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if there is a technology product that technology practitioners love and hate, xr (virtual reality vr, augmented reality ar and mixed reality mr) can be deservedly ranked first.

love isxr directly hits the information needs of human beings. 85% of the information obtained by humans is through vision. products that change visual interaction are often successful, such as magazines, television, movies, short videos, etc. moreover, both virtual reality and augmented reality can meet people's desire to break through space.

therefore, xr is not only a new way of presenting information, but also a new way of interaction. it has always been hailed as the entrance to the next era after smartphones. those who obtain xr are worth at least hundreds of billions of us dollars.

hategiant companies and small entrepreneurial teams have taken turns to enter the market, and it can be said that "eight immortals crossing the sea, each showing their magical powers", but they are still facing dilemmas: amazing technology, exaggerated costs; amazing demos, and crying sales, but they still haven't ushered in the iphone moment.

for example, the first generation of microsoft's hololens amazed the world, but the price of $3,000 made it prohibitive for consumers, so microsoft had to develop b-side customers and even turned to the military market.

although meta quest 2 has seen a huge increase in sales and sold tens of millions of copies, it lacks applications that can continue to attract consumers and will most likely be left to gather dust after the epidemic ends.

apple's visionpro is far superior to its peers in terms of design, technology, and display effects, but the first generation of the phone was also praised as "amazing, until you use it."

to the extent that many people believe that the demand for xr is too advanced, and anyone who tries it will be like drawing water from a bamboo basket or trying to catch the moon in a well.

but is this really the case? looking back at the history of xr development, it is obviously not the case. on the contrary, the three "shackles" of "product, technology, and manufacturing" that have troubled xr are being opened one after another.

01 the shackles of product positioning

there is an interesting story about products and technology.

after jobs returned to apple, he planned to stop the development of opendoc (a document editor). however, when he attended an event, he was questioned and dissatisfied by an opendoc supporter, who even mocked jobs for not knowing programming and not understanding the power of opendoc technology.

in response to this question, jobs first complimented the other party, and then made a classic statement: opendoc does have its own advantages, and has some functions that other technologies cannot achieve. however, the most difficult thing is how to fit those functions into a bigger vision, such as a product that can sell $8 or $10 billion a year.

“you have to start from the user experience and work backwards to figure out what technology to use. you can’t start from the technology and then think about how to sell it.”

what jobs described is one reason why xr is in trouble:technical thinking is more important than user thinking.the second reason is:ultimate thinking is more important than iterative thinking, always hoping to create revolutionary products with multiple functions to solve multiple needs of users at one time, but ignoring the importance of iteration.

under the influence of these two thoughts, xr will be "infected withthree highs and one shortsymptoms of”high cost, high power consumption, high weight and short battery life.the end result is low practicality. the product can only be used in fixed scenarios and cannot be used freely by users, especially outdoors. moreover, due to weight and battery life issues, it cannot be worn for a long time.

any product that cannot be used frequently cannot be called a hit and cannot become popular.

fortunately, after repeated trial and error by batches of companies, the industry has begun to reposition its products: standing from the user's perspective, abandoning ultimate thinking, starting from scenarios that are easy to implement, cultivating usage habits, and continuously iterating technology.

then,ar glasses become the pioneer in solving the "three highs and one short" problem。

ar glasses product picture

first of all, ar glasses give up the pursuit of full scenes, butfocus on areas where ai capabilities can be combined, such as translation, navigation, business meetings and other scenarios, the requirements are clearer and more practical; secondly, because of the streamlined functions, the power consumption of ar glasses is also reduced, and the battery life can also meet daily use.

at the same time, ar glasses are similar in shape and weight to ordinary glasses. with good design, they can combine practicality and fashion.

not only are users happy to wear them for a long time, but the target audience has also expanded from geeks to ordinary users.

ar glasses have gradually become the choice of various manufacturers. thunderbird, skyworth, huawei and other companies have successively released new products.overseas giant meta, also released the first ar holographic glasses, codenamedorionforeign media said the cost was as high as $10,000. meta's relevant person in charge said that the prototype of this product was as shocking as the oculus rift prototype.

ar glasses may not be the final form of xr, but after giving up the ultimate thinking, the market has also begun to give good feedback. in 2023, domestic sales of ar glassesthe growth rate reached 150%.it can be said that the shackles of xr's product positioning are being opened by ar glasses.

02 the shackles of technical routes

technology is also a shackle for xr products. the reasons for the constraints are:multiple components often have multiple technical routes moving forward in parallel, with different manufacturers focusing on different areas and a more dispersed supply chain.this has resulted in, on the one hand, a delay in the outbreak of economies of scale and a slowdown in the pace of cost reduction; on the other hand, it has also set a high threshold for users to choose products, which is not conducive to product popularization.

for example, taking the optical display of ar as an example,optical display moduleit is a major cost contributor, accounting for about 40% of the total cost; it is also the most important component that affects the performance of the product. however, optical display has derived multiple routes around the trade-off between cost and presentation effect.

first of all, in terms of displaying the overall form, it can be divided intovideo see through vstandoptical see through ost。

vst uses sensors such as cameras to capture the effects of the real world and then projects them on the screen. it can be simply understood as "helmet mode", and representative products are apple's vision pro and meta's questpro. ost projects virtual images into the user's real field of view through optical lenses. it can be simply understood as "glasses mode".

in comparison, vst is reality added to virtuality, while ost is virtuality added to reality. the former has the advantage of deep immersion, but the disadvantages are large amount of calculation, many components, and heavy weight. the disadvantage of ost is weak immersion, but the advantage is the potential of being "compact".

microsoft's first-generation hololens was the first product to adopt the ost solution, but due to limited technology at the time, the advantages of ost were not brought into play. the product was huge in size and user feedback was not good.

after more than ten years, ost has achieved good"lightweight" effect, which is very suitable for glasses. therefore, almost all domestic ar companies currently adopt the ost model.

the reason why ost is gaining more and more recognition in the industry is due to the development of its components, especially the technical routes of micro-display screens (which convert virtual images into light) and optical components (which allow images to enter the user's eyes by designing light reflection).

the technologies in these two fields can also be described as"various"optical components include prism, free-form surface, birdbath, optical waveguide and other solutions. micro display screens include lcos, micro oled, microled, dlp and other technologies. moreover, these two components can also form a variety of combinations. for example, google glass used "prism + lcos", rokid glass used "birdbath + micro oled", and hololens used "optical waveguide + lcos".

it felt like a "twisted dough twist". fortunately, the twist was gradually untied.

in the field of optical components, "optical waveguide" is gaining more and more recognition.

the so-called optical waveguide, in simple terms, allows light to travel completely through the upper and lower surfaces of the glass in the form of "total reflection" without passing through. the difficulty lies in the design of the mirror surface. the advantages are good light transmittance, small size, and smart design. the display device can be placed on the frame without blocking the eyes, which is more in line with the shape of daily glasses.

the red frame in the figure is the "optical waveguide solution"

optical waveguides have become mainstream due to their lightweight advantages. currently, optical waveguides are mainly divided into array optical waveguides (geometric optical waveguides) and diffraction optical waveguides.

comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of several optical components

the next problem islight enginethe part that displays the image, converts it into light, and transmits it to the lens. take the following figure as an example. the red frame on the upper left is the light engine part of a mature product; the lower left is the display screen; the upper right and lower right are multi-color or monochrome light engines (the display screen is equipped with a series of lenses).

light engine schematic

for light engines, user demands include:bright enough, small size, low power consumptionespecially when the optical waveguide solution is selected, since the optical efficiency of the optical waveguide is very low (the intensity of light will be weakened), the requirement for brightness is higher.

previously, the main solution was lcos, which is liquidcrystal on silicon. simply put, it is a cmos substrate at the bottom, liquid crystal in the middle, and an ito glass substrate at the top. in this solution, cmos, liquid crystal, and ito are all mature technologies, so the cost is low and mass production is easy;the disadvantages are high power consumption, large size, and poor adaptability to low temperatures.therefore, when made into glasses, they are not light enough and are not very effective when used in winter.

the micro oled solution takes advantage of the self-luminous characteristics of oled, with small size and low power consumption, but its disadvantages are short life cycle and low brightness. especially in terms of brightness, it is a typical "weak when exposed to strong light". since ar glasses are a superposition of reality and virtuality, when the external light is too bright,the brightness of oled will be relatively insufficient, so that the virtual image cannot be seen clearly and the original function is lost.in use, the indoor performance is generally good, while the outdoor performance is relatively poor.

micro led is also called μled. simply put, it is the miniaturization of led, with the pixel pitch reduced from millimeters to micrometers. led also uses self-luminous compounds, including gap (gallium phosphide) and ingan (indium gallium nitride), etc., with low power consumption, and due to the high pixel density, it has the characteristics of ultra-high brightness and high contrast.

comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of several micro display solutions

therefore,based on the first principle of demand, micro led is the preferred solution for ar near-eye display and is gradually becoming mainstream.

according to statistics from the well-known overseas organization yole, most of the nearly ten lightweight ar glasses launched in the world in 2022 use microled micro-display technology solutions. and these solutions are basically from the same company:jbd shanghai showaccording to industry insiders,meta's recently released ar glasses, code-named orion, also use jbd's microled solution.

ar glasses micro display solution statistics

it can be seen that although there are still some differences in technical routes such as optical components and display solutions, driven by user needs, there has been a trend of "pull together", and the technical shackles are gradually being opened. however, to achieve better results, it is necessary to open the third shackle: manufacturing capacity.

03 the shackles of manufacturing capabilities

there is a short story about how much apple values ​​the chinese supply chain. one day, after listening to a report on the chinese supply chain, cook pointed out that "this problem is very bad and someone should go to china to solve it."

thirty minutes later, cook looked up and saw apple's operations manager sabih khan, and immediately asked, "why are you still here?" khan then immediately drove to the airport and took the nearest flight to china.

the importance of china's supply chain to apple is unquestionable. but in a sense, it is also apple that is driving the chinese supply chain forward.

in the era of new energy vehicles, it means "going hand in hand". tesla's ability to break through the "capacity hell" is inseparable from the construction of the shanghai super factory. it is also thanks to the chinese supply chain that domestic new energy vehicles have risen one after another.

and inin the field of consumer ar, china's supply chain has shown good leadership。

on the brand side, brands such as thunderbird and meizu were the first to adopt ai technology and explore new scenarios, becoming pioneers in the entry of ar glasses into the consumer market; on the component side, kunyou optoelectronics broke through the patent restrictions of optical waveguides and provided more cost-effective optical waveguide technology.

the microled solution, which is hailed as a "masterstroke" in the display field, is also led by chinese companies such as jbd, which has solved many manufacturing problems.

first, when the company was founded in 2015, jbd brought a new idea to the industry: combining led and semiconductor manufacturing, and proposedhybrid integrated semiconductor technology, that is, integrating silicon-based driving circuits and led compounds at the wafer level, up to 200 million cmos circuits and 20 million microleds can be integrated within one square centimeter.

as a result, the production efficiency of microled has been greatly improved and the cost has continued to decline.

the more critical achievement isthe promotion of “lightweight”. in 2021, jbd launched the world's first 0.13-inch microled micro display screen, and for the first time compressed the size of the color light engine to 1.5cc. in 2023, the company's third-generation product reduced the volume to 0.4cc, a reduction of 73%. the volume is only the size of a soybean and can be easily placed in the frame of glasses. recently, the volume of jbd's mass-produced monochrome light engine has been further reduced to 0.15cc.

size comparison between jbd light engine and red bean

smaller in size, but better in effect. jbd hummingbird i color optical module can achieve a brightness of more than 6000 nits, breaking the previous brightness level of 1500 nits for color optical waveguides, allowing users to enjoy a high-quality visual experience even outdoors.

comparison between the hummingbird optical module and the previous generation optical module

after nearly a decade of development, jbd has formed a product matrix that radiates from micro display panels to light engines and light modules. it is also listed by yole as,a key player in the ar field alongside apple and meta(in the tv field, tcl and boe are the core players in display).

microled application roadmap

this is undoubtedly a recognition of china's supply chain, and it also allows everyone to see the importance of deepening and strengthening vertical fields.

04 conclusion

xr is an interesting topic. in the process of opening the "three shackles", we can not only see the exploration of chinese consumer electronics brand companies, but also see several hidden champions like jbd in the manufacturing field with low-key reputation and high-profile technology.

only when both the brand peak and the manufacturing peak are located in the country, will we not worry about being "choked", our manufacturing industry will obtain more value distribution, and we will not have to worry about "migration".

this road has just begun. what is needed is a decade of "low-profile reputation and high-profile technology".

-end of article

intern liu yuchen (current student at peking university hsbc) also contributed to this article.

composite background of science and engineering/finance,

10 billion private equity/top self-media dual experience

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