PhaseSpace will deliver 10 working lightweight Augmented Reality Head Mounted Display unit(s) for test and evaluation, indoors, outdoors, for mission enhancement, maintenance, repair, and medical applications. The devices will be mounted external to a standard helmet, with injection molded rugged and easily replaceable, plastic lenses - beam splitters, and characterize with the assistance of Night Vision Labs, the optical performance and user experience. PhaseSpace has demonstrated capability to create an indoor / outdoor Augmented Reality Head Mounted Display device that can be mounted to the existing night vision goggle mount, to display multiple applications to enhance missions in a lightweight form factor. PhaseSpace has garnered interest from the Department of Homeland Security for devices for over 100,000 agents, including Coast Guard, TSA, ICE, Border Patrol and others under their department, as well as interest from Dell and commercial / industrial partners, as a low cost, outdoor compatible Hardhat compatible AR Headset. The AR Market industry and commercial shipping has huge potential that has not been met with expensive, hard to use devices that cant be easily adapted to repair and maintenance activities. AR Displays tend to have a very narrow field of view and are only useful indoors in office room type lighting. Most designs are not compatible with glasses and restrict viewing of the virtual image to an image plane two meters from the user. This creates eyestrain trying to use the device while working at arms length, or viewing at a distance, where the eye accommodation distance conflicts with the image plane focus. Allowing an adjustable image plane that can be set with a dial knob similar to binoculars, at half a meter to infinity, of which both are much more common for military use than fixed viewing at two meters, allows greater use, and utility. PhaseSpace modified a lens design created under a previous Navy SBIR, and commercial efforts, to allow testing on a Helmet with recently improved commercially available LCD displays, and testing photochromic filters that will darken the lens (in Phase II) when exposed to UV light for use outdoors.
