A twenty-year bet that the lens was the whole game
Here is a slightly counterintuitive fact about augmented reality: the hard part is not the software, or the chip, or the battery, or the demo where a dinosaur walks through your kitchen. The hard part is the glass.
Specifically, the hard part is a piece of transparent material called a waveguide, which has to take the light from a tiny projector tucked into the arm of a pair of glasses and route it across the lens and into your eyeball, cleanly, in full color, without making the glasses heavy, expensive, or so glowy that everyone around you can see your notifications reflected on your face. This is a genuinely difficult optics problem, and it has quietly killed or delayed a large number of very well-funded AR dreams.
DigiLens, a company in Sunnyvale, has spent more than two decades on exactly this problem. It was founded in 2003 as SBG Labs - the initials stand for "switchable Bragg grating," which is the kind of name you give a company when your customers are physicists - and it took the friendlier name DigiLens in 2015. Its founder, Jonathan Waldern, is a long-time immersive-display pioneer who was building virtual reality hardware back when that phrase mostly meant disappointment.
The company's core insight is almost aggressively practical. If AR glasses are ever going to be as common as phones, the lenses can't be exotic, hand-tuned lab objects. They have to be manufacturable - ideally by something closer to a printing press than a semiconductor fab. So DigiLens developed a proprietary photopolymer it calls CrystalClear, and a way to make waveguides using inkjet printing and a "holographic contact-copy" process, which is roughly the optical equivalent of running off copies of a master hologram. The pitch is that this makes good AR optics cheap and scalable, which is the whole ballgame.
You can tell a lot about a company by who gives it money. DigiLens has raised more than $165 million, and its investor list reads like a cross-section of everyone who has a stake in AR working: Samsung, which led a 2021 Series D that valued the company at over $500 million; Sony; the automotive supplier Continental, which cares about heads-up displays in cars; Mitsubishi Chemical, which cares about the materials; and Niantic, the Pokémon Go company, which cares about pointing your phone at the sky. When investors from consumer electronics, automotive, chemicals, and gaming all write checks to the same 43-person optics shop, they are not betting on a single product. They are betting on a supply chain.
"Extending reality. Augmenting life."
— DigiLens company tagline