Hey, so there’s this Swiss company, CREAL I think it’s called? They’re into this light field display tech, which basically means your eyeballs won’t hate you after bingeing on AR glasses. No idea why that’s such a big thing for me, but here we are. So they just snagged $8.9 million in some funding round—pretty decent, right? This ZEISS company, from Germany (they do optics and stuff), they led the charge. Anyway, I think some old investors jumped in too. Something about UBS or something like that.
Right, so now CREAL’s sitting on a total of $32 million. And I can’t help but wonder what they’re planning to do. They probably want to make these AR glasses super tiny and comfy. Because, really, if I’m wearing glasses all day, they better feel like clouds or something.
The company mumbles a bit about making digital experiences seem “natural,” which sounds pretty good if you ask me. Oh, and there was a picture of something… their gadget maybe. I can’t remember it well, but it was there.
You know, AR glasses are supposed to work magic with light, mimicking how it hits our eyes in real life. Imagine seeing virtual stuff but feeling like it’s there, like for real. Helps with depth perception, whatever that means. My brain hurts just thinking about it, but I digress. Moving on.
People are talking about how regular AR and VR headsets pull tricks to make us feel that depth sensation. They use this thing called stereoscopy. Fancy word, huh? But those headsets can’t change focus like our eyes do naturally. It’s that weird eye thing where our eyes kinda go out of sync in these headsets—“vergence-accommodation conflict” (try saying that three times fast).
A few headsets throw in this varifocal thing. Apparently, Magic Leap One and some old Meta prototypes do this — keep changing focus lengths dependent on our gaze. Sounds eerie but cool, right? Still, because they’re not dealing with real light fields, issues pop up. Weird stuff, but yeah.
Tomas Sluka, CREAL’s big boss, had a word or two—he’s all about marrying AI with AR to create this new way of doing things. But there’s this riff about health and comfort again. Glasses need to feel like second skin if we’re gonna wear them all day. Makes sense, I guess?
So, they’ve got this cool new cash pile to work on their AR module R&D (I hope I got the acronym right), aiming to make glasses not just for enterprise geeks but for normal folks soon. Oh, and they teamed up with ZEISS. They’ve this licensing deal for some eye-care thing by late 2024. Kind of sounds like a sci-fi movie, doesn’t it?
That’s about it. Random thoughts, feelings, and all. If I ever try those glasses, I’ll let you know if they really do feel like clouds.