By Evelyn M. Rusli
In the future, virtual reality won't require strapping a bulky
contraption to your head.
Instead, imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly
seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or looking
down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce
above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2
in the movie "Star Wars."
A key to this future may lay in Carlsbad, Calif., where startup
Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly
working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and
glasses-free 3-D images for smartphones and giant screens.
Other companies have shown they can project floating images that
appear to be holograms, but many involve large machines employing a
system of mirrors to direct light with limited viewing angles. For
instance, the lifelike image of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, which
graced the Coachella music festival stage in 2012, was a
combination of computer graphics and video projection that relied
on visual effects first designed in the 19th century.
Ostendo's projectors, in contrast, are roughly the size of Tic
Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the color,
brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million
pixels.
One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable
of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal. A
patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more
complex images. The first iteration of the chip, which is scheduled
to begin shipping next year, will only project 2-D videos, but the
next version, expected to follow soon after will feature
holographic capability, according to Ostendo's chief executive and
founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury.
"Display is the last frontier," said Dr. El-Ghoroury, who in
1998 sold CommQuest Technologies, a mobile chipset company, to
International Business Machines Corp. for about $250 million in
cash and stock. "Over the years, processing power has improved and
networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable
advancement in display."
The race to disrupt the screen is intensifying as both upstarts
and technology giants try to find new ways to bring content to
life.
Microsoft Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are both working
on their own virtual reality rooms, building a complex system of
projectors and computers. Hewlett-Packard Co. recently spun out a
company called Leia, that like Ostendo, is trying to bring 3-D
imaging to smartphones. Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. agreed in March to
spend $2 billion to buy Oculus VR Inc., maker of the Oculus Rift
headset that pulls users into 360-degree virtual environments.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was, in part, convinced of the
value of virtual reality after he accidentally tried to set down a
real world object on a virtual table while testing the Oculus Rift,
forgetting for a moment that the table didn't exist in the real
world, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Ostendo, tucked away in Southern California, is little-known but
has raised $90 million from venture-capital firms and Peter Thiel,
Facebook's first outside investor, and has secured some $38 million
in government research and development contracts. A large bulk of
that has come from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
or Darpa, the government's futurist agency that worked on the
predecessor to the Internet and self-driving cars.
That capital has given Dr. El-Ghoroury, an immigrant from Egypt,
the luxury to work for nearly a decade undisturbed. Ostendo now
employs about 115 people, including scientists suited in scrubs and
goggles who handle fragile nanotechnology equipment at a high-tech
semiconductor lab.
The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager,
an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name, which fuses an image
processor with a wafer containing micro light-emitting diodes, or
LEDs, alongside software that helps the unit properly render
images.
During a recent test reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,
Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid
together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air.
The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the
position of the viewer.
According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on 3-D
displays for MIT's Media Lab, Ostendo's advantage and the key to
its 3-D capability is its resolution. The Retina display on Apple
Inc.'s iPhone, for example, has about 300 dots per inch, Ostendo's
chips are at about 5,000 dots per inch.
Ostendo, which says it has several opportunities with major
handset manufacturers, expects the first 2-D projector unit to be
in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015. With a lens
attached, it will be less than 0.5 cubic centimeters, roughly the
size of the camera in the iPhone. It also expects to begin
manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3-D capability,
in the second half of 2015. The cost to the consumer should be
about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates.
Dr. El-Ghoroury said the company still needs to improve the 3-D
product and is aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve
higher resolution.
Ultimately, the larger vision is to have Ostendo's chips
everywhere electronic displays are needed, whether it is a
glasses-free 3-D television screen, a smartwatch, or tables that
can project hologram-like images.
So what happens in a world where 3-D and virtual reality is
everywhere? Dr. El-Ghoroury predicts people's relationship with
technology will change and breed a wave of business opportunities,
on scale with the introduction of the iPhone.
"Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3-D--all of
your shopping, all of your gaming, every way you retrieve data," he
said.
Write to Evelyn M. Rusli at evelyn.rusli@wsj.com
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