The story so far
The physicist who bet against the headset
Right now, Barmak Heshmat is running Brelyon from San Mateo, California, shipping displays to defense contractors, flight simulator builders, and Wall Street trading floors. His product - Ultra Reality - does something that sounds impossible: it generates a panoramic 120-inch-equivalent visual field from a desktop footprint, without anything touching your face.
The technology works by intercepting light before it reaches your eyes and recalculating the wavefront in real time. Specifically, Brelyon's displays manipulate "different properties of light, specifically the wavefront of the electric field" through a computational layer that runs shader programming and inference microservices. The result is true optical depth - not simulated, not 2D with tricks - in a form factor that plugs into any computer via HDMI.
Heshmat has a name for what his company is doing: adding a new layer of control between the world of computers and what your eyes see. Everything before Brelyon, he argues, skipped that layer entirely.
We are adding a new layer of control between the world of computers and what your eyes see.
- Barmak Heshmat, Founder & CEO, Brelyon
Heshmat did not arrive at this by accident. His doctorate - earned at the University of Victoria in 2013 - was in optoelectronics and nanomaterials. His dissertation work produced a terahertz receiver with sensitivity an order of magnitude beyond the then-state-of-the-art. That is not an incremental improvement. That is a new instrument.
From Victoria he went to MIT, joining the Camera Culture group under Ramesh Raskar. There, he led the "inverse problems in light propagation" subgroup - a research unit that, in plain terms, worked on making cameras see things they logically should not be able to see: through fog, around corners, inside closed books. His team used femtosecond laser pulses to photograph light in motion at a trillion frames per second.
Before founding Brelyon, he spent time as head of optics at Meta's augmented reality division - leading the engineering team, filing patents, observing from the inside exactly what makes AR headsets uncomfortable, impractical, and limited. That vantage point sharpened the question he would spend the next chapter answering.
