‘Smart glasses’ are no longer an entelechy. Powerful technology companies, such as Google, Apple or Bosch, have already developed and even marketed these devices that, based on the augmented reality, can project data and images directly into the eye. The University of Alicante has created a more efficient augmented reality system for these glasses.
Specifically, the Holography and Optical Processing Group (GHPO) has recently achieved notable progress in this area, which has been published in the prestigious journal Heliyonand which proposes the manufacturing one of these devices with the commercial Bayfol photopolymer. Furthermore, it is shown how photopolymer shrinkage helps make these systems more efficient, as UA Physics professor Sergi Gallego tells us. The application of this discovery would mean, according to the researcher, the recording holograms in a faster and more efficient way and, consequently, with a lower cost.
What advantages do these augmented reality systems allow, as they have been created at the UA?
This type of device is capable of projecting all types of notifications, such as calls, messages or any other information on the retina of the user’s eye without having to look away or resort to the mobile phone. “The user can thus view all the desired information superimposed directly on the background view in such a way that “The image that is transmitted is transparent, that is, you can see through it.”explains Gallego, who points out that “one of the most relevant handicaps in this technology is the introduction and extraction in the glasses of the image that is to be transported to the eye and holography is a tool that can solve this problem.”
In this sense, Professor Sergi Gallego highlights that “The use of this technology can revolutionize our daily lives almost to the level that smartphones have done”. The proof of this is a special call from the European Commission to subsidize projects in this line of research that came out in March 2023 and that has recently been resolved by financing the proposal led by the multinational Essilor and in which the research group participates.
The University of Alicante has always been a pioneer in the field of holography and, in fact, it was on the Alicante campus where the first hologram of a diffuser object in Spain was recorded in 1969. The Holography and Optical Processing Group, led by Professor Augusto Beléndez and Professor Inmaculada Pascual, has widely demonstrated its experience and ability to record holograms for a multitude of applications such as image processing with holograms, holographic memories, generation of new materials. holographic recording, holographic sensors, holography for solar energy or holographic augmented reality devices.
This work has been developed entirely within the UA group, with the participation of researchers Joan Sirvent Verdú, Juan Carlos Bravo Frances, Jaume Colomina Martínez, Cristian Neipp López, Daniel Puerto García, Andrés Márquez Ruiz and Sergi Gallego Rico.
