Creator: Metaio

Organization: Metaio

Description:

Every popular representation of Augmented Reality has the same thing in common: they depict the constant use of computer vision through a connected device. Iron Man, Minority Report, Terminator, Avatar- short films like Sight and many more. The reality is that there aren’t any devices that exist today that are prepared to run even the most basic AR experiences 24/7 without severe drains on power and running the CPU processors so hot that they could potentially melt (really).

Metaio has been working on research for accelerating augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, and has since found that there is only so much improvement possible from the software side. In order to run these “always on, always augmented” scenarios there needs to be hardware specifically designed to run AR experiences- hardware that’s integrated down to the silicon level.

The majority of the “work” being done on a given mobile device is processed through the CPU- display, camera access, connecting to the internet and downloading and uploading information can tax a CPU (thousands of picojoules) while severely draining battery power. Metaio designed the so-called “AREngine” to divert processing power specifically away from the CPU to allow it to run cleaner, cooler and faster.

Features:
– between 0.01mm^2 – 0.02mm^2
– modular and able to be customized to nearly any semi-conductor platform in nearly any device (mobile, tablet, glasses, embedded systems like vehicles or smart appliances)

In initial testing, integrating the AREngine on SOC (silicon platform) resulted in:
– up to 6000% faster initialization (recognition, tracking) of the experience vs. same experience running on unoptimized device
– up to 60% reduction in power consumption while running AR experiences on the device
– any latency in the experience virtually disappears
– tracking becomes more than 100% more robust
– device is able to process point cloud tracking configurations twice the size in a fraction of the time

It’s the first chipset of its kind- the only chipset ever designed specifically to accelerate augmented reality experiences.

Where to find it:

On display at the Metaio showcase at AWE, booth 73

Platforms:

Mobile, Glasses, Stationary Device, Gesture Device, Internet of Things, Location Technologies

Additional Screenshots: