DigiLens Partners with Mitsubishi Chemical to Produce Plastic AR Glasses
AR seems to one of the hottest topics in 2021, with companies like Oppo that aims to dominate the AR ecosystem.
Waveguide optics, DigiLens, partners with Mitsubishi Chemical to produce plastic type AR glasses to the market.
The company believes that plastic can achieve the relatively same performance as glass, but with the advantage of weight reduction. Plastic is also safer and cheaper than glass, which is ultimate goal of the AR space to bring cost of production to be more consumer price friendly.
Sunnyvale based DigiLense is amongst the handful of optical solution maker to compete for market share of the soon-arriving AR boom.
Patrick Suel, President of Diamond Edge Venture, strategic investor of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation says
"Because DigiLens uses its proprietary photopolymer and holographic contact copy manufacturing process, DigiLens’ technology is the only approach that will be able to make a working waveguide display using plastic waveguide substrates,”
Their investoment in DigiLen and collaboration with Mitsubishi Chemicals can help produce the only plastic waveguide technology without the need for nanoimprint lithography.
This will ultimately provide a scalable plastic solution for licensed partners of DigiLens, a cost-effective price point for the mass majority of the consumer market, and help faciliate an ecosystem to deliver lighteweight form factor XR glasses .
“Plastic is an essential element for everyday life, and so critical to the ultimate success of waveguides and therefore XR glasses,” said Johei Takimoto, Managing Executive Officer of MCC.
“As the leading material supplier for the global display market with a broad expertise in materials technology, MCC is excited to help make this plastic concept become reality – combining knowledge in molecular design, polymer formulation, and coating technology. Coupled with DigiLens’ leading waveguide technology and laser focus on accelerating the development of the smartglasses computing category across the entire ecosystem, we are putting our full attention and support to deliver on this key initiative. With plastic waveguides, the head worn ecosystem can start designing for compelling ruggedized use cases, wrapped in a small and standalone form factor – we believe AR/XR glasses will be the next volume mobile device and we are very excited to be at the forefront of this new frontier.”
