I had a chance to do a demo of the Lynx R-1 standalone mixed reality headset at the Augmented World Expo, which was a really compelling experience that blended the virtual and real better than any other headset I’ve seen do before. Part of the magic was having a headset specifically engineering to minimize the distance from the the cameras from my eyes, therefore minimizing the normal proprioceptive disconnect between what I’m feeling in my body vs the offset that I’m seeing in my arms and hands. It’s the first XR HMD that I’ve seen that can legitimately call itself a Mixed Reality device — as opposed to Windows Mixed Reality headsets, which are really just VR HMDs with the aspiration to maybe eventually live into their names of doing mixed reality.
I had a chance to catch up with Lynx CEO Stan Larroque on the last day of AWE to recap his first public demos of the Lynx R-1, their collaboration with Qualcomm on using the full capacity of the mixed reality features build into the XR2 chip, their unique four-fold catadioptric freeform prism optics design, what their OpenXR runtime integration will be able to unlock with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces, their successful Kickstarter raising 2.4x their target amount, how they’re leaning into and leveraging the broader open source communities to compete with the biggest players in XR, and his own first real experience of mixed reality with the Lynx that only happened about a month ago.
The Lynx R-1 is expected to ship some of their first units in April 2022, and I’m excited to see what innovations in mixed reality and augmented reality prototypes are able to be created with this headset. They’re one of the few remaining, independent headsets out there competing against the biggest tech companies in the world, but yet taking a leap of faith in how compelling headsets that are truly optimized to be standalone and all-in-one devices capable of virtual reality, augmented reality, or mixed reality. They’re optimizations to focus solely on mixed reality yield some really interesting tradeoffs, but the end experience is totally worth it is a device that starts to show the real power of seamlessly blending the virtual and the real.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So last week at the Augmented World Expo, I had a chance to try out a bunch of different demos on the first day that the Expo floor had opened. And my two main highlights for the day were from Tilt 5, Jerry Ellsworth and the rest of her team putting out amazing technology. And I'll have an interview with Jerry here coming up here next. But the other demo that really blew me away, that's something that I didn't quite expect that would be quite so compelling, was the Lynx R1 by Stanley Roque. He's from Paris. He's building this mixed reality headset. So it's got the form factor of a standalone VR headset, but it's got this flap that goes over your eyes. And it's very thin, very, very, very thin, which means that he's able to get the camera as close as your eyes as possible to reduce this proprioceptive disconnect that happens when you have the camera that is offset too much. So really optimize for mixed reality pass-through. And he's been working on this for like three years, tuning it and optimizing it for this very specific use case. And in fact, collaborating with Qualcomm, because Qualcomm sees that there's different capabilities on the XR2 chip, and that just so happens that this specific use case is using things that other OEMs haven't really focused on yet. And so the fact that Lynx R1 is doing this means that they got a lot of extra attention working and collaborating with Qualcomm in order to really Optimized for all the different things really pushing the XR to chip to its limit and the demo that I had was quite magical It was a video pass-through it was just color and the thing was that you were able to kind of walk into a sphere that allowed you to fully immerse within a virtual world and rather than seeing my Hands that had the ultra leap or you know what used to be called the leap motion Gemini hand tracking which was super solid in fact I think it's still to this point some of the best hand tracking that I've seen on any different headset just super solid and So, I start to go in and out of this celestial sphere of the solar system. You kind of walk in, and you're seeing all the different planets in our solar system. You grab a planet, and you walk outside of the celestial sphere, and all of a sudden, you're in IRL reality, being able to manipulate and work with these different objects that are from the virtual world, so really just seamlessly blending the virtual and the augmented reality. So, given this real mixed reality experience, which I think is actually really quite compelling, So it's also just a very independently driven project. They just did a Kickstarter that raised over $800,000. It's a little over two times as much as they're trying to raise. So they're going to be actually shipping some of these units here in April. So I've actually caught a tweet from Stan LaRocque saying that, hey, I'm going to be meeting with people, showing demos, and I signed up for a slot. Just so happened, I signed up for a slot around like 1130 or so, and he was running a little late. And actually, this was like the first time he started to show some of those public demos there on that Wednesday, November 10th. And he just came up with this duffel bag with two of the links and just kind of set up things at the corner of the Qualcomm booth and I just happened to be there and get to be one of the first people to try out this demo within this public context. So yeah, just really impressed and blown away. And then I was able to run into him the next day and do this interview here for just like 20 minutes to be able to catch up and to get a little bit of the story. Cause I think for me, it was just one of my highlights of my AWE trip. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Stan happened on Thursday, November 11th, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:34.750] Stan Larroque: I'm Stan Larocque, I'm the CEO of Lynx. We are based in Paris and we are making the first standalone mixed reality headset.
[00:03:41.679] Kent Bye: So maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into mixed reality.
[00:03:48.134] Stan Larroque: Yeah, so I started by myself four years ago now when I was a student in engineering school. So I'm an engineer and I started my company. We raised two million two years ago. And so with my team now, 15 engineers, we built this headset. I was convinced on day one that pass through, you know, like augmented reality pass through. So VR with cameras at the front of the headset was a A good idea that was cheap and working great to do mixed reality. So I followed that path and I did not change for four years my idea around that. And today I'm very happy to showcase for the first time the Lynx R1 for AWE.
[00:04:28.789] Kent Bye: So where did you begin in the XR industry? Did you see a VR experience or AR experience? Or what was the turning point that made you realize that you wanted to get into this field?
[00:04:37.362] Stan Larroque: So on my last year of engineering school, the school bought a DK2, an Oculus DK2 at the time, and no one was really interested in it except me. So I grabbed the headset at school and I started prototyping around it. And when I put it on, like everyone, I was convinced by VR, but I said to myself, oh, it's too bad that I cannot see through the headset. So the first thing you do is you put a camera in front and you get the image back. And then you realize you need two cameras for the stereo, and then you had more and more sensors, and finally it's a headset that looks like the LinksR1 today. So yeah, that was the turning point.
[00:05:12.732] Kent Bye: Yeah, whenever I've tried passthrough through virtual reality headsets, what I've noticed is that the camera is offset from my eyes. And then when I see my hands, it's sort of like this proprioceptive disconnect where what I'm seeing is actually different from what I'm feeling. And I feel like with your approach that you're doing is doing a different approach. So what was the things that you were trying to do that's different than how everyone else is trying to address this problem?
[00:05:35.361] Stan Larroque: So the goal here for pass-through headsets is to have the camera for pass-through as close to the eye as possible to reduce this effect of parallax and this discontinuity and discomfort you might experience in other bulkier headsets. This is why our headset is thinner than the average VR headsets to reduce this parallax and this is also why we invested in a new optical architecture to reduce the form factor of the headset.
[00:06:01.888] Kent Bye: Yes, so this optical architecture maybe could describe it because it looks like you're looking into like some diamonds that are gonna poke you in the eye So it's like very weird, but my brain when I did it was able to synthesize it So what is this lens called and how did you land upon this as an option to even explore?
[00:06:18.274] Stan Larroque: So this lens is a free-form prism, it's more precisely a four-fold cathode optic prism. It's a complicated piece of plastic. We choose to work with this lens architecture that we found with a Spanish VR optics company that we are working with. And we choose that lens to reduce the form factor as I told you, but also to do things like pixel interlacing. and other small things and optimization you see in VR and AR. But this is a lens that has better reflections compared to Fresnel lenses. So if you had an open headset with Fresnel lenses, you will see all sorts of gauze rays and reflections. And with this prism, you still have some reflection, but nearly not as much as Fresnel lenses. And compared to pancake lenses, you have a much better contrast. It has a great efficiency. So we're quite happy with the version 1 of Lynx to use this lens.
[00:07:12.260] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, my experience with it was that it was quite magical. It gave me experiences that I've never quite had within VR, which was to kind of seamlessly blend the virtual world into augmented reality and to make it feel like I didn't have that proprioceptive disconnect. And the other thing was the Ultra Leap hand tracking, which I think was really powerful to be able to overlay a virtual representation of my hand that then allows me to have a little bit more immersion within these virtual spaces and more seamless than having just my physical hand there, but seeing how you're able to allow me to be more transportive and, you know, giving a cue to my brain that there's something more virtual about this that allows me to, I guess, blur together the virtual and the real a little bit easier.
[00:07:54.023] Stan Larroque: Yeah, so this experience you had was made possible by the headset because we combined so many important blocks like pass-through, hand tracking, 6DOF and all that. And it's only when you have all these pieces of technology coming together the right way that you get this kind of experience. So not only you have to master the calibration of the pass-through, the reprojection, the latency, it was very complicated for the team to achieve that. It's again, you have to know that it's a two years work of 15 very experienced engineers that work on that and we're quite happy with the results, especially on the proprioception. I think we do a much better job than other passthrough headsets out there, and there are not many yet. And from the feedback we got from the show here at AWE, I'm even more convinced that we're on the right path. And you'll see an even more convincing experience on Lynx version 2 and on the optimization we're doing on the version 1 until April this year. So you told me that you believe that you were not really looking for a camera. But trust me, we are not even close to the final result that will be even much smoother, denoised and all that. So yeah, I'm really excited for what's coming with this platform.
[00:09:11.479] Kent Bye: Now, when I took a shot of your screen, normally when you render a VR scene, you see two renders that have some sort of barrel distortion. But on yours, you have four versions of what is either coming from the world, or are you rendering four individual scenes that have to be rendered down into this? Or maybe just talk about how, rather than the barrel distortion, what kind of things you have to do on the software side in order to render something that appears as it goes through all the different optics in this spatial way that our brain makes sense of.
[00:09:39.845] Stan Larroque: So what you saw is what is happening on the LCD screen per eye. So you see those four different quadrants on the image combining to one through the optics and this is how the magic happens and you get the final image. And the trick is we don't render four times the same scene per eye. We would have to render eight times the scene on the mobile chipset. It's impossible. So we render it once and then we apply a pixel shader on the software to do this distortion with a very complex polynomial function. that is linked to the calibration of the lens and the display. And when we apply that, it's very light on the GPU, and we can do that 90 times per second in real time.
[00:10:19.783] Kent Bye: So you were showing some of this stuff, at least when I saw it, it was in the Qualcomm booth, but kind of associated with Qualcomm. And so are you using Qualcomm technology? Are you using the Snapdragon spaces? Or what was the connection to Qualcomm with the Lynx R1?
[00:10:33.332] Stan Larroque: So we are very fortunate to have a very, very good relationship with Qualcomm. We've been partnering with them since the beginning of the XR2, which was two years ago now on development, and they like the project, they like what we're pushing. Like, we are pushing the boundaries of their hardware, we're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in VR and AR, so they helped us. We've been working together, we will have Snapdragon spaces. run on the headset. We are using some algorithms from them. We're using some optimizations. So yeah, it's a great partnership. And it was, sincerely, without the XR2, we would not have been able to make it an interfered headset. It would have been like the Vario headset linked to a PC. This chipset is very powerful, and we look forward to the future with them.
[00:11:20.021] Kent Bye: So yeah, I mean, I don't remember, actually. Was there a cord that was connected to a laptop? I know there was a laptop that was there, but were you broadcasting that remotely? Or is this completely untethered? Or do you need the computer to help send over and do processing?
[00:11:33.711] Stan Larroque: it's completely untaffered so for the show here because the headset is running all day and sometimes all night we have to keep the cable for the battery so it was just getting power from the laptop through usbc and also i could control the demo from the laptop but if anything happened on the data it was a headset streaming the display to the computer you see my tiny laptop it's not running anything so the headset is fully untaffered And you can do also a PC VR untethered on Wi-Fi 6. And we showed that with native VR, like native YouTuber, he was able to play SteamVR games like Beat Saber and Alyx entirely wireless.
[00:12:10.101] Kent Bye: Yeah, so that's so mind-blowing to be able to see some of this stuff. And I was talking to Hugo Swart from Qualcomm earlier today and asking him about the Snapdragon Spaces, which is collaborating with developers and creators like yourself, be able to interact at the OEM level and doing stuff like OpenXR to be able to have some of these different integrations. And so maybe you could talk a little bit more about the Snapdragon Spaces and the OpenXR and how that is playing into the specifics of what you're able to achieve with this more seamless pass-through.
[00:12:39.463] Stan Larroque: Yeah, so OpenXR is critical for us, and we are again working with Qualcomm to get our OpenXR runtime ready by the end of November or beginning of December. Right now the team is working on that, because once we drop the OpenXR runtime, not only will it be compatible with Unity like we are today, but it will also be compatible with any system that talks with OpenXR, like Unreal Engine, Godot, Autodesk, you name it. Everyone that has an OpenXR implementation, it will be much easier to be compatible. So far, OpenXR is truly a godsend for little players like us, because we could easily plug into systems that even two years ago it was impossible or it would be too difficult for the software team to get the runtime compatible with all these independent systems. So we're happy to have this runtime, to have this layer of compatibility with everyone. And Qualcomm is helping us on that. And once we get the OpenXR runtime running, we'll get Snapdragon spaces running. But again, as I told you, all the other engines, we have a lot of excited developers that are waiting for that.
[00:13:44.515] Kent Bye: In terms of the ecosystem development, is this something that, are there going to be specific applications that you're trying to develop? Or what do you see as the real sweet spot for what this is going to unlock and enable?
[00:13:55.022] Stan Larroque: So my job is not to, our job at Lynx is not to develop applications specifically. tech demos, like open source tech demos and samples in our SDK to show developers and users what is possible to do with the headset. But the end game is to have a full ecosystem where we just provide the hardware and the platform and people make games or training application, a professional application on top of that, like everything you see running on HoloLens 2, we want that running on Lynx next year. And every time you see a HoloLens 2 in an Enterprise or HTC Vive, we can replace that with a Lynx, and we're aiming for that. So it's anything from entertainment, like gaming, to more boring Enterprise use cases that are more mature for augmented reality. And that is critical to have a good developer ecosystem. And in that sense, we are in discussions with SideQuest. SideQuest, they are making a very interesting work, an app store for Android devices like ours. So we are finding common grounds between our two companies to announce something soon, maybe for CES.
[00:15:00.788] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious to hear a little bit more about this strand. I don't know if there's connections to Linux or open source or kind of an open approach that you're taking. And so I think people have been wanting some alternatives to the standalones. But this seems like I saw you running Linux on your computer. But maybe you could talk a little bit about if this is something that you want to make this a headset that would be able to do a lot more stuff with Linux systems.
[00:15:21.078] Stan Larroque: So not only I believe in that because as you just said my laptop is running Linux, but it's also one of the small leverage I have against the other big players that are big companies that are running proprietary software and are sometimes maybe locking too much developers and consumers into their ecosystem and we are trying to leverage the open source community here, so this is why we took this approach. We don't have unlimited resources, but people on internet is an unlimited resource. So I thought that if we open source the SDK, if we open source most of our APIs, we'll get some help from outside and see some ideas that we would never have in the office. So this is why we play the card of the open source, because we believe in that and it's a great way for us to build a community here.
[00:16:11.845] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you just had a successful Kickstarter. Maybe you could tell me about that as a journey because that's pretty amazing that you're able to raise over to nearly three times as much as that you were asking for. So yeah, your Kickstarter just wrapped up a few days ago. Maybe you could talk about that as a journey and what the reactions have been like.
[00:16:29.068] Stan Larroque: Yeah, so we, I'm quite overwhelmed, but yeah, we finished the Kickstarter two days ago. We closed at around 800k dollars, which is amazing. And it's, for me, a great way to show the world and the investors like, hey, people want what we're doing. So this was a great way to show traction and to see that, you know, it's the best validation we could have. So, you know, today I have two very good validation, the feedback of people trying the headset and say, yes, finally, and also people willing to actually pay for that. And those are two different things. And they're both are important to have a real product. So yeah, it's, it was amazing. It was very hard. As I told you, you know, we are a 15% company, you have to imagine all However overworked we were and we still are so right now the Kickstarter allows us to raise more money so we can grow the company hire more talents to bring that product onto the market in April and Yeah, so I can finally say that we're taking off and it's it's really great. It's a great time right now
[00:17:35.403] Kent Bye: What was the time for you that when you were going through these experiences that you had that moment, that magical moment of being able to blend the realities? What were you experiencing when you were able to really experience that on your own hardware?
[00:17:47.577] Stan Larroque: It was actually not very long ago that we had everything coming together with the hand tracking and the 6DF and the passthrough. Maybe I would say like last month maybe. So you have to imagine how brand new this is even for me. So yeah it was quite magical and it kind of validated everything I've been doing for the last three years. So you have to imagine the relief for me and my team to say, yes, it's working. It's what we imagined. So it's, you know, we put everything on paper three years ago. So it's, yeah, it was very emotional. It was very emotional for me.
[00:18:22.532] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I similarly had a reaction that was really quite mind-blowing. I think the Tilt 5 was one of the mind-blowing things, and also your demo. And it wasn't even really an official part. It was a part of the Qualcomm booth. And you were originally in the booth, and they had you move off to a separate section. So maybe talk about what the reaction was from the larger community in terms of being able to actually have people see it, and what were some of the feedback that you were getting?
[00:18:45.728] Stan Larroque: So the feedback we were getting was very, very, very positive. No one complained about like the lens or the eye box or the eye relief. People with glasses could experience the headsets, people with all different kind of head shapes. So it was really a good test for us. I'm very happy with the outcome. I think I also met the right people for growing the company, like partners and investors and all that. So it's entirely positive. And I wish my team was here with me so they could see people outside of the company trying that and say, wow, that's great. And kind of the reaction you had and you saw people's reaction, it was overwhelmingly positive.
[00:19:23.502] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you have a bag here with your two Lynxes that are sitting here and so you're traveling across from France in a bag and bringing these hardware. It feels like, you know, that moment of like these duct tape prototyped headsets and quite an amazing journey and congratulations for being able to have your first public showing of the hardware. And I guess just to start to wrap up here, I'm curious what you think the ultimate potential of this combination of virtual and augmented reality through the mixed reality, what the ultimate potential of mixed reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:19:55.530] Stan Larroque: Yeah, I think from what I see when we look at the roadmap of the vendors we're working with, the partners, I really see a future where VR and AR will completely merge. And maybe consumers in the future won't refer to VR and AR as separate technologies. And we'll just finally all talk about MR, like mixed reality. So this is what I expect, also what I see from other players in the industry. So I think we're on the right path of history for this industry. And optical see-through devices like HoloLens or Magic Leap are bound to stay in AR for a long time. But devices like ours, they already demonstrated today that we could cover the full spectrum of immersive technologies. And it will continue to be true in the future for at least five years. And you'll see next year and the year after that all the headsets that will come on the market will have passed through like what we do. So it's a huge validation. The market will be huge. It's going to be wild. And I'm very happy to be at the forefront and a bit ahead of the curve on that movement, actually.
[00:21:07.225] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:21:11.607] Stan Larroque: But yeah, I just want to say thank you. I met so many backers on the floor here. I was met with overwhelmingly positive energy and it's really a relief. So I just want to say thank you to this community. It feels great. a lot of familiar faces you know it's not like the smartphone world where it's too big it's still like a big family like you know the familiar faces people that are in this space for a long time i'm just saying thank you for the welcoming here and the attention we got it's just great yeah so thank you
[00:21:44.118] Kent Bye: Yeah, and thanks for being able to be first in line to be able to see one of the first demos. And yeah, thanks for coming across the ocean and showing all this stuff. And yeah, congratulations on the Kickstarter and for your first public screening. And yeah, look forward to seeing where this all goes when I think you're really onto something with what your approach here. And yeah, look forward to seeing it getting into the developers' hands and seeing what kind of experiences get created. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. Yeah, thank you very much, Kent. So that was stanley rogue he's the ceo of links which is based in paris And they just finished up their kickstarter and they're making the first mixed reality standalone headset called the links r1 So i've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all? Well, there's lots of different things they had to do over the last three years in order to bring all this together. It's quite amazing to listen to his story to realize that it was only about a month ago that he was really able to get all this stuff working together and that he described it as a really emotional experience because he had this vision, that mixed reality fusion of the virtual reality affordances on top of the augmented reality you know, taking in the pass-through camera, and to really optimize this whole system to be able to make sure that the distance of the camera is as close as your eyes can possibly be. So, they're using these really exotic lenses. They're the four-fold catageoptric freeform prism. So, when you look at it, you're like, I have no idea how this is going to work, because it looks... You're gonna look at it and it's gonna look like one of those kaleidoscopes that you're just like turning around but somehow with all the light that's bending when he gets it to the proper distance your brain kind of figures it all out and it's properly bending all the light so he's doing a pixel shader to be able to take the stereoscopic render and then to the GPO this complex polynomial to kind of shift the pixels around to be very finely tuned to what the lens is actually looking like and So in my little brief demo, I was only doing some mixed reality stuff just for a few minutes. There's a video that Nathie had a chance to do it for like five hours of like playing around with a bunch of different stuff. And he was able to see lots of the other nuances of like doing a fully immersed virtual reality headsets and just how all the different pixels are coming together, you know. So for long distance use, I recommend checking out Nathie's take on some of that. Also, Cass from Cass and Sherry had a chance to try out some of the stuff, and there wasn't any 6DOF controller demos that were being shown at AWE. This was all using just the hand tracking demo, which, you know, with the mixed reality fusion of VR and AR, it actually worked quite well to be able to just use your hands, and the hand tracking was super solid. I did the Vario XR3, and, you know, the thing about that was it's super, super high resolution, but the cameras are offset so much from my eyes that I did notice a significant proprioceptive disconnect just kind of feeling like outside my body just imagine like taking your eyes and like offsetting it by 60 or 80 millimeters however far out it is from the headset and this for the links it's super optimized to be as minimal as possible so it actually felt like i was able to preserve this sense of embodiment and also overlaying the hand tracking that was completely synthetic from the UltraLeap also helped my mind get primed that this is going to be in the more virtual realm of reality that can kind of suspend my disbelief rather than what I was seeing in the Navario headset which was a little bit more of a voxelized picture of my hand that yeah just looked a little uncanny juxtaposed against something that was super super super high resolution. If you're having something like a super high rendered stuff within the Navario Headset and then you see this pass-through that looks not quite as that same level it for me breaks my sense of presence and this was a headset that actually was able to maintain the Fidelity of both the graphics and all the different stuff that he mentioned from like the hand tracking six off the calibration the reprojection the latency You know able to tie all these things together It took 15 engineers over the last two or three years to be able to get to the point where it is right now and So Stan said that OpenXR is critical, that a lot of the things that they're doing is going to enable them to be able to have so much more capability with other devices and programs moving forward. I think that's just going to be such a huge boon for the XR industry once these standard OpenXR runtimes that You know, you create a program and you're able to talk to so many different devices, you know, imagine running blender and just being able to throw on one of these different devices. And it's like a mixed reality and you're able to flip it up. It's maybe a form factor that's just easier than if you want to be completely immersed within a virtual reality experience. And so I imagine that there's going to be some use cases like that, where there's going to be specific headsets that are very specifically tuned to do specific tasks. And this feels like it's gonna be one of those things that is just the form factor That's a standalone and you get like really high quality Pass-through augmented reality pass-through and also when you think about doing a standalone VR you have to actually render everything But when you're doing standalone AR then it's not quite as much that you have to do so you can actually do a little bit higher fidelity Experiences because you're using the actual reality you don't have to render the reality that you're just use the pass-through near to see it and you feel immersed in that world and then And on top of that, you're able to do different experimentations with augmented reality design. So I actually think that devices like this are going to make it more accessible for more and more people to be able to tinker around and play with augmented reality, head-mounted display stuff. Because, you know, when you think about the HoloLens, it's like $3,000, and, you know, Magic Leap is also super expensive. And so this is a very affordable device to be able to play around with different stuff. And the Quest, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people have already started to play around with this, but this is like a color pass-through with a whole optic system that is totally tuned to optimize for this mixed reality type of experience. So it's just something that differently, you have to really experience it to really feel it yourself because it has a different quality that it's difficult to fully articulate, but the best I can describe is that you kind of have this suspension of disbelief and that you just feel like you're fully immersed and that you believe that these different worlds are blending together. It's really the merging of the digital and the real. which I think is a big theme of what's happening with the XR technologies in general, but usually it's been fairly separate with the virtual reality, you're completely immersing into these virtual worlds, and the augmented reality has had such a small field of view that you're looking through the windows. Maybe that was part of the other thing, is that it was such a wide field of view experience of being fully immersed into some of these different worlds. I think TILT 5 was able to achieve this wider field of view as well. It's kind of dependent upon this retro-reflective surface that has got these other fiducial markers, and that you see the light being reflected off of that. And it's doing an inside-out approach rather than shooting photon beams into your eye. You're shooting into the retro-reflective material, and it's bouncing back, and you're seeing it through these different polarized lenses. But you're able to, again, be much more fully immersed with what they're able to achieve with this wide field of view of TILT 5. So just the same with the Lynx R1, you're able to get these wider field of view augmented reality experiences. So just something that, I don't know, it just was really compelling and I heard just a lot of buzz and positive feedback. And it was just nice to be able to actually just try it out and be able to chat with Stan a little bit. So they're working on it, and they're gonna be coming out here in April They're looking on these open XR runtimes, and they're gonna be integrating with the Qualcomm snapdragon spaces I talked to Hugo Swart And you know he actually called out the links are one as One of the headsets that are starting to leverage some of the things that are designed for within the XR to chip But no one's really push it to the limit so They're using six cameras to do a variety of different tracking Black and white cameras to do the positional tracking the IR cameras to do the hand tracking and then they have the pass-through camera Which is a color so they're using six cameras. I think the xr2 can go up to seven So there's still some capacity there, but still they're pushing it to the limit in terms of what other headsets I've been able to do so they've been able to collaborate pretty closely with Qualcomm and So yeah, coming out on April 2022, it's a Kickstarter. You know, you know how these things go. Some, there's always the possibility for things to get delayed or whatnot, but so some of the specs that have an XR to chip, it's a six gigabytes of Ram, 128 gigabytes of storage on board. And that can be expanded with the SD card up to a terabyte. They have to dual LCD screens with 1600 by 1600 per eye. And then there's 90 Hertz or wifi, six Bluetooth, five, and then PC VR streaming. I recommend checking out a few of the other hands-on reports from Cass and Sherry and Nathie, and also Norm Chan got a chance to do a hands-on for Tested as well, so I'd highly recommend checking that out as well. Digging into a lot more of the details. But yeah, this was just kind of like a quality of the moment of just kind of capturing the buzz of this conference and people being really excited about it. Yeah, it was neat to be able to be there and see where the future of the blending of these realities is going, you know, the virtual and the real and the mixed reality, these fusions that are happening in this next phase of these augmented and virtual reality headsets and how we're going to start to see a lot more of this as we move forward. So that's all I have for today and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast and if you enjoy the podcast then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.