The ultimate goal of AI is to pass what’s known as the Turing test — to build a machine whose intelligence is indistinguishable from a human’s. The emerging field of augmented reality (AR) is striving to pass its own “visual Turing test,” in which virtual objects interact so seamlessly with their real-world surroundings that it’s virtually impossible to distinguish what’s digital from what’s real.
The imaging technology startup Avegant says it has achieved a truly realistic and immersive AR experience with its newly introduced “light field” head-mounted display. The company’s prototype headset appears to overcome one of the critical limitations of current AR devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens — the inability to interact with objects at close range.
Journalist and tech industry analyst Ross Rubin was recently given a private demo of the Avegant Light Field prototype and compared it to the immersive experience promised by Magic Leap, a secretive AR startup that’s received nearly $1.4 billion in funding from Google and Alibaba.
“One of [Magic Leap’s] first signature images was of an elephant being cupped by a hand. That’s what I experienced in the Avegant demo, to be able to hold a planet in my hands,” Rubin told Seeker. “It’s the difference between seeing animated objects out of your reach and being able to actually walk up to things, put your hands around them and navigate within the mixed reality space.”
Avegant’s light field headset works by mimicking the way that real-world objects emit light. In the real world, light enters the eye as a collection of rays, which are focused for the brain. Objects that are different distances from the eye emit different “light fields,” requiring the eye to constantly adjust like the autofocus setting on a camera. In humans, our combination of binocular vision and the ability to switch between different focal planes gives real-world objects their depth and distance.
To display virtual objects with the same realistic sense of depth, Avegant needed to give each digital object its own light field. Instead of presenting the viewer with a flat projection of virtual objects at a set distance, each object now exists on its own focal plane. When the user turns his attention from object to object, his eyes refocus to accommodate the object’s specific light field, including objects very close at hand.
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Source: Seeker