Augmented and virtual reality have long promised immersive digital experiences, but their journey from spectacle to everyday utility has been slower than expected. While advances in graphics, GPUs, and rendering engines have pushed visual realism forward, the real barriers now lie deeper—inside the wireless links, materials, packaging, and system architectures that must quietly work in unison to make AR and VR practical, portable, and reliable.
In an exclusive interaction with ELE Times, Vijay Muktamath, CEO & Founder of Sensesemi Technologies, offers a grounded view of what truly limits AR and VR today—and what will ultimately enable their mainstream adoption. His insights come at a time when Sensesemi has raised ₹250 million in seed funding, aimed at accelerating the development of integrated edge-AI chips for industrial, automotive, and medical applications.
Why AR and VR Still Feel Heavy?
One of the most visible challenges of current AR and VR systems is their bulk. Headsets remain tethered, power-hungry, and constrained—symptoms of a deeper issue rather than mere design immaturity.
According to Muktamath, the root of the problem lies in data movement. “AR and VR demand extremely high data rates,” he explains. “Millimeter-wave technologies in the gigahertz range work well for browsing or radar applications, but once you move into 4K and 8K immersive content, the bandwidth requirement pushes you into terahertz.”
Terahertz frequencies offer vast bandwidth over short distances, making them uniquely suited for point-to-point communication, including intra-device and inter-chip data transfer. This becomes critical as conventional PCB traces introduce losses that are increasingly difficult to manage at higher frequencies.
In other words, as visuals improve, connectivity—not compute—becomes the bottleneck.
Terahertz Is Powerful—but Unforgiving
Yet terahertz is far from a silver bullet. While it unlocks unprecedented data rates, it also introduces a new class of engineering challenges. “Power, noise, packaging—these are all issues,” Muktamath says. “But the real bottleneck is system-level integration.”
Terahertz systems demand precise alignment, tight thermal control, stable clock distribution, and, most critically, spatial coherence. Even minor deviations can degrade RF performance. Testing compounds the problem: lab setups for terahertz systems are bulky, complex, and expensive, making cost control a serious concern for commercial deployment. “Eventually, all of this reflects in the economics,” he adds. “And economics decides whether a technology scales.”
Where CMOS Quietly Takes Over
If terahertz dominates the conversation around connectivity, CMOS quietly anchors the compute backbone of AR and VR systems. “Once the RF signal is converted to digital, that’s where CMOS shines,” Muktamath explains. “Real-time processing, control, power efficiency—this is where CMOS is extremely mature.”
This is also where Sensesemi positions itself. The company focuses on integrated compute and control architectures, enabling on-device processing while supporting lower-bandwidth wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and BLE for system control and coordination. However, AR and VR systems are not monolithic. “The future architecture will be heterogeneous,” he says. “Terahertz front ends may use silicon-germanium, while compute runs on CMOS. The challenge is integrating these into a single, compact, reliable system.”
Packaging: The Hidden Constraint
That integration challenge places advanced packaging at the center of AR and VR’s evolution. “At terahertz frequencies, even tiny interconnects inside substrates matter,” Muktamath notes. “When you integrate different materials, interfaces and bonding become critical.”
Multi-chip modules, 3D heterogeneous integration, and new interface technologies will determine how efficiently data moves across the system. For AR and VR, where space is at a premium and performance margins are tight, packaging is no longer a back-end consideration—it is a design driver. “This is where the next wave of innovation will come from,” he adds.
Like most deep technologies, AR and VR face a familiar adoption dilemma: performance versus cost. “Today, the world is cost-sensitive,” Muktamath says. “But over time, users start valuing reliability, security, and performance over cheaper alternatives.” He believes AR and VR will reach a similar inflection point—where the value delivered outweighs the premium—much like smartphones and AI systems did in their early days.
Healthcare: Where AR and VR Become Indispensable
While consumer adoption may take longer, Muktamath sees healthcare as the sector where AR and VR will first become indispensable. “In medical robotics and assisted surgeries, AR and VR can overlay real-time insights directly into a surgeon’s field of view,” he explains. “Even if devices are bulky initially, the value they offer is immediate.”
By reducing cognitive load and improving precision, AR and VR can transform how complex procedures are performed—accelerating both adoption and technological refinement.
India’s Moment—If It Thinks Long-Term
On India’s role in this evolving landscape, Muktamath strikes a cautiously optimistic tone. “India started late in deep-tech R&D, but we have started,” he says. “What we need now is patience—capital, policy, and vision that spans decades, not quarters.”
He emphasizes that India’s talent pool is strong, but better alignment is needed between academia, industry, and government to move from research to productization. “Innovation doesn’t end with a paper,” he adds. “It ends with a product that the world uses.”
From Science Fiction to System Engineering
As the conversation draws to a close, Muktamath reflects on how quickly perception can change.
“AR and VR may feel like science fiction today,” he says. “But in the next three to four years, they will be very real.” What will decide that future is not just better visuals or faster processors, but the invisible technologies—terahertz links, CMOS compute, advanced packaging, and system-level coherence—that quietly work together behind the scenes.
