Introduction to the SPIE proceeding of AR/VR/MR 2020 conference "optical architectures for display and sensing in augmented, virtual and mixed reality"

Abstract

This is an introduction paper to the 2020 SPIEW AR/VR/MR conference held in San Francisco, at Moscone Center, co-located with the 2020 SPIE Photonics West main symposium. The subject of this conference is to share the world state of the art in optical architectures for AR/VR/MR headsets and smart glasses. A heavier than usual industry participation has been present since the inception ofthis conference in 2018. The 2020 version of the SPIE AR/VR/MR conference includes a list of invited industry talks, and a list of conference papers which are edited in this proceeding. In addition to these papers, a list of student papers attempting at solving industry challenges in AR/VRMR hardware have also been presented. The challenges include those of - wearable comfort (weight, size, center ofgravity, thermals) - visual comfort (angular resolution, optical foveation, vergence accommodation conflict, pixel occlusion, peripheral displays, low latency sensors,...) - social comfort (unobstructed eye contact, high transparency of combiner optics, low profile optics,...) - immersion (audio, display and see-through field ofview, gesture sensing and eye tracking, spatial scanning,...) The invited industry papers are mostly discussing existing new product architecture integrations, and are not listed in this proceeding, but are available as videos on the SPIE web site. In addition to the industry talks, conference papers and optical design challenge papers, a large demo room has been set-up at the conference location to allow participants to experience the latest headsets available in 2020. This proceeding is a good source of information about new optical architectures targeting entire headset systems, or rather specific building blocks either on the display side, the optical combiners side or the optical sensors side. The industry talks available as videos are a good companion to this proceeding list. This introduction paper review the current market position for AR/VR/MR, and lists the various products that have been discussed throughout the conference and have been shown to the attendance as demo headsets.