Today, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh disclosed the company’s acquisition of Raxium, a five-year-old business with MicroLED technology that might be critical in developing a new generation of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality headsets.
This adds to the evidence that Google’s next big AR move is getting closer: the company already acquired North in 2020 and is apparently employing engineers to construct an augmented reality operating system. We learned in January that Google Labs is developing an augmented reality headset called “Project Iris” under the same management as the Project Starline high-resolution video chat experiment revealed at last year’s I/O event.
In terms of competition, Microsoft has already delivered an augmented reality gadget in the form of the HoloLens, while Apple, Meta, Snap, and others are apparently investing substantially in developing their own gear that overlays information and images on top of the real environment.
According to Raxium’s website, a Super AMOLED screen on your phone has a pixel pitch (the distance between the center of one pixel and the center of another pixel next to it) of roughly 50 microns, but its MicroLED has a pixel pitch of about 3.5 microns. It also claims to have “exceptional efficiency,” which is more than five times more than any world record.
Osterloh mentioned both the size and efficiency in his blog post about future display technologies that Raxium may develop. He stated that the startup will join Google’s Devices & Services team, adding that its “technical knowledge in this area will play an important role as we continue to invest in our hardware efforts.”
