Into the CES stadium, is such a body full of two-dimensional code cube. Because of the posture Qing Qi, you can't see every face of it, as if this CES show, too many people have seen a lively. For the doorway behind them, there are no shortages of people and people. As a pursuing and enthusiastic media, can we tolerate such reports? The answer is of course No!
The three-day CES Asia passed yesterday and I miss it.
In fact, the first two days (7th and 8th) did not stay in the pavilion all day because of too many things. The high-speed rail that returned to Beijing was at 3pm on the 9th. To catch the tail on the last day, I took my friend's exhibitor's card and entered the court early at eight o'clock. Then, in order to see more for a while, it was only one and a half hours before leaving. As a result, a frantic run caught the train. During my running, my head was thinking: Ah, I haven't run so fast for many years, but my legs are still good and the pace is big. After sitting on the high-speed rail, I looked at the watch, which was two minutes and three minutes.
"This year's CES will not work." It has become the voice I hear most, as if it all became politically correct. Although there were indeed a lot of CES booths that were not sold, personal observations showed that there were many things that could be said. In fact, I believe that you have already seen too many of these so-called CES summary articles that read the exhibitor's PR drafts at each booth. If you are not satisfied with this, throw away the glimps of the glimpse of the light, we come to talk about real CES.
The following sections are divided into several parts: AR glasses, VR hardware, automotive +VR/AR, AR+early education, VR/AR shopping, low-profile company exhibitions, and upstream companies in the industry chain...
Hey, the title doesn't seem to be awesome. Well, it's still called "AR glasses: It's not easy to say love you," "The biggest surprise of VR came from a Russian manufacturer!", "In the future, when you drive, you can't separate from AR/VR. "Children, ready to welcome a big wave of AR play (ji) lei", "put down VR shopping, Jingdong's AR warehouse feels very promising," "small booth, big giant, you will definitely miss Are these low-profile companies and the “VR/AR industry behind the scenes†feeling much worse?
So, let us go into today's share (cao). Let's Go!
AR glasses: It's not easy to say love you
The AR glasses company has come very, very much, and has even made a fortune for a long time. Most companies are not familiar with it. However, after walking through the overall AR glasses, it still feels that the AR glasses are still in a very early stage. Most of the exhibited things are still in the demo stage. They get up on the stand, take a look, lay down, leave, and OK. The problem, but people can buy home, can use, all aspects of robustness, I'm sorry, just like a friend's statement, probably still takes five years.
First of all, AR glasses are inherently a very high-tech gadget. Putting a piece of virtual image in a natural way into people's eyes is really not easy to talk about. Nor is it easy for some manufacturers to bring it around during the press conference. It has particularly high software and hardware requirements. Software such as computer vision, SLAM technology, hardware such as optical imaging, SoC chips, etc. In fact, the hardware and software in this area are currently not very mature. Still not finished, even the need for industrial design considerations, shape can not be too ugly, right?
We don't talk about B and C. That's the type of business that the merchants forcefully assign to customers. Say as a human being, what do we wear for glasses? To be light and to display well, one hundred times run OK with one hundred times. The most important thing is to be cheap.
If you want to be light, you must work hard on the hardware of the optical solution and processing unit. Most of the spectacles manufacturers exhibited at the CES show are still the old version of the optical program - N-year-old Google Glass Prism program (that square box), or is the brother of this program: transflective Reflection, or an upgraded version of the freeform prism, is then rare, and is also the future of the AR Eye—optical waveguides, and last but not least, the legendary Video-See-Through.
One by one, Google Glass Prism this outdated stuff we do not say skip it? It has poor results, FOV (field of view) is small, and only monocular. But you should not underestimate this kind of scheme, it is really cheap - in fact the AR glasses manufacturer with the most shipments is in this field, and this time very low-keyed there is only a small booth, it is said that its family's magnitude reaches 5k level, this The level is actually astronomical in the field of AR glasses. However, we really should be on the move, look forward to it ... In addition, who knows that a Shenzhen Prism Company that was passed down last year and whose character was closed down in Shenzhen was awkward?
Next is a semi-transreflective reflection. Its principle is to project an image in front of your eyes through a screen, and then refract into your eyes. The most famous program in this area is Meta – if you don’t know, Tencent, Comcast, Li Ka-shing, and Lenovo have invested hundreds of millions in this company. You have to be good, right? But Meta's helmet is actually very bulky, which is determined by its optical principle. Therefore, although the FOV has a large size of 90 degrees, the volume is very large. The worst thing is that you must connect to a computer - this is almost unbearable for AR.
Meta's solution is DreamWorld. The DreamWorld also occupies a booth. I used to ask for optics. My little brother gave me an English sentence and listened to it. (I didn't understand). And Meta is very close (do not know why, they do not let me shoot people wearing glasses photos), using a similar program. In fact, their CEO is out of Meta, and coincidentally, I just went to see DreamWorld in the morning, and came back to my house in the afternoon and came up with a message that Metagame sued DreamWorld CEO to plagiarize the old club's patent.
Aside from these gossips, DreamWorld can be said to be the best in display, brightness and color. It is almost the best in the entire CES Asia show. It has no problems with the same category, and its brightness is claimed to reach 300 nits. However, it is a pity that the SLAM cannot be implemented in the show, but at the very least, it will also show the display effect. It is said that its SLAM program is still being done. In addition, it is also necessary to connect a mobile phone or computer and start from the app.
In this venue, I was impressed by RealMax's AR phone box, which is not as good as the AR carton. This scheme was first implemented by the Shenzhen Zhima team acquired by RealMax. It looks a bit industrial, but the display effect is very general and not as good as DreamWorld. In addition, the mobile phone was placed in this position at the forehead. There is also an AR industrial helmet that has not been successfully turned on for a long time. From the display point of view, the experience is also very general. I personally really doubt the prospect of such a small-screen industrial helmet.
In addition, we also saw a Lanster in Hangzhou, which has been doing for many years. The company was established in 2011 and it is said that it has a lot of lists. Uh, check it out... Open the machine, what do I see? That is not the absolute invincibility of the legendary, classic Google Andrews system under the three virtual buttons! What do you do when you go to AR glasses? !
In the end, 0Glass, the Shenzhen company's product that had just been invested by Sany Heavy Industry was the last one I left before leaving CES because there were too many people before. Although their latest Danny optics are still a semi-transparent, they do not need to connect mobile phones and computers. The display is not bad, from the demo demo point of view, the effect can also be used Sony's OLED screen. However, the show is still just a demo.
Next is the product of the freeform solution. In fact, the freeform surface is also a prism. However, compared to Google's simple and crude stuff such as Glass and Meta, it is more difficult to design, and it can achieve larger viewing angles and lower prices. . The three major exhibitions featured here are bright winds, insights, and shadows (two are strictly speaking). Beijing Nadejia, a well-known module provider in the field of free-form surfaces, has no separate exhibitors.
The bright wind table adopts the free-form optical waveguide scheme of Beijing Nadejia Company, including the exhibition of the exhibitors. The light stage is still displaying HiAR Glass glasses, equipped with Xiaolong 820 chip. I have discussed this company and its hardware products many times before. The effect of the demo is still possible. The founder team is of technical origin. The lineup is very luxurious, but the pit from software giants to hardware molding is huge. The products of the bright winds have been dragged on for a long time. It may be related to them. Recently, mass production was reported, and it is hoped that mass production will be successful. After all, for hardware products, the supply chain is still a huge pit. Some of the listed companies in the hardware industry do not dare claim that the supply chain is strong.
Innocent took the semi-transparent product out and displayed its own new product, Air, which also uses a free-form curved prism. According to Dongruo, the director of the Creative Optical Team, this freedom The surfaces were designed by their own optical team and achieved a 60-degree FoV solution on a 10 mm lens. They are also observing whether it is the direction of the next optical waveguide.
In the end, the legendary optical waveguide finally arrived. Why is optical waveguide so important? Is everyone considered the direction of AR glasses optics? Because only it can be achieved at present, lightweight, close to our actual shape and weight of glasses now.
The optical waveguide is dominated by Lumus, a well-known Israeli optical solutions company. It has basically dominated the market for N years, and the United States has recently been catching up with DigiLens. The optical waveguide solutions brought to the show were Lumus's partner Infinity AR, Beijing's Conch and Microlight and Shenzhen's Dingjie.
Let's talk about Infinity AR. This company was invested by US$15 million by Ma Yun’s father Alibaba. It was originally a company that I had more expectation. In fact, lining up was really impassable. It was hard to take a sip and wear the legendary Lumus's AR glasses. The effect is indeed the lightest, and the permeability is also higher than the previous ones.
The current problem with optical waveguides is the high price because of their low yield. It is said that Lumus glasses to more than 1,000 US dollars (although I heard that a company in Shanghai claims to be able to achieve 80% yield), the two add up directly to 10,000. Beijing Ling rhodium not sell glasses, only sell light machine. The lens can also look effective. The thickness of 1.7mm is close to Lumm's 1.6mm. The FOV is also good, but it is said that you can adjust the brightness by yourself. In short, the most critical issue of the waveguide is the mass production, the production capacity, and the yield rate. At present, there are domestic Shenzhen Optoelectronics (exclusive | seven-member team adhere to two and a half years, AR Optoelectronics has won millions of angels round of investment), Shanghai Lixin Optics and so on.
However, one company’s brochure said that it is the only one in the world that can produce consumer AR optics. Hehe... Whoever does not name it.
Shenzhen Dingjie exhibited a prototype of its own optical waveguide. It was impossible to use Otz without electricity. It is said that this is a company with strong channel capabilities and is ready to sell AR glasses to some users of aerospace technology. Optical waveguide solutions come from various domestic suppliers.
Finally, let's talk about the only AR (called "Mediated Reality" (MR)) spectacles using the Video See Through solution at the CES Asia Pavilion.
Video See Through (video perspective) is one of the two mainstream ways to implement AR/MR. The first one is to use lens optics. We have introduced a lot of specific types. Video perspective is to put a screen in front of your eyes, and videos taken from outside are played in front of your eyes to form a “seen†reality effect. Virtual objects are superimposed on this video. It can be understood that this is an AR-like VR, so-called Mediated Reality. However, few people are engaged in this kind of program.
Put on MR Eyes of Mizuto Technology, just as I said just now, you can see the reality of my eyes captured by the camera, and there are also some virtual objects superimposed on it. But it is awful that the entire experience has a low number of frames. Smear and dropped frames are very serious and should not reach 60fps. Glasses sell more than 8,000, it is amazing that the shop's profile is written to understand the developer (white sense is a geek), it is also recommended that general users do not buy. However, the company claims that they do not rely on selling this eyewear as its main business, mainly to pick up some B-side solutions.
Having said so much optics, there is software?
The most important aspect of this is of course SLAM technology. It is the core technology for solving virtual objects that can truly exist in reality. Simply speaking, SLAM is a positioning solution. It can sense and rebuild the world around it, and let the virtual objects in the AR world stay firmly in place. Just as true, you won't appear when you turn a few meters away and find your way back. ? Is something missing? Then play for a second.
If you use Microsoft's HoloLens you will understand that HoloLens is based on four RGB cameras + a depth camera, and a HPU (holographic image processing unit) to complete the perception and reconstruction of the environment.
In this exhibition, almost all the homes had a general effect, including the Israeli company Infinity AR, which is known for its use of a binocular stereo camera + inertial measurement unit solution. The price is cheap and it is SLAM. However, it is also very drifting. It is said that the reason for not using a depth camera is to save energy.
According to a friend who specializes in SLAM, the big problem is that many companies have released the VIO (visual inertial metric) techniques as SLAM: VIO uses a monocular or binocular camera for recognition matching and depth. Estimates, etc., use inertial measurement units to do initial level estimation and 3 degrees of freedom, and finally use a set of algorithms to do the fitting. Reluctance can be understood as a simulation. The problem is that, "Look at the video and play table games, VIO can barely. But in the big scenes of factories, warehouses, and large buildings, there is no SLAM."
It is better to rely on Marker's VIO than SLAM. But this is very troublesome. Will you label the whole house when using AR glasses?
There are basically no SLAM eyewear manufacturers participating in the exhibition. DreamWorld said that SLAM had a demo but did not exhibit it. 0Glass's direct demonstration of demo did not realize SLAM (his home software is said to have been co-opted with EasyAR). In addition, there is a Shanghai visual limit to do "visual inertial SLAM module", because the time did not see the relationship, the specific unknown, it is regrettable. A friend who has seen can tell me how it works.
In summary, it can be seen that there are still many immature places in the AR glasses, both hardware and software, and there are many pits. We still need to wait for the further maturation of these technologies.
In addition, HoloLens, who is not present at all but is everywhere, must be mentioned.
There is nothing shameful about integration. Lie is a shame and shame.
We must bring in Microsoft HoloLens, which has been hung several times by N domestic AR vendors. HoloLens's optics uses a holographic diffractive waveguide grating scheme made by itself. It was originally from Nokia. Although it is called the waveguide, this set is not the same as Lumus's scheme. The process is quite complicated, and there is no company in the country that can reproduce it. may. The angle of view brought by this optical principle is indeed small, only about 30 degrees. At present, the single display effect has indeed been surpassed by some domestic freeform surface solutions. However, the HoloLens display is still OK (although a little color, it is determined by its principle), and the operating system is stable, but gesture recognition is indeed a bit potholes.
What has to be said is the HoloLens SLAM solution, which no one has ever surpassed. It does not require you to place any markers or Mark points in the space. The virtual object is also really stable in your vision, has been out of the demo category, there are practically available games and applications. Who is who knows.
The most embarrassing thing is that Microsoft specially equipped HoloLens with a piece called HPU (holographic image processing unit). This stuff is designed by TSMC specifically to handle all the data coming from the camera and sensor sequence. It can basically achieve one trillion times per second. Operation.
Domestic companies like to take the weight and FOV to say something, so that the HoloLens FOV is small and heavy, while the prism, free-form surface, or semi-transflective film is used for it. How efficient is the processor? Does SLAM achieve it? Is it split or HoloLens? (Split refers to placing the processing unit in a module.) These questions are not secretive or deliberate. It really doesn't mean much.
It can be said that although it has been launched for a long time, HoloLens is still the best AR glasses, not one. Jokingly, Microsoft leans on the world's top talents, painstakingly operating N for many years, and is simply surpassed by your startup company?
As a friend of the same AR glasses said, if Microsoft has spent so much manpower and material also casually whipped, it is the sorrow of our industry. The threshold is so low, we still play with hair? The giants should have come in harvesting. Oh no, Apple has come to harvest the SDK vendors. Please allow me to be sad.
In fact, I really feel that whether domestic manufacturers are financing or PR, there is no need to hover around HoloLens, and don't learn bad things from the field of VR helmets. Do you really tell investors that our domestic startups are less than HoloLens, the international giant, who has spent several years doing it? Is this very shameful? I think if investors can't understand this point, then this investment seems not to be worth mentioning?
The AR glasses supply chain is really too long. It is not possible for a startup company to be comprehensive and involves many companies in the upper reaches of the industrial chain. Aside from optics, chips, and software, there is a small LCoS screen-casting technology. Many manufacturers get together, such as Qijing Optoelectronics, this time participating in the exhibition of the Korean company May and the Hong Kong company Hong Kong Applied Research Institute Co., Ltd. (Yes, This is a company, which will be described in detail below). The LCoS module is also shown.
In the future, micro OLED screens with better picture effects may also be adopted. Currently, the main supplier of mini OLED screens is Sony, but its disadvantage is in brightness. In addition, the US military supplier eMagin claims to be able to adjust the brightness to 5000 nit. The high, there is BOE Investment Yunnan Oreide Optoelectronics. (Theoretically, the brightness can be increased by increasing the current, but this will cause power consumption and heat.)
Speaking of Taiwan's Zuo, this is a company with a long history and specialized solutions for other AR glasses manufacturers. This time, their Shanghai affiliate defied the pupils and also exhibited at CES Asia. In a gorgeous manner, they released a large number of AR-glasses that they had designed, from prisms, free-form surfaces, transflective to optical waveguides (Lumus's light Waveguide schemes are all involved.
I also heard Lenovo's AR glasses program (not a joint venture with Kopin, another pair of HoloLens eyeglasses in the interior, which was released in July) and Sato is doing it. However, the staff of the staff said that their strengths are not in optics but in the tiny chipboard that Google Glass has done. "This is where our core technology lies."
In fact, for start-up companies, a lot of things are really not what you can handle. What's more, there are indeed gaps in technology at home and abroad. Lenovo, a large company, has a joint venture with Kopin in the United States to use the other party's optical program to make AR glasses. Therefore, the integration of various companies' products to form their own products is really nothing to lose, it is also a very powerful technology. The level of supply chain management has always been a very scarce capacity. It takes several years or even more than a dozen years of skill.
Just like the U.S. military-made AR glasses Vuzix, in fact, optical and software solutions are not as high-end, and many are not done by themselves, but they are actually doing solutions in the industrial and military fields. Therefore, there is definitely an opportunity for China’s startup companies to target a vertical field, to dive down, to do solid work, and to make a tailor-made job. As for the hardware parameters? Advanced optical solution? Bunker processing speed? That's not your track. It's the giant's track.
Is AR glasses the future?
But is AR glasses the future? I personally doubt it.
I first solemnly declare that individuals are very fond of AR glasses, and to what extent? The idea of ​​buying Microsoft HoloLens twined me for half a year, but it was too expensive to do it. After all, it's poor.
First of all, we must respect the power of custom. Old Luo's hammer M1 has updated the “one step†function, allowing the mobile phone to have one more sidebar. If you want to jump from WeChat to the browser, a slide, a point, it will be passed. It can be said that it is too convenient to return home. You don't have to double-click on the Run menu.
I bought two machines, M1 and Nut Pro. I have used this system for a long time. But how did I do it? I still go back to the Home menu like before, and then browse through the app icons of the browser... In very rare cases, I think of the "one-step" function, and I've come to realize that there are such convenient functions. Didn't I take advantage of it?
To say this story is just to illustrate that the power of custom is so powerful that it cannot be changed overnight, and even sometimes it cannot be changed.
Users look at computers and watch mobile phones. In fact, the habits are the same. It is to look at a screen that is free from the outside of the body. And the mobile phone is just a social demand product, radiation is very strong.
But what if all this moves into a spectacles? The situation is completely different. Think about it. Look at a novel. The statement floats directly in your line of sight. Make a phone call and the other person's information is displayed in your eyes. Can everyone adapt? Anyway, I will not be comfortable. Walking on the street, showing information everywhere in the glasses, is actually not natural. This is a feeling that violates people's habits: I probably don't want to have so much information to show, even annoying it. After all, isn't there enough information today? When we open WeChat, thousands of them have all come out. My WeChat has long been bombed by various VR/AR groups, displaying 999+ all year round. All of them are too lazy to point out.
Then someone will say that I can turn it off, but the problem is that the act of wearing glasses is not an action that everyone is accustomed to. Some people think that it is ugly to wear glasses (from small to large, not to me.) Some people simply don't like it. The phone can be considered to be something outside of the body. However, some people still like to take the shape of a cell phone to force it. What's on the face? Unless you look in the glasses in the future and you don't see his glasses, it may still make sense.
Therefore, in the fairly visible future, AR glasses should still be a highly scene-dependent product, used in a variety of specialized fields, such as industry, medical care, education, etc., just like the current cinematic 3D glasses. Above, take it off when you leave. However, the requirements of this vertical field are still very high. After all, it is a matter of life and death.
However, AR is in the car, that person thinks that there is still a future, and then we will introduce a good car in CES. There is also a pair of smart glasses for the blind (the booth staff specifically emphasizes: we are not AR glasses!) NextVPU will be discussed next.
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