A Waterloo Engineering spinoff company has received a multi-million dollar injection from Intel Capital.
AdHawk Microsystems, co-founded by engineering alumni, has raised a $4.6 million USD Series A funding that will bring its microscopic eye-tracking technology to virtual reality and augmented reality headsets.
Intel Capital led the Series A investment round, with participation from Brightspark Ventures and the founders of AdHawk, which develops advanced microsystems for human-computer interaction.
Current VR/AR headsets equipped with eye tracking systems rely on cameras to keep track of where the user is looking, and it takes immense computing power to process the hundreds of images per second the cameras capture. As a result, these headsets need to be tethered to a power supply and a high-end computer.
AdHawk’s eye tracker replaces the cameras with ultra-compact micro-electromechanical systems – known as MEMS – that are so small they can’t be seen by the naked eye. These MEMS eliminate power-hungry image processing altogether, resulting in order-of-magnitude improvements in the speed, form factor and energy efficiency of the VR/AR units that carry them, while delivering resolution on par with expensive, research-grade systems.
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