Edward Tang (Avegant) on How Our Eyes & Brains Deceive Us and Making Displays to Match

The Guest

Edward Tang is the co-founder and CEO of Avegant, a company building next-generation display technologies for augmented reality experiences.

Prior to Avegant, Ed spent nearly 15 years working in microfabrication and MEMs technologies, including 5 years focused on applying MEMs to brain-control interfaces. (MEMs stands for micro-electromechanical system, which is basically a teeny tiny machine that has both mechanical and electronic components.)

The startup Avegant has been around for several years and initially came to prominence with their Glyph product, which was a head-worn display that served as a portable second screen.

Recently Ed and his team have been focused on the underlying display technology. He comes at it from the perspective of trying to match the quirks of the human visual system.

edward tang.jpeg

Edward Tang

LinkedIn | Twitter

Avegant

The Conversation

In this conversation, Ed helps us appreciate some of the surprising ways our eyes and brain work to stitch together our perception of reality based on some limited and sporadic data. Ed and his team are using this insight to guide them in creating better displays for smartglasses. 

Avegant’s is creating a new type of foveated display, which enables a high-quality visual experience over a wide field of view in a way that doesn’t require a lot of pixels or compute power. They’re also creating the software development and rendering pipeline to match.

This is a fascinating conversation with try-at-home experiments to understand how our brains work.

Jason McDowallAR smartglasses, consumer, micro displays