Kura’s custom, one-of-a-kind development kit optics are on track for production later this year to deliver the best-performing augmented reality glasses and drive the next wave of innovation for the Metaverse

Kura Technologies, an award-winning developer of the best-in-class augmented reality (AR) smart glasses and platform, announced that its fully custom and highly-anticipated development kit optics are up and running in the lab with production to start later this year.

“An AR headset is nothing without its display and optics,” said Kura Founder, CEO and CTO Kelly Peng. “Kura’s groundbreaking performance is made possible by our grounds-up architecture, including custom display silicon we’ve fabricated with TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, custom micro-LED display, and custom AI-generated optics.”

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 Kura’s optics are uniquely capable of:

• Up to 150-degree field-of-view, a world record for waveguide type displays and 9 times the viewable area of current market leaders.
• 8K resolution, 16 times the resolution of existing AR, enabling text readability critical for training, remote collaboration, and design.
• Up to 95% transparency—significantly higher than ~25% typical in other products; Kura’s performance enables natural eye contact and safe operation, and lets users perform other tasks while using AR.
• Compact eyeglass-style waveguide displays enabling attractive, ergonomic glasses suited for extended usage.
• Wide range of depth, allowing for natural interactions from arm’s length all the way to infinity.
• Zero front light leakage so that others cannot see the content the wearer is viewing—critical not only for defense and security use cases, but also for privacy in day-to-day usage. Kura has the only waveguide display that can achieve true zero outwards light leakage from any angle.

To build its ultra-high performance AR glasses, Kura initially tried to use existing optics and multiphysics design software, but found that executing the design in existing tools was completely impossible, since the simulations didn’t converge. In response, Kura developed a proprietary AI optical design tool, Istara, which executes over 1,000 times faster than existing software, finding solutions in a matter of hours rather than years. This tool leverages a state-of-the-art parallel, vectorized compute kernel which implements accelerated ray tracing algorithms and proprietary AI algorithms that Kura developed from the ground up and are completely different from the algorithms in popular toolkits such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Caffe. Istara is based on both mathematical models and real-world feedback from designs manufactured with the tool. Kura has already received licensing requests from some of the largest companies in the world for this software.

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“We have our amazing team to thank for this groundbreaking work. Our team of world-class experts includes pioneers in machine learning, MIT-educated engineers and PhDs in program synthesis, AI, advanced algorithms, signal processing, machine learning, optics, and high-performance computing, and award-winning math and computer science experts,” said Kura Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer Bayley Wang. “It’s this sort of experience which gives us the boldness to break free of traditional paradigms and craft something completely novel, something that very few other groups can pull off.”

“It’s been thought impossible to build a headset which is transparent enough to look someone in the eye and opaque enough to see images in daylight, but Kura’s AI optimizer and simulator assemble the optics in a truly mind-boggling way that makes this possible,” said Dr. James Koppel, Kura’s software advisor, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT on AI for generating programming tools.Kura’s product has been widely regarded as the highest-performing AR headset for years, with orders from industry-leading companies and institutions including General Motors, Caterpillar, Trimble, and multiple government agencies, which approached Kura after being dissatisfied with the performance of other AR glasses.