OPTIX develops cutting-edge optics technology and offers advanced solutions for the next-gen AR and VR products. The company, founded in August 2022, revealed at CES 2025 some of its products and technologies for the AR/VR segment. One of them, the 8K VR Pancake Module, now includes foveated rendering tech and gaze tracking, allowing to maintain full 8K resolution in VR while saving GPU.
OPTIX raised US$15 million fundraising last May, to solve the bottleneck of XR optics technology, and the investment appears to be working. As Gary Yan, Founder and CEO of OPTIX said on the fundraising announcement, “Optics plays a crucial role in XR hardware. The technology itself is very challenging because it needs to be highly integrated with other subsystems, at the same time, be manufacturable at mass production scale. Our goal is to provide the ultimate optical experience, and to create outstanding AR and VR products in collaboration with world-leading customers and industry partners.”
The new funding comes on a heel of a rapid growth year for OPTIX. The company has established its own laboratory and manufacturing process and has been simultaneously focusing on key optics technologies for both AR and VR. Within weeks of Apple releasing its first headset Vision Pro in June 2023, OPTIX published their VR Pancake optical module, which has a resolution of 8K binoculars, and a field-of-view that is larger than Vision Pro for more than 15 degrees. According to OPTIX, “the extremely delicate picture and 3D display effects have been unanimously recognized by many customers worldwide.”
It was said, then, that the next step was to further integrate gaze tracking, foveated rendering and PB Lens into the iterated pancake module, and they were all on display at CES 2025. With all the technology it features, the 8K VR Pancake Module is, OPTIX claims, “wider and sharper than Visio Pro”. Now we just have to wait to see it being used in one of the upcoming VR headsets. Pancake is the mainstream optical solution for the current and next-gen VR products. It is lightweight, compact, and has superior image performance compared to any other solutions.