News: Industry Samples

Bugeye Technologies Inc. (Bugeye) is a manufacturer of innovative displays. These displays are based on technology that Bugeye has licensed from The Boeing Company (Boeing). Bugeye has developed new products for several markets, including: simulation products for commercial, educational and military use; as well as products for theme parks, science centers and arcades.  Bugeye’s business model is based on sales of its products as well as service revenue from engineering, manufacturing, and design consulting. 

Bugeye products utilize Boeing patented technology by incorporating an integrated hardware/software system that provides a 3D perceived display with exceptional realism at an affordable cost.  The Bugeye founders have delivered McDonnell Douglas & Boeing real-time flight simulation devices for the past thirty plus years to military customers throughout the world.

Bugeye Technologies Inc. has developed its products using virtual imagery based on a relatively simple technology of enhancing a displayed image with special lens technology. The complex aspect of this technology is creating effective continuous virtual imagery from multiple displayed images. The basic components in Bugeye’s products include a flat panel display or LCD, a Fresnel lens, and software to generate an image. The lens is positioned to create the desired effect. The software is typically run on a personal computer and might be a video game, computer-aided design drawing or any other type of graphical content.

Bugeye products offer several distinct advantages over alternatives:

·          Superior panoramic imagery to maximize the visual training experience;

·          Unique depth perception without headgear and associated costs;

·          Hardware and software compatibility with PC developers; and,

·          A deployable, modular system to support upgrades and reliability.

Many versions of display technology have evolved but the most common for use in flight simulators has been one in which the viewer is seated within a dome (spheroid) with the viewer’s eye located at the center of the dome. This approach requires extensive non-linear display mapping to accurately project the terrain imagery on the interior of the dome surface. It also requires continual alignment to maintain reduced-brightness, low resolution, and out-the-window imagery. The approach chosen by Bugeye engineers is a mosaic of flat panel displays surrounding a dome that could be arranged (tessellated) in such a way that all of the vertices of the lenses lie on the surface of the dome.

The lens must be a suitable distance away from the eye to allow freedom of movement, but closer to the LCD than its focal length. These distances are designed to create a virtual image at, or near, infinity, thus magnifying the real image. The observed area on the LCD is typically less than the total area of the desired virtual image. The additional visual area on the LCD allows for overlapping of adjacent images to create a seamless and coherent image. An overlapped image allows greater body, head and eye movement, but there is a trade-off between resolution and allowable movement. The overlapping may be achieved making hardware adjustments to the pixels in each display panel, or making software adjustments to the fields of view in each display panel.  In order to build larger and larger virtual images, computer images are generated in each display panel, rotated and sized to the appropriate display panel, and overlapped to make continuous imagery from an arrangement of independently generated images.