Lumus Maximus

Lumus Maximus
Basic Info
VR/AR	Augmented reality
Developer	Lumus
Manufacturer	Schott (waveguides)
Announcement Date	January 2017 (shown at CES 2017)
Website	https://lumus.com/products#maximus
Display
Display	Liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) microdisplay
Resolution	1440 x 1440 (Maximus OE); 2048 x 2048 (2021-2022 prototypes)
Image
Field of View	50 degrees diagonal, 1:1 aspect ratio
Optics
Optics	Reflective waveguide with two-dimensional pupil expansion; 1.7 mm waveguide thickness
Device
Weight	20 g (optical engine)

Lumus Maximus is a waveguide and optical engine from Lumus. It is a see-through display component for augmented reality glasses and head-mounted displays: a small projector at the side of the frame injects an image into a thin glass waveguide, which expands it and directs it to the eye. Lumus first showed a Maximus prototype at CES 2017, and later prototypes, including one shown at AWE 2022, paired a 50-degree waveguide with a 2048 by 2048 pixel microdisplay. The optical engine Lumus lists on its website has a 50-degree diagonal field of view, a 1440 x 1440 resolution and a 1.7 mm thick waveguide, and the company says it is "currently used in military and medical devices".

There is an evaluation unit. In a May 2021 post about a review by the display analyst Karl Guttag, Lumus referred to "the latest dev kit from Lumus featuring our 2D expansion waveguide, Maximus".

It is a reflective waveguide and it has 2D pupil expansion.

It was codeveloped with Schott. Under the partnership agreement announced in July 2020, Lumus is responsible for the optical design of the waveguides and their commercialization, while Schott manufactures them.

It uses a 2048 by 2048 pixel LCOS microdisplay from Compound Photonics. The LCOS display uses field sequential color (FSC).

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every new claim, spec table value and infobox value against the cited Road to VR, KGOnTech, Lumus, SCHOTT, PR Newswire, VoxelMatters, SPIE and Holochip pages; the older 2024 YouTube citation was not re-watched. About review dates.

History

CES 2017 prototype

Lumus showed the first Maximus at CES 2017 in January 2017, describing it as a new optical engine. Road to VR reported a 55-degree field of view from optics less than 2 mm thick. The unit was mounted in a fixed rig rather than built into a headset, and its microdisplays and electronics sat in a large housing above the lenses. The image Road to VR's Ben Lang saw was 1080p; Lumus's Dr. Eli Glikman said the resolution was limited only by the microdisplay feeding the optics, and that Maximus still needed about a year of research and development before it could be made into a product. Lang found the image sharp and bright, but wrote that contrast "didn't seem great", with bright white areas appearing blown out.

Manufacturing partnership with Schott

On 1 July 2020 the German glass and optics group Schott announced a strategic partnership with Lumus under which Lumus's Lightguide Optical Elements (LOEs), "including the brand-new and pioneering Lumus Maximus", would be manufactured by Schott. Lumus CEO Ari Grobman said in the announcement that the company's "upcoming 'Maximus' 2D waveguide architecture" was ready for the consumer AR market. Schott described a production chain with optical glass melting in Germany, substrate processing in China through a joint venture with Crystal-Optech, and LOE assembly at its component factory in Malaysia.

When the two companies extended the partnership in January 2024, Grobman said it had begun "in early 2019" with the goal of cost-effective, mass-scale manufacturing of the waveguides used in the Maximus architecture.

2K by 2K prototype (2021)

Aviv Frommer, Lumus's executive vice president of research and development, presented Maximus at SPIE's AR/VR/MR 2021 conference in a talk titled "Lumus: Maximus: Large FoV Near to Eye Display for Consumer AR Glasses". In May 2021 Grobman and Frommer showed the prototype to Karl Guttag, who published through-the-lens photographs. The prototype contained only the displays; it had no batteries, processing, cameras or SLAM, and external cables supplied video and power. Its 50-degree diagonal field of view had a square aspect ratio, which Guttag gave as about 36 by 36 degrees. Lumus told him that the 50-degree square format was a starting point and that the waveguide could be scaled to other aspect ratios and fields of view.

Product family and AWE 2022

On 6 April 2022 Lumus announced two further products based on the Maximus architecture, describing the original Maximus 2D expansion waveguide display as "launched just 18 months ago": Maximus 1080P, with a 40-degree field of view, more than 4,000 nits, 1080-pixel resolution, a 16:9 aspect ratio and a 12 x 12 mm eye box, scheduled for the third quarter of 2022; and Maximus 1440²P, with a 50-degree field of view, more than 3,000 nits, 1440 x 1440 resolution, a 1:1 aspect ratio and the same eye box, scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2022. Grobman said at the time that "the 2D Maximus waveguide technology is mature and producible in mass quantities", and the company said it had co-developed manufacturing processes with Quanta Computer and Schott.

In March 2022 Lumus and the 3D-printed lens maker Luxexcel announced a demonstrator that embedded a Maximus waveguide in a 3D-printed prescription lens, to be shown for the first time at SPIE AR VR MR. The companies gave the waveguide's specifications as a 50-degree field of view, 2K x 2K resolution, a 12 x 12 mm eye box and a brightness of more than 4,000 nits/WLED, and said prototype samples would be available in the fourth quarter of 2022.

At AWE 2022 in June, Lumus showed a Maximus glasses prototype with a 2048 x 2048 microdisplay and a 50-degree field of view. Road to VR reported that Lumus said this prototype reached up to 5,000 nits, and that the company expected the first major consumer product using its waveguides in 2024. Road to VR also noted that Lumus had a lower-resolution 1440 x 1440 prototype, which the company linked to battery life and price.

Successor

In January 2023, at CES 2023, Lumus announced Z-Lens, a second-generation 2D reflective waveguide architecture that it said "builds upon" Maximus. Lumus stated that Z-Lens kept the image quality and luminance efficiency of its predecessor while making the optical engine 50% smaller, and Grobman said that the introduction of Maximus "two years ago was just the beginning". In January 2024 Lumus said that Schott was processing waveguides for the Z-Lens architecture. Maximus remains in Lumus's product line: as of September 2026 the company lists the Maximus OE among its products, alongside Z-Lens.

Design

Maximus is a reflective waveguide. Light from a microdisplay is injected into a thin glass plate at an angle that supports total internal reflection, and an array of structures in the glass, which Road to VR described as prism-like, bounces sections of the light out toward the eye. Earlier Lumus waveguides expanded the image in one direction only, which required a larger optical engine. Maximus uses two-dimensional pupil expansion: Guttag describes a first stage that expands the pupil horizontally and a second stage that expands it vertically, so a very small input image fills the whole eye box. Road to VR explained that reflecting the light twice lets the optical engine be much smaller and mounted at the side of the glasses instead of above the lenses, as on the 2017 prototype.

In his description of the 2021 prototype's engine, Guttag wrote that a small set of red, green and blue LEDs on a single circuit board lit the display. A "light pipe integrator" rod mixed the light, a polarizing beam splitter directed it to the field sequential color LCOS panel, a curved mirror collimated the resulting image, and an "injection prism" built into the waveguide coupled the light into the waveguide. He called this an outline of the more obvious structures, noting that Lumus uses other optical techniques as well. He estimated that the Maximus display engine had about a quarter of the volume of the HoloLens 2 engine. The prototype used simpler spherical optics that produced some pincushion distortion; Lumus said the production version would use aspherical optics and that software could already correct the distortion digitally. Like other waveguides, its output was focused at infinity.

The Compound Photonics LCOS panel in the 2021 prototype has 3-micron pixels. Guttag reported that it supports frame rates up to 240 Hz and a field sequence rate of up to 1440 Hz, which reduces the color breakup associated with earlier field sequential LCOS displays such as those in Microsoft HoloLens 1 and Google Glass.

Guttag wrote in 2025 that the Maximus waveguide, like Z-Lens, uses glass with a lower refractive index than typical diffractive waveguides, and that, unlike Z-Lens, it needs an air gap when push-pull or prescription lenses are added. He also wrote that his understanding was that Maximus has better light throughput efficiency than Z-Lens but may cost more to make.

Specifications

The table lists values as each source states them. Brightness figures are manufacturer claims unless noted.

Version	Shown or announced	Field of view	Resolution	Brightness	Source
CES prototype	January 2017	55 degrees	1080p	Not stated
2K x 2K prototype	May 2021	50 degrees diagonal (about 36 x 36 degrees)	2048 x 2048	Over 3,000 nits, with over 4,000 nits expected
Maximus 1080P	April 2022	40 degrees	1080 pixels (16:9)	More than 4,000 nits
Maximus 1440²P	April 2022	50 degrees	1440 x 1440 (1:1)	More than 3,000 nits
AWE 2022 glasses prototype	June 2022	50 degrees	2048 x 2048	Up to 5,000 nits

Lumus publishes the following specifications for the current Maximus OE (optical engine):

Parameter	Value
Field of view (diagonal)	50°
Display resolution	1440 x 1440 pixels
Aspect ratio	1:1
Projector source	LCoS
Color	Full color
Luminance efficiency	>3,000 nits/WLED
Eye box	12 x 12 mm @ 18 mm eye relief
Transmittance	>80%
MTF @ 14.5 cycles/degree	>25% (average of H and V)
Sequential contrast	>250
ANSI contrast average	>40 (3 x 3 checkers)
Ghost image	<1%
Focus to infinity	+/- 0.15D
Waveguide thickness	1.7 mm
Optical engine weight	20 grams
Projector volume	3.6 cc
Operating temperature	0-60 °C
Storage temperature	-40 to +85 °C

Evaluations

Karl Guttag, who examined the 2021 prototype, wrote that its color and brightness uniformity, "while not perfect, is vastly better than any other waveguide-type optics I have seen". Using test patterns photographed through the optics, he found that Maximus could display single-pixel lines at 60 pixels per degree at the center of the image, where the HoloLens 2 was failing at 30 pixels per degree, and he estimated about four times the horizontal and vertical angular resolution of the HoloLens 2. Road to VR, summarizing his findings, described the 60 pixels per degree as "retina" resolution, but noted that color uniformity and brightness still fell off in the corners of the image.

On efficiency, Guttag reported that Lumus expected Maximus to reach 650 nits per lumen, as stated in its AR/VR/MR 2021 presentation. He compared this with the 50 nits per lumen rating of the WaveOptics Oden diffractive waveguide, which has a similar 56-degree field of view, and cautioned that the comparison "may not be a totally fair comparison". He measured the waveguides as about 85% transmissive, reducing light from the real world by about 15%, compared with about 60% blocked by the HoloLens 2. Lumus told him the prototype projected about 5% of its light forward, away from the wearer, and that improved coatings were expected to reduce this to 1%.

Road to VR's Ben Lang, who tried the glasses prototype at AWE 2022, found the image "impressively uniform" in color and clarity, without the faint rainbow haze he associated with HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap, and noted that the glasses did not need tinted lenses to dim incoming light. In its 2021 report, Road to VR also noted Guttag's point that it had yet to be proven whether Lumus's manufacturing method was scalable.

Applications

Lumus states that the Maximus OE is used in military and medical devices. In March 2025 Lumus announced that Holochip had selected Maximus optical engines for the H50, a goggle-style AR device funded by the U.S. Navy for equipment maintenance. The announcement gave a 1440 x 1440 resolution, a field of view of 35 x 35 degrees and a battery life of more than six hours, and said the device was expected to be available by the end of 2025. As of September 2026, Holochip's product page lists the H50 as being in the research and development stage and "not available for sale or commercial use"; it names Lumus Maximus as the display and gives a weight of 220 grams and a 50-degree diagonal field of view.

In May 2025 Guttag reported that one image on the website of Rivet, a defense and industrial AR start-up, showed horizontal expansion facets "indicative of a Lumus Maximus waveguide", while other images showed Z-Lens waveguides. Rivet did not confirm its supplier, and Guttag wrote that he did not know whether Rivet planned to use Maximus, Z-Lens or both.

See also

• Lumus
• Reflective waveguide
• Diffractive waveguide
• Waveguide display
• Optical combiner
• Optical see-through display