Facebook has the long-term goal of offering practical Augmented Reality glasses which can be worn the whole day and which do not make you look like a cyborg.
Today they have come one step closer to that goal by partnering with UK company Plessey, an award-winning provider of full-field emissive microLED displays.
Plessey’s technology combines very high-density RGB pixel arrays with high-performance CMOS backplanes to produce very high-brightness, low-power and high-frame-rate image sources for head-mounted displays (HMDs), and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems.
Under a new commercial agreement between Plessey and Facebook, their LED manufacturing operations will be dedicated to helping Facebook prototype and develop new technologies for potential use in the AR/VR space.
Plessey operates leading-edge 150mm wafer processing facilities to undertake design, test and assembly of LED products and a comprehensive suite of photonic characterization and applications laboratories.
Plessey notes that Facebook has a headstart in the AR game with their successful Oculus VR range and seems best positioned to make consumer-ready AR glasses a reality.
As noted earlier, no immediate products are expected from the partnership, but Facebook appears to be pulling together a number of components for an eventual device, including a partnership with glasses maker Luxottica on frames, and it is certainly a more practical approach than Google’s AR contact lenses.
See a demo of Plessey’s technology below:
Via Venturebeat.