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Television, the internet, smartphones. Technology has a long history of innovating the ways we connect with the world and each other. The next step? Augmented reality, powered by advanced waveguide optics. Prepare to see the world more clearly than ever before.
What Is a Waveguide?
At its core, a waveguide is a piece of glass that carries light from a projector to your eyes. In AR devices, the waveguide sits where the lens typically would. It’s transparent, letting you see the real world clearly, even as it enhances your view with digital content—like directions, images, or 3D models.
Waveguides themselves look unassuming—like a regular piece of glass. They’re thin, lightweight, and about as ordinary-looking as something you’d find at an optometrist’s office. They are about two inches in diameter and less than 1 mm thick. But within that ordinary appearance lies extraordinary technology: nano gratings and patterns on the surface of the glass.
Here’s how it happens: digital content like for instance a map with directions is projected from a tiny microprojector, usually located in the temple area of the glasses, directly into the waveguide.
Think of a waveguide like a network of veins and arteries in the body: both confine and guide their contents with precision to their final destinations. The heart acts like a projector, pumping blood into the system with the direction needed to keep it moving, much like a light source injecting images into the diffraction gratings of a waveguide. These gratings, like organized queue lines, ensure each ray of light follows a precise path until it exits. Similarly, blood vessels, like waveguides, are designed with branching pathways and valves to maintain precise flow, bringing together the real world with digital content. Just as light carries data to its destination—your eyeball—blood delivers oxygen and nutrients exactly where they’re needed.
Nicole Zaworski, Sr. Process Engineer at Magic Leap, explains this simply: "The waveguide acts like a light trap. It keeps the light in, maintains its angle and intensity, and then projects it toward your eyes to create the virtual image you see."
This nanoscale magic lets you access digital information—like directions, images, or 3D models—at any time, while keeping the experience private and unobtrusive. It’s like having a personal display that’s always available but never gets in the way.
Making Waveguides
Waveguides are created through advanced techniques to create nanoscale detail. For glass waveguides, engineers use a process called nanolithography. A customized lithography process is performed to pattern the waveguide glass, leaving nanometer-sized features on the surface of or embedded into the glass.
To give you an idea of the precision involved: in a single six-inch wafer, engineers dispense over 1.5 million picoliter-sized drops of grating material. The process deposits our grating material at precise locations on the waveguide wafers, matching the exact needs of the waveguide design. This level of detail ensures waveguides are efficient, compact, and capable of handling red, green, and blue light simultaneously to produce vibrant, full-color images.
Over a Decade of Waveguide Learnings
Waveguide technology has evolved through relentless trial and error, solving complex challenges that once made AR uncomfortable for users. One of the most significant hurdles our engineers faced was vergence-accommodation mismatch. The name may be intimidating, but it’s a phenomenon we’re all familiar with. Mike Miller explains: “Your brain is expecting the content to be at a specific depth based on our own experience and understanding, but because it’s being presented at the wrong focal depth, this can create dizziness and headaches.”
When confronted with incorrect focal depths, our brains get confused, resulting in that strain and dizziness—something many of us have experienced during 3D movies or theme park rides.
So what’s the answer? Remember those nanoscale diffraction gratings we mentioned before? The ones that send the light down precise paths? These gratings, along with specialized lenses, are what allow the waveguides to present virtual images at the correct focal length. It took our engineers years of meticulous research and innovation, but this breakthrough allowed them to create AR that truly feels as though it’s part of your environment, ensuring a natural, strain-free experience that’s comfortable for long-term use and opening the door to endless new possibilities.
Information at Your Eyeballs
Waveguides are just one piece of the puzzle in Making AR Possible, but they’re the key piece. They bring information directly to your eyes, giving you instant, seamless access without breaking your focus or flow. It’s like having a personal assistant always by your side. Whether you’re checking real-time stats during a presentation, navigating a bustling city, learning about history in a museum, or exploring a 3D model in vivid detail, AR has what you need, when you need it.
With waveguides, you don’t just see information—you experience it naturally, integrated into the context of your world. What might sound like science fiction is becoming a reality that’s designed to make life easier, more connected, and fundamentally more human. It’s the result of decades of research, distilled into a groundbreaking technology that feels intuitive and extraordinary. Maybe even fun.
Watch more of our story in Making AR Possible.