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The Amp Hour

Building AR Headsets with Aedan Cullen

Jul 9, 2023 · 1 hr 8 min · Episode 638 · 65.5 MB
0:00-1:08:33

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Welcome, Aedan Cullen!

  • Chris first learned of Aedan from his 2022 Hackaday talk about building an AR system
  • AR is "Augmented Reality", but that term is different depending on the company / headset (think "magic leap" vs "google glass")
  • Got into AR because of robotics, he had be doing software around SLAM and CV
  • Interacting with objects in 3D space
  • The first board he was working with was the Jetson TK1
  • Magic Leap's "Lightpack" had a Tegra in it
  • Apple's new Vision Pro is more like VR with passthrough (and creepy eyes!)
  • Being able to wear an AR unit all day
  • Resolution matters
  • What is it worth spending power on in a headset?
  • The previous rev used the AllWinner D1 RISCV and can support one camera
  • Which way should you point a camera on a pair of glasses?
  • MIPI DSI outputs and DSP processing
  • Lots of SIPs available for high density designs
  • Octavo makes SIPs out of other companies' silicon.
  • Jason and Robert from BeagleBoard talked about Octavo when they were on the show
  • ECX337 from Sony needs 10V
  • Torex power modules helped save space too by being stacked on top of the inductor
  • Sony uses LVDS (FPDlink) and not MIPI
  • Offloaded processing to a phone or computer
  • Power
  • Wi-Fi vs bluetooth
  • New goal is to minimize power during processing, now it'll be efficiency around WiFi and Display
  • With OLEDs you can selectively turn on pixels
  • Goal for the battery is 8 hours for "all day"
  • What is Aedan's "requirements space" and what's driving it?
  • Cost has become a concern for new boards
  • Using an assembly house to have one known-good assembly board
  • What's on the new board?
    • The new display has MIPI DSI
      • The display doesn't support 2 lane DSI out of the box
      • Displays are sometimes configurable in terms of how many lanes with registers
      • What do the lanes refer to? Each pair ("Data lane") is a differential pair
      • Most displays will do 4 lanes (8 conductors) at 1Gbps
      • "Giganibbles per second"
      • Silicon backplane with OLED on top
      • ViewTrix
    • The processor is the NXP iMX RT500
    • WiFi module is the same as the past rev, the Si Labs WFM200S
      • Sending compressed data over the WiFi link
    • Mechanical
      • Tweaking displays and 3D printed mounts
      • Prism
      • Flex cables
      • XReal / NReal
      • Using your brain as the combiner
  • Zach from Voidstar
  • Aedan just went to the Augmented World Expo in May. "No one was wearing an AR display around the conference"
  • Vision for the future
  • Follow Aedan online