Dongheon Yoo and Seungjae Lee from SNU Professor Byoungho Lee’s Lab Awarded at AR/VR/MR Optical Design Challenge


▲ From Left to Right: Professor Byoungho Lee (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Researcher Dongheon Yoo, and Researcher Seungjae Lee
 

SNU College of Engineering (Dean Kook-heon Char) announced on 21^st that Dongheon Yoo (Ph.D. Course) and Seungjae Lee (Ph.D. Course) from the lab of Professor Byoungho Lee (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) won 2^nd place at the Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR)/Mixed Reality (MR) Optical Design Challenge hosted at Moscone Center, San Francisco from February 2^nd to 7^th.
 
This competition was hosted as a part of the SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering) Photonics West, world’s largest biomedical, optics, and laser conference. Every year, approximately 20,000 optical engineers and developers and 1300 companies participate in the event. This time, large companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Huawei and startup researchers developing AR/VR/MR headphones took part in the event to evaluate the research papers submitted by participants.
 
Dongheon Yoo and Seungjae Lee received high score for submitting a paper titled “15 Focal Planes Head-Mounted Display Using LED Array Backlight.”
 
The two students introduced a method to implement glasses-free, three-dimensional display onto VR headphone using LED arrays with small volume. With this headphone, three-dimensional space from 20 cm to several meters before the user’s eyes can be expressed into 15 focal planes at real-time with natural blurring effect.
 
Professor Lee explained, “Conventional AR headphones caused nausea due to visual discomfort. This research relieves this visual fatigue and enhances the flow experience of AR headphone.”
 
This research was conducted with the support of the Korea Institution for Information and Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) and the Ministry of Science and ICT. The research was primarily conducted by researchers Dongheo Yoo and Seungjae Lee under the supervision of Professor Byoungho Lee who is the leading expert on fields relating to VR/AR optical systems. Researchers Youngjin Cho and Jaebum Cho and Soo Hyun Choi, a Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering student, also participated in the research.
 

▲ 15 Focal Planes VR Headphone
(a) Apparatus, (b) 3-Dimensional Video Filmed at Various Distances


▲ Winners of the Optical Design Challenge. Dongheon Yoo is third from Left.

 
 
[Reference Links]
- SPIE Photonics West:
http://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/photonics-west/highlights-photos-and-more
- SPIE Photonics West AR/VR/MR Challenge:
http://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/photonics-west/ar-vr-mr/design-challenge?SSO=1
- Links to Photos:
https://spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/photonics-west/highlights-photos-and-more