Massadoption of Virtual Reality has been slower than expected. Reason: the negative side effects such as eye strain, nausea, and headache that accompanythe prolonged use of VR headsets prevent users from having an ideal virtual reality experience. The makers of VR headsets are aware of this fact; however, they were not able to address this issue. Consumer devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or Windows Mixed Reality headsets all suffer from the same flaws that limit the use of VRtoday. This is where Lemnis Technologies comes in.
Lemnis Technologies, a Singapore-based company, is the first to address this problem with its best-in-class Verifocal™ platform, a new software and hardware platform that works with the human eye to create a more immersive and comfortable VR experience. Unlike the other VR devices available in the market, headsets powered by Verifocal™ eliminate the eye strain common with VR and ensure that users can have an ideal virtual reality experience. “From the early stages of the journey, we were focused on addressing the issues of eye strain and visual discomfort that are plaguing the VR industry,” says Dr. Pierre-Yves Laffont, Co-Founder andCEO, Lemnis Technologies.
The advent of the Verifocal™ platform has brought about a big change in the VR industry mainly with its key features: eye tracking, dynamic re-focusing, and vision correction. While eye-tracking analyzes eye movements to determine where the user is looking, dynamic re-focusing eliminates eye strain by adjusting the focus in headsets dynamically and thereby providing a more natural experience, closer to the real world. Verifocal™ platform’s third feature, vision correction, is certainly a game-changer in the industry: it allows users who normally needeyeglasses to have a comfortable VR experience without the inconvenience of wearing spectacles under a VR headset.
Quick and Steady Growth
Founded by Dr. Pierre-Yves Laffont and Dr. Ali Hasnain, Lemnis Technologies started out its journey in March of 2017 with the goal of making Virtual and Augmented Reality viable as the next computing platforms. Equipped with strong research backgrounds and academic credentials,the foundersbelieved they could make a significant contribution to the VR industry by combining their softwareand hardware expertise. To achieve their objective, they did the research, understood the fundamental flawsthat caused the slow adoption of Virtual Reality, and set out to address the issue by developing Lemnis Technologies’quintessential platform: Verifocal™.
Backed by global investors such as Wavemaker Partners and Entrepreneur First, Lemnis Technologies is growing quickly. With an outstanding team comprised of Ph.D. graduates and talented engineers, Lemnis Technologies has brought forth one of the most innovative platforms that could eliminate the eye strain and visual discomfort that plague theVR market. Today, the company provides integration services to help industrial partners employ the Verifocal™ platform, providing their users with a range of benefits.
An Opportunity for Enterprise VR
The company is actively looking for industrial partners to evaluate the technology and experience the benefits by themselves.“We work with enterprise partners toimprove the platform and demonstrate key benefits for their specific applications” says Dr. Laffont. “VR is fundamentally disrupting the corporate environment, with promising applications in corporate training and learning, product design, or consumer testing. VR can simulate a real-world scenario and lets users repeat multiple variants without fear of mistakes, injury, or extra costs. But for this to be truly useful in an enterprise setting, users need to be able to stay in VR for extended periods without eye strain”.
By employing headsets augmented withLemnis Technologies’ Verifocal™ technology, enterprise usersget a host of benefits including reduced VR discomfort, correct depth perception, the ability to properly focus on close objects, and perhaps most importantly,they can use virtual reality without eyeglasses. The Verifocal™ platform even simplifies the process of creating new VR applications by lifting some of the constraints on the content developers, while remaining compatible with all of today’s existing VR content.
“We have shown Verifocal™prototypes in some of the best venues and conferences globally including SIGGRAPH 2018, SPIE PhotonicsEurope, SPIE PhotonicsWest, and many more,” adds Dr. Laffont. For its contributions to the industry, the company has recently bagged one of the prestigious awards in the industry: CES 2019 Innovation Award. Although the company is famed for its Verifocal™ platform, the real strength and the brain behind the company are its employees. Both the founders of Lemnis Technologies,Dr. Pierre-Yves Laffont and Dr. Ali Hasnain, take pride in theirteam that has written over sixty international publications and has conducted research at some of the top academic institutions in the world, such as MIT, Brown, ETH Zurich, NUS, NTU, and many more.
The company going forward will continue its effort working with industrial partners to improve the technology. This, in turn, will help virtual reality break into the mainstream. “We are at the stage where virtual reality and augmented reality are still in their infancy. Lemnis Technologies is eliminating the blocks that are hindering the industry from reaching its fullest potential. Also, the company will continue improving its solutions to address the specific needs of VR customers,”concludes Dr. Laffont. With an ambitious roadmap and industrial collaborations in progress, the future looks bright for the team at Lemnis Technologies.
