(gentle music)
- 30 Years ago when I was in the first year of my college,
my initial fascination was to develop telescope systems
and look in outer space.
And then when I saw this article
talking about a virtual reality technology
that can put you into another space digitally,
the imagination attracted me.
- My name is Hong Hua and I'm a professor
at the Wyant College of Optical Science
at the University of Arizona.
My work here is mainly working on optical technologies for
enabling advanced verbal displays for virtual reality
and augmented reality.
So 'virtual reality,' you can think of it's a technology
that puts the user completely immersed
into a computer generated environment
versus 'augmented reality,'
or nowadays people like to call it 'mixed reality,'
is trying to insert the digital contents
or the digital avatar or digital objects
into physical reality so that you have this harmony
between your digital world and physical reality.
That's one of the first variable light field display systems
that we developed a few years ago,
but one of the major things that we are working on
is trying to, how can we shrink down the volume.
Every time there is a new macro display technology
coming up or there is another component,
I would take that opportunity to develop a new system.
(violin music)
(indistinct talk in background)
In the last few years, I'm leading a group
of graduate students working on optical technology
that it can potentially address
the most challenging problems that exist
in VR or AR display systems.
One of the challenges is to render contents
that give the user ability to focus at a different distance
because in real life, your eye is able to focus far away
or look at something really close.
So one of the approaches is to be able to creating a stack
of focal planes dynamically, either time sequentially
or spatially, so that you are able to render 3D volume
in a range from very close to very far away.
And then we are trying to render, geometrically,
the light field or the light directions
that are presumably coming from the 3D objects.
So this device actually had a, we call it
an intregal imaging unit,
giving you the ability for your eye to able to see
the 3D objects rendered by the display,
appear to behave in similar ways
as your real world physical objects.
Some of the particular areas and applications
that I'm personally very interested in,
is developing displays to help people.
And one particular project that I have worked recently
was the work with E-Sight. E-Sight is a Canadian company
that developed a variable assistive technology for people
who have compromised vision that are not able to see their
surroundings with their naked eyes,
but they have some residual vision.
When you put this device on,
you would be looking through the camera
and look at your real world through the camera.
And then I, if I look at your face now,
your face will be a few times bigger
than what I would normally be able to see with my naked eye.
Some other application areas
that we had worked on in the past
was to develop a anatomy visualizer for doctors,
to be able to show their patients
how their surgical procedure is gonna be.
So to me, my motivation of helping people,
is kind of probably coming from my family value.
I grew up in a family where my father passed away
at a very early age and my mom
was a elementary school teacher.
So you can imagine she does not make a lot of money,
but however, one of the things that she has taught me
was education can change your life.
When you have education,
you need to learn to give it back.
It doesn't matter where you come from.
Other people cannot tell you what you can do
or what you cannot do. Only yourself can.