In an Augmented Reality (AR) Symposium at the recent ST Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California, ST and its partners treated attendees to interesting presentations that updated the progress in the technology’s adoption. These presentations, from enablers, early adopters, and supply-chain gurus, painted an exciting picture of the future for those hoping to ride the wave.
AR Panel Looks into the Future
In a presentation titled, AR Traction Will Power Next Evolution of Devices, IDC Research Director for Enabling Technologies, Michael Palma, emphasized that the share of AR shipments for commercial customers had passed an inflection point and was in a growth spurt that was created a strong opportunity for suppliers. His research emphasized the movement of sensors to drive new human-machine interfaces (HMI) and position tracking. To meet the end-product demands, Palma emphasized the strong influence that AR applications would provide to processing, connectivity, and display developments.
As if to emphasize Palma’s point regarding HMI and position tracking, North Vice President of Advanced R&D, Stefan Alexander showed his hand – literally – and it had “Loop,” a tiny ring, on his index finger. Small as it is, Loop features a thumb-controlled joystick that allows the wearer to interact with their Focals, the custom sized and fitted eyewear, that are a real use case. The eyewear aspires to be the first step toward a new paradigm of technology, where technology is seamlessly blended into our world and is both immediately accessible when we want it and completely hidden away when you don’t.
ST Partners Share Their Views
Equally excited by the opportunity, Prince Gupta, Senior Product Manager of XR at Qualcomm, presented some of its enabling technologies while Atheer’s Chief Product Officer Nag Chandrashekar spoke of their pioneering Augmented Reality Management Platform, which provides a competitive edge to improve productivity, effectiveness, accuracy, and safety through delivering contextual information and expertise.
In a presentation of its enabling technology, ST’s Marco Angelici introduced attendees to ST Laser Beam Scanners for near-eye displays. The technology builds on ST’s success in MEMS micromirrors and showed the extraordinarily small size of ST’s Laser Bean Scanner: 1.7 cubic centimeters while promising further size reductions. For progress in this feature, ST has been working with another presenter from the session: OSRAM. Senior Applications Engineer from OSRAM, Ann Russell-El Demery, described its range of optical technologies for AR and presented innovative laser diode technologies designed to support all-day wearable AR glasses.
STDevCon19_2.4-5-ARVR-by-OsramThere is no denying mainstream, high-volume AR is coming soon and ST was pleased to be able to host so many innovative companies at the forefront of this disruptive technology.
