Pacific Northwest Chapter
From Environment to Bits: What Do AR Systems Need to Know About the Environment to Ensure High-Quality Display Experience? Takahiro Doi Research Scientist, Meta Wednesday, Sep 23rd 2026 6:00 - 7:00PM PDT
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Unlike a phone or laptop screen, an augmented-reality display is additive: virtual content is composited onto whatever the wearer happens to be looking at. Visibility therefore depends not only on the ambient light level but on the luminance, structure, and depth of the see-through background directly behind the content. This talk asks what an AR system needs to sense about the real world to keep the display experience high quality, and how that sensing should drive auto-brightness. Using egocentric video from Meta's Project Aria, recorded during thousands of hours of everyday activity, we will show how luminance from the wearer's own viewpoint is distributed indoors and outdoors, how quickly it changes during ordinary behavior, and how well a wide-field ambient light sensor predicts the luminance actually behind a small display. We will close with the open questions, including how head-locked and world-locked content place different demands on sensing.
Speaker Bio
Takahiro Doi is a Research Scientist in the Display Image Quality Team at Meta Reality Labs in Redmond, Washington. He received his PhD from Osaka University in human vision and systems neuroscience in 2009 and joined Meta in 2022, where he has been working on perception-based specifications for AR display systems hardware and software, including auto-brightness, binocular tolerance, and see-through image quality.
Month
Date
Company
Speaker
topic
location
state
Jan
15-Jan
MIT Labs
Akshat Dave
Superhuman 3D Vision by jointly designing Cameras, Graphics, and AI
Microsoft
WA
Feb
-
Mar
19-Mar
Meta
Nihar Mohanty
The evolution of display materials and processes for full augmented reality
UW campus
Apr
May
12-17-Jun
SID – Display Week
June
04-Jun
Consultant
Adi Abileah
Highlights of Display Week 2025
Microsoft & online
July
09-Jul
Highlights of Display Week 2025 (Part #2)
Aug.
Sep
10-Sep
Pohang Univ. of Science & Tech. Korea,
Prof. Junsuk Rho
Optical metasurfaces for imaging, sensing and display
Oct
8-Oct
Jim Zhuang
AR/VR displays
planned
Nov
TBD
Portrait Displays
Catherine Meninger
Display color calibration
Dec
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Officers
Adi Abileah, consultant, retired from Planar Systems, where he served as chief scientist for 14 years. His main activity is related to development of AMLCD, physics and optics of displays of several technologies. Adi has BSc in physics from the Technion, and MSc in plasma physics from the Hebrew Univ. He developed soil density detectors at the Negev Institute. Developed high power CO2 lasers in the Hebrew Univ. His first work in the Industry at Elscint was development of Gamma Camera. He was head of optics group at Elbit for 5 years. He managed the El-Op branch (R&D) in Haifa. Since 1987 he managed the optics engineering at OIS, MI, development of AMLCD, until 1988, when he joined Planar. Adi has 46 US patents, and many papers and seminars in display technologies, as well as other topics. He is a Fellow of SID and got the Schade award. He was the director of the SID Pacific Northwest chapter (2010-17). In the last four years he was the Regional VP for Pacific and South Americas.
LinkedIn profile
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Jignesh Gandhi
Abhijit Sarkar
2001
Dean Wilkinson
Tom Curran
2002
Chris Curtin
2003
2004
Joe Hallett
2005
2006
2007
Koji Yugawa
Pat Green
2008
2009
Brian Schowengerdt
2010
2011
Peggy Lopez
2012
2013
2014
Allen Gard
2015
2016
Allen Gard / Samantha Phenix
2017
Samantha Phenix
Jacob Choi
2018
Gary Johnson
Tim Large
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
Rashmi Rao
Tim Larger
2024
Arka Mejumdar
Abhijit Sarkar & Arka Mejumdar
2025
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