Real Reality (RR) Courses on AR/VR at Photonics West

Bernard Kress, the partner optical architect for the HoloLens team at Microsoft, will teach two courses at Photonics West, where he'll focus on market expectations, hardware requirements, optical technologies, and investment patterns in the AR/VR/MR industry.

Kress notes that it took 20 years for technology to advance from a cordless phone to a smartphone, but it took 50 years for a head-mounted display to develop into something like HoloLens-mostly because government research moves slowly. But now that the AR/VR research has moved into private industry, the pace of advancement is going to pick up. Fast.

"I can't even predict what we're going to have in five years," says Kress, "so don't ask me what we'll have in ten years!"

The industry is still struggling to find a less-clunky term that encompasses all of the different "reality" technologies, including smart glasses, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. According to a tweet from Clay Bavor, head of AR and VR for Google, "VR/MR/AR/RR are not separate and distinct things. They're convenient labels for different points on a spectrum."

For now, the research community hasn't agreed on the right term to unify these different technologies any more than they have unified these technologies into a single headset. "Of course, everyone wants to merge to a single device," says Kress, "but optical technologies do not allow for such merging at this time. But this fusion of all three functionalities will happen eventually."

Kress will teach a two-hour Introduction to VR, AR, MR, and Smart Eyewear (SC1234) and a full-day course on Optical Technologies and Architectures for AR/VR (SC1218).

Complementary to the two courses taught by Kress is a full-day course taught by Michael P. Browne and James Melzer called Head-Mounted Display Requirements and Designs for Augmented Reality Applications (SC1096), which emphasizes requirements, specifications, design and components, and human factors. It's complementary to SC1218 and people interested in learning about AR/VR would benefit from taking both.

Along with optics for AR/VR, there will be more than 70 courses and workshops to choose from at Photonics West, ranging in length from two hours to two days. Topics include LiDAR for autonomous vehicles, laser sources, nonlinear optics, biomedical spectroscopy, tissue optics, photonic therapeutics, optoelectronic materials, and more. Register for a course: spie.org/PWCourses