Category: general

The post Two Roads To Usable AR Glasses appeared com. After years of false starts, augmented reality glasses are edging toward everyday use. Two companies, HarmonEyes and Kopin, are addressing the biggest obstacles from opposite directions out of the public eye, but very much on the proverbial radar screen of investors. One is using AI to make AR comfortable for people. The other is using microLED technology to make it usable in daylight. Together they represent complementary advances in human and optical engineering that could make displays for AR glasses less expensive and more useful. Adam Gross, co-founder and CEO of HarmonEyes. HarmonEyes “We’re focused on understanding the state of a user in real time and predicting how it will change,” said Adam Gross, co-founder and CEO of HarmonEyes. “If you know a person is about to hit cognitive overload or fatigue, you can intervene before it becomes a problem. No one else is doing that predictive part.” Gross and co-founder Dr. Melissa Hunfalvayspent years building FDA-cleared medical eye-tracking tools for doctors, athletes, and the military. That business created what they describe as the largest validated eye-tracking dataset in the world, including data from studies on fatigue, stress, and diseases like Parkinson’s and Lyme. When cameras in phones and headsets became good enough, the company pivoted from hardware to software. HarmonEyes tracks a driver’s cognitive load levels every second and predicts when they’ll change. HarmonEyes The result is the Theia SDK, a camera-based system that runs on any device. Developers can integrate it to measure cognitive load, fatigue, or motion sickness without adding special sensors. “Theia runs on commodity cameras,” Gross explained. “We’ve built a conversion engine that normalizes data from different lenses and sampling rates, so it’s interoperable across webcams, headsets, and phones.” The company calls its approach a “focused foundational model” trained only on eye-movement behavior. “In XR,.