Apple buys lens manufacturer Limbak – report - MIXED Reality News

Image: Lynx

Optics specializer Limbak makes lenses for headsets similar Lynx-R1 and Simula One. It is present owned by a “major US company”.

Display specializer and manufacture perceiver Karl Guttag reports this connected his blog. Guttag thinks the purchaser is Apple oregon Meta, but won’t commit. The often well-informed XR expert Bradley Lynch assumes Apple aft talking to his sources.

After talking with my manufacture sources, I’m comfy reporting that Apple is the institution who acquired the Limbak optics company.

I besides person immoderate complaints astir this ? https://t.co/gDiWUzths0

– Brad Lynch ? CES 2023 (@SadlyItsBradley) December 31, 2022

Limbak’s website has been offline for immoderate time. Guttag assumes the acquisition happened a portion agone and lone present came to nationalist attention.

Limbak’s lenses: emerging startups arsenic customers

Founded successful 2013, Limbak is simply a Madrid-based institution that developed lenses for VR headsets. Its best-known customers see Paris-based startup Lynx and SimulaVR, makers of the Simula One Linux headset.

Probably the astir antithetic lens plan is utilized successful the Lynx-R1 mixed world headset, which is shipping to Kickstarter backers these days. Lynx calls it a “4x catadioptric free-form prism.” It stitches the representation unneurotic from 4 lens elements and ensures a peculiarly crisp representation successful the halfway of the image.

Is Big Tech buying each the expertise?

According to Guttag, Limbak has besides been moving connected peculiar pancake lenses. These types of lenses are expected to go the golden modular for XR headsets, arsenic they let for a narrower headset plan and an wide sharper and artifact-free representation than Fresnel lenses (see Meta Quest Pro).

If Apple bought Limbak, the U.S. institution whitethorn beryllium funny successful the exertion down this lens design. Apple has reportedly been moving connected a mixed world headset for galore years, but has not yet commented connected it.

Limbak is conscionable 1 of galore optical companies that person been acquired by large companies similar Apple and Meta successful caller years. Meta confirmed conscionable a fewer days agone that it had bought lens specializer Luxexcel.

Guttag fears that buying up technological know-how volition pb to monopolization, making it progressively hard for smaller hardware manufacturers similar Lynx and SimulaVR to vie successful the marketplace done innovation. According to Lynch, the acquisition volition person nary interaction connected the startups’ existent products. But what astir aboriginal products? Manufacturers volition apt person to look for caller optics partners.

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