New Power Sources for Wearable AR Displays

As the complexity and computational requirements of world capture, world analysis, scene management, rendering, and human interactions with AR experiences increase, a delicate balance must be struck so as to ensure that the useful life of a device between recharges is not too low. Power management may be addressed through a combination of different approaches, including increase in use of low power DSPs, off-loading some computational tasks to the edge of the network (off-device services), and increasing power storage capacity. There is another potentially powerful resource to address the duration of wearable AR display usage. This topic focuses on the research and development of novel methods to capture power from the user or the environment that could be transferred to the power storage system.

Specifically, the proposed topic will research, build, and test implementations of new methods of energy harvesting from sources that have not been used in prior wearable AR display systems. There will need to be studies of human movement (steps, arms, hands), solar sources for users that are outdoors, and chemical reactions that release energy. This topic will span a wide range of technologies, including analysis of the power requirements of each individual AR display component.

Stakeholders

All users of wearable AR display devices and those who manage their use in the workplace will benefit from longer duration between recharges. Introducing or integrating novel power production, transfer, and storage technologies will have impacts on display costs, which could affect the number of devices purchased.

Possible Methodologies

The research will be leveraging developments in physics, chemistry, and other sciences pertaining to energy production and combining those with deeper studies of wearable AR display device power use. In addition to theoretical calculations, there will need to be prototypes developed and tested to measure the efficacy and efficiencies of power capture, storage, and use with AR displays. Finally, the introduction of new energy production, transfer, and storage methods or systems will need to be carefully studied for their safety in the workplace.

Research Program

This research topic could be studied in different environmental conditions, such as indoors, outdoors, and in different temperatures. In addition, there will need to be studies of different use cases in which some users are actively moving throughout a work shift. The results of this research would also be very valuable for non-enterprise users and display devices.

Miscellaneous Notes

Although quite dated by today’s standards, one of the first studies focusing on this topic was performed by Dr. Jannick Rolland and Dr. Henry Fuchs to examine the pros and cons of these two display options in a surgical use case. The study was published in the journal “Presence” in 2000. The topic of mitigating parallax-related registration errors is a highly active field of study, as demonstrated by this article published in December 2020 in the Frontiers in Robotics and AI journal.

Keywords

Power use, power consumption, power production, AR device energy sources, energy capture, energy production, AR device energy transfer, energy consumption, energy management, electromechanical, solar energy, friction, power storage for AR displays, human factors, weight, usability, portability, computational efficiency, low power electronics, electric batteries, power consumption, power conversion, power aware computing

Research Agenda Categories

Displays, Technology

Expected Impact Timeframe

Long

Related Publications

Using the words in this topic description and Natural Language Processing analysis of publications in the AREA FindAR database, the references below have the highest number of matches with this topic:

• Malhotra, N., Mann, A., & Pandey, N. (2019). Design of Low Power ECRL Based Power Gated 4:2 Compressor. 2019 6th International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN)
• Ro, H., Park, Y. J., Byun, J.-H., & Han, T.-D. (2019). Mobile device interaction using projector metaphor. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces: Companion.
• Alavikia, Z., & Shabro, M. (2019). Pragmatic Industrial Augmented Reality in Electric Power Industry. 2019 International Power System Conference (PSC).
• Sanches, S. R. R., Oizumi, M., Oliveira, C., Damasceno, E. F., & Sementille, A. C. (2017). Aspects of User Profiles That Can Improve Mobile Augmented Reality Usage. 2017 19th Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality (SVR).
• Speicher, M., Hall, B. D., Yu, A., Zhang, B., Zhang, H., Nebeling, J., & Nebeling, M. (2018). XD-AR. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(EICS), 1-24.

More publications can be explored using the AREA FindAR research tool.

Author

Christine Perey

Last Published (yyyy-mm-dd)

2021-08-31

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