Low Power Digital Signal Processors for Use in AR Display Devices

While the data about the user’s context is captured, fused, and filtered in one digital signal processor (DSP), vision processing units (VPUs) are analyzing individual and fused data signals to detect key features (e.g., objects) of the real world. Audio processing also requires computing resources. At the precise moment when AR experiences are delivered to users, power is needed for the rendering computations. This power usage must not compete with the power necessary for the optics, auditory, or other real time processes to produce digital assets visible to the user.

DSPs are common components of AR Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) in displays. The DSPs accelerate the classes of computational tasks required for optimal performance of AR systems. They can be configured and optimized to specific parameters, matching the sensors that capture the real world tasks that they perform and even the use case or user’s requirements.

To reduce total display power usage and increase the time between charges, fundamental research needs to advance the state of the art in design and production of low-power DSPs dedicated to every computationally intensive component of enterprise AR displays and delivery systems.

This research needs to be performed without interference with existing patents and be published and available to component manufacturers and AR display manufacturers without license or fees in order to accelerate the development of new DSPs and to reduce the cost of high-performance enterprise AR display devices and other mobile hardware.

Stakeholders

AR display designers, AR display manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) of semiconductors for AR displays, AR systems integrators.

Possible Methodologies

Semiconductor and DSP designers can collaborate with other AR ecosystem segments to increase their understanding of the diversity of real world requirements. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, designers will optimize new DSP architectures for AR-specific functions.

Research Program

This research can be combined with fresh research approaches to create new power capture and power storage technologies for use in AR display designs.

Miscellaneous Notes

A 2018 Qualcomm Technologies presentation describes important computing tasks and functions of signal processors in advanced AR display devices. This is a blog post published June 2020 on the ARM community web site about this research topic.

Keywords

Low power, power use, power consumption, digital signal processing, DSP, VPU, SoC, AR display hardware, digital signal processing, low power electronics, heads-up displays,

Research Agenda Categories

Displays, Technology

Expected Impact Timeframe

Long

Related Publications

Using the words in this topic description and Natural Language Processing analysis of publications in the AREA FindAR database, the references below have the highest number of matches with this topic:

• Speicher, M., Hall, B. D., Yu, A., Zhang, B., Zhang, H., Nebeling, J., & Nebeling, M. (2018). XD-AR. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(EICS), 1-24.
• Malhotra, N., Mann, A., & Pandey, N. (2019). Design of Low Power ECRL Based Power Gated 4:2 Compressor. 2019 6th International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN).
• Fadzli, F. E., Yusof, M. A. M., Ismail, A. W., Salam, M. S. H., & Ismail, N. A. (2020). ARGarden: 3D outdoor landscape design using handheld augmented reality with multi-user interaction. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 979, 012001.
• Iwai, D., Itoh, Y., & Punpongsanon, P. (2018). Computational Augmented Reality Displays. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces
• Schmalstieg, D. (2018). VIS Keynote Address : When Visualization Met Augmented Reality. 2018 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST)

More publications can be explored using the AREA FindAR research tool.

Author

Christine Perey

Last Published (yyyy-mm-dd)

2021-08-31

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