Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on Mapping AR Displays to Suitable Optics (Part 2)
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The Guest
Karl Guttag, is currently most well known as a speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.
Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, memory architecture, and micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.
He’s got 150 patents to his name related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at TI (that’s Texas Instruments), and was named a TI Fellow - the youngest in the company’s history. In the 20 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.
And these days he’s also the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders when they need it most.
The Conversation
In this second part of my conversation with Karl, we talk about matching display technologies to the right combiner optics technologies. Karl talks about which of those technologies he thinks have the best chance of being successful. He also discusses the importance of matching what the devices can do well to the user and the use case, and we get into some of those use cases across consumer, enterprise, and military.
On this last one, Karl goes deeper into the hard tradeoffs in delivering something of essential value to the military and other first responders in the field.
Links From The Episode
- Article: NES Creator Masayuki Uemura on the Birth of Nintendo's First Console by Jeremy Parish on USGamer.net
- Article: How the Famicom was Born, Part 7 - Deciding the Specs reprint from a 1994 article commissioned by Nathan Altice.
- Article: How ColecoVision Became the King of Kong by Damien McFerran at NintendoLife.com
- Product: Sega SG-1000
- Product: ColecoVision
- Article: FOV Obsession by Karl Guttag and inspired by Thad Starner’s 2019 Photonics West presentation
- Paper: Lateral positioning of a monocular head-worn display by Malcom Haynes with guidance from Thad Starner
- Video: Optical Challenges Paving The Road to The Ultimate Mixed Reality Experience by Bernard Kress
- Video: Karl Guttag on Optics and Displays for AR as part of the Bay Area VR-AR-XR Creators Meetup on January 14th, 2021
- Paper: [Digital optical elements and technologies (EDO19): applications to AR/R/MR by Bernard Kress
- Book: Optical Architectures for Augmented-, Virtual-, and Mixed-Reality Headsets by Bernard Kress
- White Paper: Light Engines for XR Smartglasses by Jonathan Waldern, DigiLens
- Video: Doug Lanman (Facebook Research) on Reactive Displays: Unlocking Next Generation AR/VR Visuals with Eye Tracking
- Blog Posts: Karl’s Breakdown of the visual quality of the Microsoft Hololens 2 - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6
- Episode Transcript - Part 1
- Episode Transcript - Part 2