Follow-up, April 2018: Mind-bending new screen technology uses ‘magic pixel’ to display different content to multiple people
Two former Microsoft researchers are raising money for a new startup that utilizes innovative display technology.
Paul Dietz and Albert Ng are the co-founders of Misapplied Sciences, a Redmond-based company that just raised $3.4 million of funding, according to a new SEC filing.
Dietz would not confirm the investment round, telling GeekWire that his startup is keeping quiet.
“We are still in our stealth phase,” he said.
On his LinkedIn profile, Ng notes that Misapplied Sciences “is developing an incredible new display technology.”
“It has barely even been imagined in science fiction, and will literally change the way we see the world around us,” he wrote.
Ng adds that “we are inviting world class talent in display optics, computer vision and sensor fusion, 3D graphical interface development, and physical prototype construction to join our team.”
On his own LinkedIn profile, Dietz writes that Misapplied Sciences is “a new company that is commercializing a truly startling innovation. We will have a lot more to say about this in the future.”
Dietz, the company’s CEO, and Ng, the president, generated some attention back in March 2012 after Microsoft Research published a video online featuring Dietz talking about a high-performance touch technology test system he and Ng developed in Redmond that demonstrated the impact of different latencies on a user experience.
“What we’ve done with this research is set something of a bar for where we’d like to head over the next decade,” Dietz says in the video, which has more than 1.2 million views. “We’d like to see systems decrease their latency down to the 1-millisecond level and then you start to actually have things that feel like you’re moving a real physical object.”
Here’s a description of the video from Microsoft:
Modern touch devices allow one to interact with virtual objects. However, there is a substantial delay between when a finger moves and the display responds. Microsoft researchers, Albert Ng and Paul Dietz, have built a laboratory test system that allows us to experience the impact of different latencies on the user experience. The results help us to understand how far we still have to go in improving touch performance.
Dietz told GeekWire that his pressure-sensing technology research was ultimately used when Microsoft developed its Touch Cover keyboard for the Surface tablet.
Touchscreen latency was a topic last week when Apple unveiled new tablets and a new Pencil stylus device. Macrumors noted that the Pencil has “almost indistinguishable latency.”
“The touch subsystem of the Multi-Touch display in iPad Pro has been redesigned to work with Apple Pencil to dramatically reduce latency and deliver incredible accuracy for activities like fine art illustration and detailed 3D design,” Apple said in a press release.
Prior to Microsoft, Dietz worked for nearly seven years as a senior research scientist at Mitsubishi and as a technical lead at Walt Disney before that. Ng, meanwhile, graduated from Cal Tech in 2011 with a degree in Electrical Engineering and earned a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2014.
Misapplied Sciences was registered as a business in the state of Washington in November 2014. Listed on the SEC filing as a director is Carl Ledbetter, the managing director at Salt Lake City-based Pelion Venture Partners.
