Meet the Avegant's new project of VR that imitates the human eye

A few weeks ago, Avegant showed off an early look at some of the crazy tech it has been working on that — in its most simple terms — seeks to make head-mounted displays function more like human eyes. It’s an ambitious goal with more than a few interested parties. Many top tech execs and investors have high expectations for smart glasses to usher in the next computing platform wave, but in order to do that there are some major, non-trivial advances in near-eye display tech that will need to happen.

One of the most-hyped and least-seen technologies that will allegedly solve many of these problems is “light field technology,” which Avegant is using this bulky feature prototype to showcase.

You really have to change how you think of displays. When you’re looking at a television screen, the entire display is a point of focus. You couldn’t glance at, say, a character onscreen and cause the rest of the environment to move out of focus because they’re all on different focal planes. In the same vein, if you ordered up a fancy 3D TV you could see some objects seemingly moving closer to you but you wouldn’t be able to interact closely with what’s in front of you. This is due to the way our eyes converge on points of focus; within a meter or so you can’t use stereoscopic video feeds to show objects because it looks awful and screws up your vision. With this technology you can not only see an object floating in front of your nose but you can cast it out of focus simply by looking at something else in the light field space.

Avegant’s take on a “light field” display shows your eyes a 3D representation of an image based on stacking multiple focal planes. It’s a far from finished prototype, but it’s entirely unique and the first consumer-minded “light field” type display that many in the tech press have been exposed to. Things like field-of-view and environment mapping are still problems that need to be tackled.

The headset isn’t the HoloLens-killer that some have billed it as, but it’s more accurately an early glimpse at a display technology that will more seamlessly combine digital holograms with the rest of the physical world.