Sensics

Key takeaways

Sensics belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Sensics to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Sensics from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Sensics is an American company that made virtual reality products for professionals and consumers. Sensics was the co-founder of the OSVR ecosystem and technical lead of its software platform. Sensics is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. As of January 2025, Sensics' website is down. According to the Maryland Secretary of State, Sensics has been forfeited since 2019.

History The company's products are based on patented technology developed at Johns Hopkins University at the request of a major car company, starting in 1999. The need presented by this car company was to develop a head-mounted display that had both wide field of view and high resolution, so that a high level of immersion in the virtual world can be achieved. The application was car design, with a focus towards designing the interior of the car, and the thought was that a high-performance head mounted display can shorten the time it takes to bring a new model into market. Wide field of view and high resolution initially seemed to be contradictory requirements: if a single display element is used, it needs to be magnified to show a wide field of view, but this same magnification reduces the pixel density and makes it seem of lower resolution. The solution was to optically tile multiple displays. Conceptually similar to how multiple desktop PCs can be networked together to form a powerful computer, the team realized the multiple micro-displays can be blended together into a display that has much higher resolution. The project was successful: a prototype model was indeed delivered to that company and was used in the design process of a major family sedan. After completing this project, Dr. Larry Brown and Marc Shapiro, part of the team that developed this technology at Johns Hopkins University decided to start Sensics to commercialize this product signed a technology licensing deal with the university. The team was able to secure a Phase I and then Phase II SBIR grant from NASA, which allowed it to incubate the company, develop the technology and deliver a working product to NASA.

Product evolution

2006–2013: Professional-grade tiled display systems In 2006 Sensics hired Yuval Boger as CEO to take the company's products to market. The company's first commercial product, the piSight was launched in 2006. The initial piSight featured 24 micro-displays, 12 in each eye. Each micro-display was of SVGA resolution, and thus the initial product had nearly 6 million pixels per eye. This resulted in an overall field of view greater than 150 degrees. At the time, operating the piSight required an array of computers, which was required to generate the 24 SVGA signals. These computers had to be networked so that changes in the virtual scene could be synchronized. While the 24-display piSight was sold towards several high-end uses, Sensics felt that it could offer tiled HMDs to customers that perhaps could not afford the high-end model. The company started offering many different models of its products, where the key difference was the number of micro-displays installed in each. For example, a model with 12 micro displays (6 per eye) could provide over 120 degree field of view, while requiring just 50% of the displays and computing power of the 24-display model. Because these models were quite similar, customers were able to upgrade from one model to a model with greater number of displays. The early need to use multiple networked computer to drive the HMD was deemed to be a major issue for several customers that could not, or did not wish, to modify their application software to support such networked configuration. To overcome this limitation, Sensics introduced high-speed hardware capable of taking a single video signal and performing real-time splitting of this signal to the lower-resolution signals required by the micro-displays. The company also introduced the xSight, an HMD with a ski-goggle design, to complement the "over the head" mounting of the earlier piSight.

2010–present: Professional-grade Single-display HMDs Sensics added a more traditional HMD, the zSight, to its product line. Like many other HMDs on the market, it uses a single display per eye. Though it does not provide a field of view that is as wide as the multi-display products, this design allows for a simpler, lower cost solution that as more portable and more power-efficient than its multi-display counterparts.

2012–present: Emulated optical devices These are devices such as virtual binoculars and virtual rifle sights. They are typically made by modifying a commercial field binocular or similar device and inserting a micro display, adapting optics and sometimes a motion tracker inside them. The result is a device that looks similar to the original field device but shows an image that is generated by a computer. This is typically used for training applications.

2014–2019: Consumer products and the OSVR open-source initiative Sensics collaborated with Razer Inc. in creating OSVR, an open-source ecosystem that includes both an open-source software platform as well as open-source HMD for VR. Sensics created the software architecture and designed key parts of the OSVR HMD, also known as a Hacker Development Kit (HDK) Sensics personnel frequently deliver presentation on the OSVR architecture

2019-present: Forfeiture According to the Maryland Secretary of State, Sensics has not been allowed to legally operate since 2019.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Sensics

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Sensics claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Sensics before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Sensics ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Sensics

In research: Sensics appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Sensics in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Sensics is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Display technology, Technology companies of the United States, Virtual reality companies, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Sensics outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Sensics in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Sensics means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Sensics out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sensics in simple terms?

Sensics is an American company that made virtual reality products for professionals and consumers. Sensics was the co-founder of the OSVR ecosystem and technical lead of its software platform.

Why does Sensics matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Sensics?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Sensics.