UPDATED 10:58 EDT / MAY 14 2019

EMERGING TECH

DigiLens secures $50M in funding on the path to cheap augmented reality

DigiLens Inc., maker of holographic waveguide technology for augmented reality devices, today announced it has raised $50 million in a new funding round.

Smart glasses and other augmented reality devices use transparent displays so that users can look through them — for example the lenses of glasses or the windshield of a car — and see computer graphics overlaid over their field of vision. DigiLens provides the photopolymers and other construction to make AR products possible as well as reference designs and smart glasses products.

The company intends to use the Series C funding to expand its development of displays for global automotive, enterprise, consumer, avionics and military applications. New partners in this investment include UDC Ventures, the venture arm of Universal Display Corporation, and Samsung Venture Investment Corp. Others joining include Niantic Inc. — best known for Pokemon Go — Continental AG, Sony Innovation Fund and Diamond Edge Ventures.

“These partnerships provide the ecosystem that enables our technology to go into a variety of different display markets in a variety of different form factors,” said DigiLens Chief Executive Chris Pickett.

With AR technology, smart glasses can be used for numerous roles, including delivering instant information to field workers, providing visually overlaid navigational instructions to drivers and other applications. Companies such as Scope AR and Upskill put smart glasses to use in industrial conditions to put remote experts in touch with workers.

Similarly, companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and WayRay SA have explored automotive AR setups that put computer graphics into windshields to assist with navigation and provide information without distracting the driver.

In January, the company debut the DigiLens Crystal AR smartglass prototypes based on its photopolymer technology as an iteration on current AR technology. Crystal uses DigiLens’s patented technology to make AR glasses cheaper and for power uses the Universal Serial Bus type-C for power employed by most recent smartphones. Crystal also uses untinted glass and stronger light emitters so the glasses can be used even in bright light conditions.

Thanks to the cheaper and more easily manufactured technology, DigiLens expects smart glasses using this technology to retail for less than $499.

“We have set the bar for featherlight indoor/outdoor smartglasses for workers and mobile gamers,” said Pickett. “By tethering the smartglasses to powerful mobile devices, we have reduced the barrier to developing compelling AR applications to a simple app.”

Young Optics Inc., a display manufacturer, was one of the first to license DigiLens technology and recently began shipping its own products based on the DigiLens Crystal 25 reference design for AR smart glasses.

The DigiLens reference is quite similar to Microsoft Corp.’s HoloLens technology, offering a 30-degree field of view and an 8-megapixel camera and weighing just over a half-pound.

This funding brings the total investment in DigiLens to $110 million. Previous investments started in 2012, followed by the beginning of the Series C round for an until now undisclosed amount, in November.

Image: DigiLens

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