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Combining the Best of AR and VR with Varjo's XR-1, featuring Niko Eiden
The human eye
is a wonderful and complex thing, and it's a technological feat just
to even come close to its natural revolution. Well, the folks at
Varjo have created something that is pretty darn good at it. Alan may
have trouble remembering how to say their company's name, but he can
attest to the clarity of the XR-1's display. Varjo CEO Niko Eiden
comes by to give us a look behind the curtain of its creation.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today we have Niko
Eiden, CEO of Varjo. He's formerly held top product leadership
positions at Microsoft and Nokia. At Nokia, Niko led a product
program team in 2006-2007, and together with researchers from Nokia
Research Center, his team developed the basis for the optical
technology that later became the Microsoft Hololens. Niko has a
Master's in science in aeronautical engineering. Varjo is redefining
reality by jump starting a new era in computing. Their hardware and
software lets people seamlessly mix realities together, moving from
the real world to extended reality into pure virtual reality, all
with human eye resolution. Their new headset, XR-1, is a mixed
reality developer device for engineers, researchers, and designers
who are pioneering a new reality. With photorealistic visual
fidelity, ultra-low latency, and integrated eye tracking, the XR-1
seamlessly merges virtual content with the real world for the first
time ever. If you want to learn more about Varjo, you can visit
varjo.com. And I want to welcome to the show, Niko. Thanks so much
for joining me.
Niko: Thanks, Alan. Nice to be
here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
We got a chance to meet at AWE this year and I got to try the XR-1,
which was -- oh my God -- what an incredible experience. You put on
the headset, the pass-through cameras were as if I didn't have a
headset on at all, I could just see the whole world. And then all of
a sudden a car appeared in front of me; in the space I was in, there
was a car. Then I got in the car, and the space around me
disappeared, and I was in the car. And the one thing that really
stuck out with me that blew my mind was. I was looking -- it was a
Volvo -- and I remember looking at the steering wheel. And the little
Volvo symbol in chrome was so crystal clear. It looked like a real
car. Let's talk about your technology and how you guys ended up at
this place.
Niko: Sure. We really had the
initial vision-- the founding team, we had a long background in
different augmented reality and VR devices. And we had always been
talking about that video see-through type of devices could actually
combine the best of both worlds of AR and VR devices. And every time
you started talking about them, somebody kind of commented basically
that don't bother: the latency, the lag between what you're seeing
through the cameras, and what's happening in reality is gonna be too
long. Or the resolution is not going to be good enough, it's not
going to look great. But we were in the summer of 2016, we were
looking at a demo and the demo was shown with the Hololens first gen
device. And I got really thinking that this would be such a cool
demo, but it's really missing a big part of the experience, because
it wasn't able to show the image in a photorealistic fashion. It was
a very high fidelity graphic scene that we were looking at with
Hololens and we were just thinking that this would be so much better
with a VR device. And combining the reality with a video see-through
device could actually really work. We were a bit curious. We had some
extra time at that point together with Urho [Konttori] -- one of the
other founders -- and we built our first prototype in 24 hours, and
the experience was really magical. So it was a very simple
experience. But the main thing of that first experience was that we
were able to dim an existing room and make it
View all episodes
By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5
1212 ratings
The human eye
is a wonderful and complex thing, and it's a technological feat just
to even come close to its natural revolution. Well, the folks at
Varjo have created something that is pretty darn good at it. Alan may
have trouble remembering how to say their company's name, but he can
attest to the clarity of the XR-1's display. Varjo CEO Niko Eiden
comes by to give us a look behind the curtain of its creation.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today we have Niko
Eiden, CEO of Varjo. He's formerly held top product leadership
positions at Microsoft and Nokia. At Nokia, Niko led a product
program team in 2006-2007, and together with researchers from Nokia
Research Center, his team developed the basis for the optical
technology that later became the Microsoft Hololens. Niko has a
Master's in science in aeronautical engineering. Varjo is redefining
reality by jump starting a new era in computing. Their hardware and
software lets people seamlessly mix realities together, moving from
the real world to extended reality into pure virtual reality, all
with human eye resolution. Their new headset, XR-1, is a mixed
reality developer device for engineers, researchers, and designers
who are pioneering a new reality. With photorealistic visual
fidelity, ultra-low latency, and integrated eye tracking, the XR-1
seamlessly merges virtual content with the real world for the first
time ever. If you want to learn more about Varjo, you can visit
varjo.com. And I want to welcome to the show, Niko. Thanks so much
for joining me.
Niko: Thanks, Alan. Nice to be
here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
We got a chance to meet at AWE this year and I got to try the XR-1,
which was -- oh my God -- what an incredible experience. You put on
the headset, the pass-through cameras were as if I didn't have a
headset on at all, I could just see the whole world. And then all of
a sudden a car appeared in front of me; in the space I was in, there
was a car. Then I got in the car, and the space around me
disappeared, and I was in the car. And the one thing that really
stuck out with me that blew my mind was. I was looking -- it was a
Volvo -- and I remember looking at the steering wheel. And the little
Volvo symbol in chrome was so crystal clear. It looked like a real
car. Let's talk about your technology and how you guys ended up at
this place.
Niko: Sure. We really had the
initial vision-- the founding team, we had a long background in
different augmented reality and VR devices. And we had always been
talking about that video see-through type of devices could actually
combine the best of both worlds of AR and VR devices. And every time
you started talking about them, somebody kind of commented basically
that don't bother: the latency, the lag between what you're seeing
through the cameras, and what's happening in reality is gonna be too
long. Or the resolution is not going to be good enough, it's not
going to look great. But we were in the summer of 2016, we were
looking at a demo and the demo was shown with the Hololens first gen
device. And I got really thinking that this would be such a cool
demo, but it's really missing a big part of the experience, because
it wasn't able to show the image in a photorealistic fashion. It was
a very high fidelity graphic scene that we were looking at with
Hololens and we were just thinking that this would be so much better
with a VR device. And combining the reality with a video see-through
device could actually really work. We were a bit curious. We had some
extra time at that point together with Urho [Konttori] -- one of the
other founders -- and we built our first prototype in 24 hours, and
the experience was really magical. So it was a very simple
experience. But the main thing of that first experience was that we
were able to dim an existing room and make it