Did Stanford just prototype the future of AR glasses?

A investigation squad astatine Stanford is developing a caller AI-assisted holographic imaging technology it claims is thinner, lighter, and higher value than thing its researchers person seen. Could it return augmented reality (AR) headsets to nan adjacent level?

For now, nan laboratory type has an anemic section of position — conscionable 11.7 degrees successful nan lab, acold smaller than a Magic Leap 2 aliases moreover a Microsoft HoloLens.

But Stanford’s Computational Imaging Lab has an full page pinch ocular assistance aft ocular aid that suggests it could beryllium onto thing special: a thinner stack of holographic components that could astir fresh into modular glasses frames, and beryllium trained to task realistic, full-color, moving 3D images that look astatine varying depths.

Like different AR eyeglasses, they usage waveguides, which are a constituent that guides ray done glasses and into nan wearer’s eyes. But researchers opportunity they’ve developed a unsocial “nanophotonic metasurface waveguide” that tin “eliminate nan request for bulky collimation optics,” and a “learned beingness waveguide model” that uses AI algorithms to drastically amended image quality. The study says nan models “are automatically calibrated utilizing camera feedback”.

Although nan Stanford tech is presently conscionable a prototype, pinch moving models that look to beryllium attached to a chair and 3D-printed frames, nan researchers are looking to disrupt nan existent spatial computing marketplace that besides includes bulky passthrough mixed reality headsets for illustration Apple’s Vision Pro, Meta’s Quest 3, and others.

Postdoctoral interrogator Gun-Yeal Lee, who helped constitute the insubstantial published successful Nature, says there’s nary different AR strategy that compares some successful capacity and compactness.