Social media giant Facebook Inc. is making a big push into augmented reality after striking a deal with British device manufacturer Plessey Semiconductors Ltd. and stealing a march on Apple Inc.

Under the terms of the deal announced today, Plessey will license its AR tech to Facebook and dedicate its entire production to the social media firm for the next “several” years.

Facebook said it plans to build a “glasses form factor that lets devices melt away so we can be more present with our friends, families and surroundings” and that the project will take “years” to complete.

Plessey specializes in manufacturing microLED displays for AR headsets and heads-up-displays. The company was founded in 2010 and originally focused on building high-powered lighting, but in 2017 made a complete pivot to the microLED display market.

It’s that last detail that seems to be critical. MicroLED is an emerging new display technology that many believe is superior to existing LCD and OLED technologies. MicroLED is similar to OLED in that it’s self-emissive, but the main advantage is that it’s much brighter and more power-efficient. As such, MicroLED is believed to be ideal for AR devices, which should be usable even in direct sunshine, yet equipped with a small battery.

Big display makers such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sony Corp. are both said to be focused on researching MicroLED tech, and have previously showed off some commercial displays, but to date no one has managed to come up with an affordable product for the consumer market. Plessey is different, though, because its main focus is on microdisplays, rather than larger panels for TVs and smartphones.

The company last year achieved a world first when it built a 1080-pixel, monolithic microdisplay with individually addressable MicroLEDs. At the time, it said the approach should enable it to build displays faster and more cheaply than the alternative method of bonding individual MicroLEDs to a substrate. It can also make 4K resolution displays of a similar size using the same technique, it said.

That may explain why Apple was also interested in getting a piece of Plessey. According to a report in The Information Monday, the iPhone maker apparently tried to acquire the company outright to further its own interest in AR, but failed to agree on terms.

Facebook’s interest in AR is no secret. The company made headlines six years ago when it paid a whopping $3 billion to acquire virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR Inc. and Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said on more than one occasion that he sees AR and VR as the company’s “next big bet.”

More recently, Facebook acquired computer vision startup Scape Technologies Ltd. in a move to build out its AR capabilities. Scape has reportedly built a localization engine that’s designed for city-scale augmented reality. Using a cloud-based “Visual Engine,” the technology can build and reference 3D maps in the cloud, allowing devices to tap into a unified perception of the world around them.

Last September, meanwhile, it was reported that Facebook was working with a company called Luxottica Group SpA that owns brands such as Ray Ban and Oakley, to build augmented reality glasses that might one day be able to replace smartphones.

It’s not immediately clear what capabilities a Facebook/Plessey device might have, but Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that the social media giant has lots of information and data that could be used to make an AR headset work.

“They will give it a try, but if it fails it wouldn’t be the first tech giant to get a bloody nose here, as both Google and Microsoft have tried but not achieved their goals,” Mueller said. “But never say never. Someone will manage to crack this category sooner or later.”

“Facebook missed the market for deep integration with smartphones, which is one reason it got an early start in AR by buying Oculus,” analyst Patrick Moorhead told SiliconANGLE.  “Therefore I’m not surprised by this deal with Plessey.”

Photo: Plessey