Sensics

Sensics corporation describes itself as a leader in professional-grade virtual reality displays, also known as head-mounted displays as well as in open-source virtual reality products. Sensics is the co-founder of the OSVR ecosystem and technical lead of its software platform.

Sensics is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland.

The company's products are based on patented technology developed at Johns Hopkins University at the request of a major car company, starting in 1999. The need presented by this car company was to develop a head-mounted display that had both wide field of view and high resolution, so that a high level of immersion in the virtual world can be achieved. The application was car design, with a focus towards designing the interior of the car, and the thought was that a high-performance head mounted display can shorten the time it takes to bring a new model into market.

Wide field of view and high resolution initially seemed to be contradictory requirements: if a single display element is used, it needs to be magnified to show a wide field of view, but this same magnification reduces the pixel density and makes it seem of lower resolution. The solution was to optically tile multiple displays. Conceptually similar to how multiple desktop PCs can be networked together to form a powerful computer, the team realized the multiple micro-displays can be blended together into a display that has much higher resolution. The project was successful: a prototype model was indeed delivered to that company and was used in the design process of a major family sedan.

After completing this project, Dr. Larry Brown and Marc Shapiro, part of the team that developed this technology at Johns Hopkins University decided to start Sensics to commercialize this product signed a technology licensing deal with the university. The team was able to secure a Phase I and then Phase II SBIR grant from NASA, which allowed it to incubate the company, develop the technology and deliver a working product to NASA.

In 2006 Sensics hired Yuval Boger as CEO to take the company's products to market.

The company's first commercial product, the piSight was launched in 2006. The initial piSight featured 24 micro-displays, 12 in each eye. Each micro-display was of SVGA resolution, and thus the initial product had nearly 6 million pixels per eye. This resulted in an overall field of view greater than 150 degrees. At the time, operating the piSight required an array of computers, which was required to generate the 24 SVGA signals. These computers had to be networked so that changes in the virtual scene could be synchronized.

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Wikipedia