AR Glasses

Overview

AR glasses overlay computer graphics onto the real world while leaving it fully visible, unlike VR, the user still sees the room through transparent optics. The work happens in the Optics Engine, one per eye, where a tiny bright micro-display is coupled into a transparent Waveguide Combiner that pipes the image to the pupil. The Mainboard supplies the compute: an XR SoC, an always-on sensor co-processor, memory, and power management folded into the slim frame. To anchor graphics to real surfaces the glasses sense the world with the Camera Module and the IMU Module. Sound comes from the Audio Module open-ear speakers and microphone array, power from the Battery Pack cells split into the temples, and connectivity from the Radio Module. The Frame & Nose Pads holds it all in an eyewear form factor, and a Temple Touchpad strip handles input.

How it works

Each Optics Engine projects an image from its Micro-Display Projector into the edge of a Waveguide Combiner, a flat glass plate etched with diffraction gratings. The light bounces along the plate by total internal reflection, then a second grating diffracts it out toward the eye. Because the plate is otherwise clear, the projected image appears to float over whatever the wearer is actually looking at.

For the overlay to stay locked to the world, the glasses run inside-out tracking: the Camera Module cameras find features in the room, the Depth Sensor measures distance to surfaces, and the IMU Module reports head motion. Fusing these gives a six-degrees-of-freedom pose many times a second, so a label pinned to a real object holds its place as the head moves. The Mainboard SoC renders the graphics while the low-power co-processor keeps tracking alive between frames. Heavier tasks are offloaded to a phone over the Radio Module, keeping the on-glasses Battery Pack draw low.