By Jonathan Lewis, Chief Executive

Two years ago we had this mad idea to use holograms in augmented reality devices. And that’s all it was – a ‘back of envelope’ notion that the expertise we had in telling light how to behave using holograms might be useful in AR devices. 

Well, we have come a long way since then. Today we launched our first commercially available optic for the augmented reality industry. We have called it the “TL2” – as we are collectively rubbish at coming up with snappy product names.

In the process, we have created a new brand, called TruLife Optics, to support our product launch. 

The company was born from our determination to use holograms to solve problems. And there weren’t many bigger problems in our field than trying to persuade light to travel from a screen to your eye without obstructing your view of the world. 

We had made single colour head up display optics for clients, and advances in our proprietary emulsion led us to test a full colour optical element. At this time (about two years ago), we were working with the National Physical Laboratory on a separate eye measuring project and the partnership was a great combination of science, expertise and mutual respect - so we shared our thoughts with NPL on the optical combiner. 

 Both sides thought the idea had legs and so we researched a joint patent, which was submitted in March 2013.

Augmented reality has since become an industry in its own right, and we felt that our optic needed an identity in this industry, away from Colour Holographic’s images of Harry Potter and Pharaohs and so TruLife Optics was born. 

We are now launching our site and brand identity and hope you like it. The optic is great, but there is still a lot of work to do. We agonised about when to launch, and the feeling was that sooner was best, given that we want to develop the optic with feedback and input from augmented reality designers. 

We don’t have all the answers and we actually can only guess about the ways the augmented reality industry will develop. 

But by partnering with developers of AR devices, we hope that we can play a key role in the development of this exciting industry.