Microsoft sent 20 sets of updated prototype glasses to the U.S. military in late July, and they were tested by two squads of soldiers in August, who praised the design improvements: mainly that they no longer felt nausea and pain when wearing them.

Last year, Microsoft partnered with the U.S. Army to develop HoloLens-like mixed reality glasses called the Integrated Vision Augmentation System (IVAS), but reports in early 2022 suggested the glasses were causing headaches, nausea, and eye strain to soldiers in tests. The glasses in question are part of an order for 5,000 sets that the Army will begin receiving in September 2022.

U.S. military spokesman David Patterson said the new glasses are now available in version 1.2, which has “improvements in reliability, low-light sensor performance and form factor.” The Army awarded Microsoft another contract for a new system on Sept. 5 and is examining whether the company can expand production.

The Army had asked Congress to fund the purchase of 6,900 glasses from Microsoft but was rejected earlier this year. Instead, Congress reduced the $400 million the Army requested to just $40 million to improve the system. The Army provided Microsoft with the funding and an additional $125 million to continue development.

The U.S. Army plans to spend up to $21.9 billion on the project, and the glasses will be tested by the Army for combat use in 2025. Microsoft’s HoloLens technology continues to live on in these special military glasses, while use cases for these glasses at home and in the workplace appear to have disappeared with layoffs affecting the teams involved in January.

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The company’s website is a source of information.

According to JBD, Hummingbird is the smallest and lightest light machine, with a volume of 0.4cc; a weight of 1.0g; a standard field of view of 30°, and supports 25°~45° field of view customization. In D65 white balance state, it can output 3~5 lumens of luminous flux with a high-quality light waveguide to achieve 1800 nits of brightness to the eyes; in terms of image quality, it supports 8bit colour depth and 16.77 million colours full true color display, which provides more possibilities for lightweight AR glasses.

▲ Image source JBD website

However, in addition to the issues of mass production and stability, the brightness uniformity of Micro LEDs in AR glasses is a major concern. This problem is made more difficult by the inconsistent brightness of the three-colour panel, so there may be some compromises on brightness uniformity in the X-cube solution as well.

The company’s newest product, the “Hummingbird”, is the world’s smallest and lightest micro LED for AR glasses.

The current optical machine products incorporating Micro LED technology can have the advantages of high brightness, high resolution, high energy efficiency and low power consumption, which is the future direction of AR glasses display technology. However, at present, the development and production of Micro LED technology is more difficult, so the cost is also quite high.

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Link is equipped with a 1.64-inch AMOLED screen, supports Bluetooth and NFC, and can realize gesture and motion recognition, and monitor health and sports data; it can connect AR glasses & mobile phones at the same time, load AI gesture recognition algorithm, and users can use simple gestures/keys / Touch screen to control AR glasses; equipped with high-precision distance sensing based on UWB sensor so that the approach control or unlocking/locking process can be displayed on the AR glasses in a visual way. Link can also be used independently as a smart Band when connected to a mobile phone.

It was previously reported that Gravity, an XR glasses-specific chip research and development company, recently completed a Pre-A+ round of financing of hundreds of millions of CNY, led by Tongge Fund (funded by Goertek, PICO, Mihayou and Sanqi Mutual Entertainment). The core product that Gravity is currently developing is an XR-specific co-processing chip, which can optimize components such as displays and sensory sensors of XR devices, and provide functions such as real-time image rendering, sensor data processing, and mixed reality interaction.

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Taiwan media pointed out that Zuozhen is one of the companies developing AR-related applications. It has invested in the development of AR smart glasses for more than nine years and has entered the medical market, allowing AR glasses applications to enter the smart medical field from smart factories, smart retail, and smart medical fields.

Liu Yangwei pointed out that the global ICT (information and communication industry) market has matured, but AI services, that is, the trend driven by ChatGPT has created many new applications, which not only pushes up the demand for cloud servers, but also reduces the cost of the Metaverse, and has great impact on electric vehicles, Self-driving systems, etc. bring business opportunities for data storage.

According to reports, in the field of Metaverse, Foxconn has not only assisted customers in product development, but also initially completed related layouts, including investing in Metaverse application software company XRSPACE, Finnish company Varjo, a high-end VR/MR company, and Zuo Zhen, which focuses on AR glasses.

In addition, Liu Yangwei said that the application of general artificial intelligence and generative AI will reduce the cost of generating metaverse content, accelerate the development of the metaverse, and allow more brand customers of Foxconn to launch more VR, MR, and AR products. Foxconn will strengthen the content of AR glasses this year and should be able to grasp the growth opportunities brought by new applications and technologies.

Financial data show that in the first two months of this year, Foxconn’s cumulative revenue was NT$1,062.4 billion (currently about RMB 239.04 billion), a year-on-year increase of 17.94%, which is a new high for the same period of the year.

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