The past decades have been dominated by innovations in mobile computing, but today we are seeing a major shift and acceleration in the sector towards spatial computing, where users can interact more intuitively with virtual content by displaying it directly on top of their view of the real world, allowing physical elements to be augmented with a wide range of information. With spatial computing, users no longer need to take their mobile phones out of their pockets and are no longer limited to the small screen of these mobile phones; instead, the entire physical environment becomes a canvas on which digital information can be displayed. The road to spatial computing is certainly not straightforward and has a long history. Several major technology companies have attempted to bring a spatial computing device to market in the form of a VR headset or AR glasses. Think of Google, which introduced Google Glass in 2013, Microsoft with its HoloLens, Apple with its Apple Vision Pro, or Meta, which unveiled a lab concept of AR glasses codenamed Orion in September 2024, with an estimated production cost of between $10,000 and $20,000 per unit. None of these VR headsets or AR glasses ever made it to market or became a big success. The reason for this is that these technology companies were limited to standard 2D display technologies, such as OLED and microLED displays, which suffer from shortcomings for VR headsets and AR glasses such as vergence-accommodation conflict and fixed focal depth. Workarounds to minimize the vergence-accommodation conflict and/or fixed focal depth results in bulky, heavy, and very expensive systems, in some cases completely isolating the user from the outside world.
Swave develops a revolutionary spatial light modulator display technology that overcomes all the limitations of standard 2D displays and will enable fashionable, lightweight AR glasses at a highly competitive price. Although spatial light modulator displays are not new – LCoS and micro-mirror-based SLM have been developed before – Swave's SLM is the only SLM display that can scale the pixel pitch to well below the wavelength of visible light, which ranges from about 380 nm to 750 nm, allowing digital holography with an extremely wide field of view (FoV) for the first time. Other SLM display technologies suffer from a pixel pitch that cannot be scaled below 1 µm, making the FoV too narrow to be practical for AR glasses. Swave will bring its SLM display technology to TRL 8 under the EIC project.
