DAVID FATTAL: Immersion is very important
because it's the natural evolution of visual media.
Whether it's a photograph, whether it's TV,
or whether it's your cell phone, everything has been flat.
The quest for immersion in the visual medium
is just very simply trying to reproduce the natural way
you're experiencing the natural world,
except in the digital form.
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NARRATOR: The New Reality: A look
at the future of consumer technology.
With your host, Poppy Crum.
Hi, I'm Poppy Crum.
I'm a neuroscientist and a technologist.
I focus on developing technologies
that enhance how we experience the world
and interact with each other.
There's a trust that comes when technology
is interacting with you in the way
that you interact with the world.
When you move from a two-dimensional image
to something that has more dimensionality--
maybe it has depth, maybe it moves with you--
you're tapping into what our brain is looking for,
what our brain wants to feel.
Your body reacts, your brain reacts.
You notice details about an individual or about an object
that you otherwise wouldn't.
You think differently about that object.
Increasing the immersiveness of what
is displayed to you in virtual communication,
in a video game, in how we look at images
and pictures of our family, it brings a number of things.
In communication, it makes me more engaged.
That lowers my stress levels, might reduce my cognitive load
as well, so how hard my brain's having
to work to understand or to stay focused.
Both of those things, having more natural behaviors,
having images that are more realistic in three dimensions,
also helps with that.
It also allows me to have richer emotions virtually, which
increases my engagement.
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One company that's pushing the limits of immersion
in consumer technology is Silicon Valley's Leia.
DAVID FATTAL: We create products around what
we call this new medium, 3D Lightfield, that
is creating a sense of immersion out of any mobile device
or automotive screen.
It's the natural evolution of visual media.
If you think, we started 200 years ago with still photos,
then we added color, motion, always
wanting for more life, more realism out of the visuals--
put simply the most natural and comfortable way
to experience 3D on display.
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Yeah, so Leia is specializing in mobile products.
We think mobile is very important
because you get to interact with your mobile device as opposed
to, for example, a television set.
So we've been focusing on cell phones,
on tablets, and on automotive display.
Incidentally, we think as the car is just a big--
is just a big cell phone.
It's the same type of content, you're
interacting with your display as well.
We launched recently the Lume Pad,
which is a 10.8-Inch tablet, running full Android, you know,
the entirety of the Google ecosystem, Android ecosystem.
And on top of that, you have the Leia ecosystem,
which lets you play games in 3D, watch movies in 3D,
take pictures in 3D, share, create, enjoy,
all of that through the lens of that new
Lightfield medium.
The whole technology behind Leia started actually at HP Labs.
It took probably over 10 years to develop.
Yeah, I was actually fortunate to lead that,
to lead that effort at HP.
It was a breakthrough in nanotechnology and nano design,
so we had to literally invent new physics
to create the 3D image.
Leia's technology uses nanotechnology
that is inside the display.
So the technology completely disappears,
much more precise control over what light can do,
and ultimately just a more comfortable experience.
It's going to be milder than what
you see at the movie theater.
But it's going to be so comfortable that you can
actually look at it for hours.
Right, so that's how I would kind of qualify the difference,
slightly less depth than what you're
used to with the glasses, but a lot more comfortable,
especially in the long run.
It is exactly like a magic window.
The way we quantify, the way we articulate
the value of Lightfields is precisely
by creating engagement.
I can go to a hotel, I can go to a retail store,
I can go to an educator, and this is essentially
what the Lightfield is doing for them.
It's main KPIs, engagement.
And engagement in turn means more sales,
means better learning, translating each
of the vertical appropriately.
But it's all about engagement.
Yeah, so take the example of retail
or the application of Lightfield in retail, especially
luxury retail.
Because on the Lightfield screen,
you are going to reproduce not only the depths, but also
the way that light is going to reflect off the surfaces,
you're going to get a feel, a literal feel for the textures,
the materials, and you're going to be
able to represent the luxury good in all of its beauty.
This is literally representing all of these light effects that
contribute to the brain's understanding of what
the surface is made of.
This is something that makes you connect.
It makes you want to engage and makes you want, ultimately,
to buy, right?
That's the main KPI for the e-commerce.
Another area would be education, right?
And we all know with the pandemic,
we've all had kids at home trying
to fight for them to get focused,
engaged on their homework or the classes
that they're following through Zoom.
Being able to get a sense of presence
that the Lightfield medium offers
you is going to give you much more emotional connection
to the person.
It's going to bring you closer.
It's going to make you want to connect and engage.
Learning geometry or biology or physics
through three-dimensional asset translate directly
into positive feelings for the learning material
and ultimately test results because that's
what parents care about.
So the same way that the telepresence was so important
in education, it's going to be equally important in medical.
Having a Lightfield display in medical training
gives you a much more lifelike experience.
And this is something, again, that
is going to be more memorable, and which
is going to be important not only to prepare for surgery
or an intervention, but also to communicate with patients.
Being able to have the 3D imagery somehow
inspires more confidence in the competence of the doctor
that you're facing, in the tools,
in the equipment that they are having.
It feels more high tech.
And in the end, it's going to promote a feeling of security
and confidence.
So for the doctor-patient communication
is also going to be very important.
The technology is half nanotechnology and half AI.
The nanotechnology definitely gives the differentiating
factor and new possibilities in terms
of creating the 3D effect.
But you need also to be able to be accessible and be
compatible with all the body of content that is out there.
You don't want to have to recreate everything
from scratch.
Today, thanks to advances in computer vision,
you don't have to get content with 3D
inside, with 3D information.
You can start from any regular 2D picture or 2D video
and still get the beautiful effect
on the Lightfield display.
And this is a trend which is going to accelerate.
Most flagship cell phone in 2021 have depth recording
capability.
The cell phone makers use the depth
to create stylistic effects.
For example, they can blur the background, portrait mode
for example.
There's so much more that you can do with that.
On the right medium, you can break away
from the confines of the flat screen
and give content so much more life.
And this is where the artificial intelligence, the computer
vision comes in.
So it's as important as the hardware.
And when they play together, at the same level,
they're both advanced enough that they
can support the ecosystem.
This is how we win, and this is the entire mission
about the company is developing both of these threads
at the same time.
I think any screen should go, should go immersive.
Any screen should have the potential to, at a whim,
just summon that third dimension.
RAHOUL VARINA: We're looking at all areas of compute.
We're looking at how we can deliver
compute more efficiently.
We've been using things like videoconferencing on PC devices
and tablet devices and the intimacy between two
parties talking, it needs to be improved.
So there's lots of areas where we can improve things
like eye focus.
For instance, I'm looking at a camera now,
and I could be looking at my own picture or your picture,
but I'm not always looking at the camera directly.
So there are algorithms that they
are using to run on the hardware to refocus the eyes.
So it looks like I'm looking at the camera
rather than looking at the screen
or looking at your picture.
There's more and more AI that's running on the processor.
There'll be more dedicated machine learning
that's running on dedicated processors.
So we're looking at how we can more efficiently run on the CPU
and also, in the future, develop dedicated hardware
to run those workloads on compute elements,
develop on Arm.
I think we've got the opportunities around 2D and 3D
viewing.
Certainly a lot of the cameras on phones can use 3D recording
and have more depth perception.
So we can-- we can use that technology
to improve the image or the video stream
and make it appear more 3D-like and more realistic
so we can bring together things like cameras,
how we use certain algorithms to improve
the stability of an image.
There are certainly areas where we
can take some of these immersive workflows
and try to optimize them for performance and efficiency.
I think there are lots of opportunities for us
to improve the immersive experience on PC and tablet
devices in the future.
Thanks for joining us.
We'll see you in the next episode.
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