Seeing Is Believing at the BA-SID One-Day AR/XR Conference

Abstract

THE BAY AREA CHAPTER OF SID RECENTLY ORGANIZED A ONE-DAY conference focused on the latest advancements in extended reality (XR) displays, optics, and waveguides. The timing was ideal, coinciding with Apple's Vision Pro and Meta's Orion AR headset announcements, signaling a new era of innovation and heightened consumer interest in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Strong attendance reflected this momentum, creating an energetic environment for discussion and idea exchange.

Bernard Kress, director of XR Engineering at Google, delivered an engaging keynote on “Display Engines for All-Day Use Smart Eyewear,” which offered a comprehensive overview of display engines, optics, and waveguides for viable smart eyewear. He highlighted how the mass adoption of smart glasses has been slow because of technical and market hurdles but projected that advances in artificial intelligence (AI), lightweight designs, and evolving user expectations would drive substantial growth post-2025. Kress emphasized that future success hinges on making designs consumer-friendly, socially acceptable, and seamlessly blending digital functionality with fashion to position smart glasses as the next essential tech accessory after smartphones.

He elaborated on the ideal future AR headset, likening it to a three-layered cake system requiring robust AR hardware, a reliable operating system platform (such as Vision OS or Horizon OS), and AI-powered applications (such as Gemini/Astra, Apple Intelligence, or Meta's Llama). Creating such a product will be a complex challenge, requiring the integration of numerous high-tech components, including display engines, waveguides, head tracking, eye and face tracking, gesture sensing, connectivity, and efficient power management. This ambitious vision demands collaboration across multiple industries, and it is clear that fully realizing it will take time.

A particularly relevant example of early progress is the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, introduced in 2023 by EssilorLuxottica and Meta. These wearable devices integrate advanced technology within a fashionable, socially acceptable frame, enabling users to make calls, capture and share media, and livestream. The speaker highlighted this as an important first step, showcasing how consumer-friendly design can expand the appeal of AR wearables in conjunction with AI applications.

Kress then provided an in-depth look at the smart glasses display subsystem, discussing the light engine's types: LCD transparent microdisplays, LCOS, microelectromechanical systems digital light processing (MEMS DLP), microLED, microOLED, and laser beam scanning engines. He also addressed complexities of waveguide combiners, explaining their types (diffractive, holographic, and reflective) and the manufacturing methods, such as nanoimprint lithography and deep ultraviolet etching. This area has become a hotbed for mergers and acquisitions, underlining the significant commercial interest.

He emphasized the underutilized potential of lenses in smart eyewear, describing them as valuable “real estate” that eventually could integrate far more functionality beyond optics. Drawing an analogy to very-large-scale integration (VLSI) in the semiconductor industry, Kress suggested that waveguide combiners could follow a similar trajectory, achieving high integration and multifunctionality at reduced costs. The concept of “wafer-scale waveguide combiners” could represent a major leap forward, creating multifunctional transparent platforms with wide-reaching applications, similar to the impact of VLSI on chip technology.

In closing, the keynote underscored the tremendous opportunities ahead in developing AR and VR hardware ecosystems and how each technological breakthrough could contribute to a new era in immersive, wearable technology. This keynote not only energized the audience but also set a high standard for the sessions that followed.