinal projection, with an interim projection system using metalenses. The Mojo Lens approach is to try to put everything, including the television screen, projection method and energy source onto one contact lens. With recent breakthroughs in scaling up the size of metalenses, an approach utilizing a combination of a contact metalens and a small pair of glasses can be utilized. This is emphatically not the Google Glass approach, which did not use modern metalenses. The system would work as follows:
1)Thin TV cameras are mounted on both sides of a pair of wearable glasses.
2)The images from these cameras are projected via projection metalenses in a narrow beam to the center of the pupils.
3)A contact lens with a tiny metalens mounted in the center, directly over the pupil, projects this projected beam outwards, through the pupil, onto the full width of the curved retina.
The end result would be a 360 degree, full panorama image. This image can either be a high resolution real time vision of the wearer’s surroundings, or can be a projection of a movie, or augmented reality superimposed on the normal field of vision. It can inherently be full-color 3D. Of course such a system will be complemented with ear phones. Modern hearing aids are already so small they can barely be seen, and have batteries that last a week. A pair of ear phones will also allow full 3D sound and also will be the audible complement of augmented vision.
Cameras in cell phones using traditional lenses are already very thin, and even they could be used for an experimental system of this type, but the metalens cameras will make this drastically thinner. The projection lens system must work in combination with the lens over the pupil. This also means that when the glasses are removed, the contact lens must also be removed, or the vision will be distorted.
The end result will be a pair of glasses, not quite as thin as an ordinary pair of glasses, but still very thin and comfortable. Instead of trying to mount the power source in the contact lens, like Mojo Vision is trying to do, a small battery would be mounted in the glasses. Mojo Vision is probably going to have to do something similar for the power source: put the battery in a small pair of glasses that projects the energy onto its contact lens.
