XR via Sexy Sunglasses, with Vuzix’ Paul Travers

XR for Business

English - October 28, 2019 10:04 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Paul Travers has been in the XR
business long enough to remember the early headsets, which were not
exactly elegant in design – he describes one of his early models as a
football helmet. But today, Vuzix has managed to shrink a ton of XR
potential into sleek, sexy sunglasses that would look good on any
goth noir vampire slayer. He chats with Alan about the advantages of
svelte headsets, from military applications to making driving safer.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Paul
Travers. Paul is the founder of Vuzix and has served as the president
and chief executive officer since 1997. Prior to the formation of
Vuzix, Mr. Travers founded both e-Tek Labs and Forte Technologies
Inc. He has been a driving force towards the development of products
in the consumer market. With more than 25 years experience in
consumer electronics field and 15 years experience in virtual reality
and virtual display fields, he is a nationally recognized industry
expert. He’s joined by Vuzix’s head of business development, Matt
Margolis. If you want to learn more about the Vuzix platform and
their headsets, you can visit vuzix.com.
Paul and Matt, welcome to the show, guys.

Paul: Hey, Alan. Thanks for
having us.

Alan: It’s my absolute honor.
You guys are making augmented reality headsets that people actually
will want to wear. And I think it’s amazing, your Blade glasses look
like a pair of awesome sunglasses. They’re lightweight. They’re
wireless. They’re every– they’re all the things. How long has it
taken you guys to get there? I mean, you started in 1997. You must
have gone through massive iterations along the way.

Paul: Yeah, Alan. I mean, we’ve
made all the big stuff, the crazy things. They really started in ’93
or ’94 when we started shipping our very first VR headset, the VFX-1.
And if you look it up, you’ll see VFX-1, it’s a football helmet sized
gizmo. And then in ’97, actually I bought out all the outside
shareholders and started Vuzix. A little bit of history there, we
started in the defense space. We were making thermal weapons sight
engines that go in the back of the light/medium/heavy thermal weapons
type programs for DRS and Raytheon. And doing that, we got an
opportunity to work with the special forces guys. And if you think
about it, these guys are carrying around 300 pounds of gear. They got
their laptop. They’re basically the ultimate mobile wearable tech
guy. And at night, they would light up like a Christmas tree. So they
put a poncho over their head. They had all this gear on and they came
to Vuzix and said, look, could you guys make a pair of Oakley style
sunglasses? They called it the Oakley Gate. And they said, if we
could do that, half the military would buy these things. And so even
all the way back then — it was ’97 to 2000 — these Special Forces
guys wanted cool. They wanted lightweight. They wanted it truly
functional. And so over the years, we’ve come out with a lot of
different devices and each iteration we’ve been pushing on, making
them smaller and lighter. We were talking a little bit earlier about
the top-down versus bottom-up approach. I mean, there’s some really
cool technology that’s out there that’s doing all spatial computing
and the likes, but it’s big. And for Vuzix, we’re taking the
lightweight, trim, wearable all day side of it, but highly
functional. When you’re looking for streaming video applications
where you’re doing see-what-I-see for maintenance, repair, and
overhaul, or you’re in a warehouse all day long taking stuff out of
that warehouse. You don’t want a great big, heavy thing. You want a
supe

Paul: Hey, Alan. Thanks for
having us.

Alan: I can totally relate
there. The Hololens, while a wonderful device, man, it’s so front
heavy and they fixed a little bit on the 2, but these are things
that– it’s not acceptable to wear something that heavy on your face
for work. It’s just not acceptable and it’s gonna cause problems. So
by taking the weight off and creating a device that frankly is sexy.
I mean, people want to wear these glasses. They’re awesome.

Paul: Thanks, Alan. I appreciate
that. And it’s the keys to success, I think it. If you put it on, in
a half an hour you want to take it off, that’s a fail. And most
companies will never deploy that. There’s a lot of companies doing
experiments, but the ones that are finally getting to deploy are the
guys that literally can give it to their employees and they’ll use it
all day. And if they do use it, they get an ROI that can be
significant by doing it. And that doesn’t need full up spatial
computing in many, many cases. You can do a lot.

Alan: Most to them.

Paul: Yeah, most of them don’t.
I mean, we’re talking, you’ve got a person. They’re using a tablet or
a phone, but they’re mobile workers. They have to use their hands.
That’s the spot where Vuzix is at. We are working to help those
mobile workers, getting them in a position to where they got access
to the information, but they don’t have to hold a tablet in their
hand to get it. And that’s the areas where Vuzix is seeing success
and starting to see some pretty significant rollouts. And 2020 is
gonna be amazing. And I think you’ll see even through the rest of
2019, there’s a bunch of really cool deployments that are starting to
happen around these kinds of lightweight wearable computing devices.

Alan: So you you said that
2wenty years ago, the military is like, if you make an Oakley pair of
sunglasses, we’ll buy them all. Fast forward 20 years and is the
military one of your biggest customers?

Paul: They haven’t been,
actually, because — believe it or not — around eight or seven years
ago, something like that, we sold our defense division. We haven’t
really been in the defense space. However, the partners that we sold
it to, we renegotiated their relationship a little bit. We had– we
gave them an exclusive, they’re now partnering with us beyond that
exclusive. And so in the last eight or nine months, the defense side
of our business, they’ve been actually now coming to Vuzix in a big
way. There’s a couple of things that Vuzix brings to the table. First
of all, in first responder marketplace, our current products are
really starting to open up some cool doors. First responders,
security markets and the like. And we can share a bit more about that
in a bit, but–

Alan: Let’s unpack that for a
second, because one of the things you have on the front page, you
upset is Vuzix smartglasses get automatic facial recognition designed
for law enforcement.

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: That’s awesome. I want
police to be able to look at somebody and detect whether they’re a
threat or not. That’s a no-brainer.

Paul: It is. And I know that it
can be a controversial topic. But if you look at the cross section of
America today and look at some of these large venues where somebody
shows up sporting some weapons that are designed really for– I
wouldn’t say weapons of mass destruction, but, you know, when you–

Alan: Not nice things.

Paul: Yeah, many, many rounds in
a minute. You’d like to think that those kinds of folks, there’s some
weapons that you can use against them. And for security folks in
large venues where maybe there’s 20,000 people showing up for the
concert. They give these security guys a book of pictures and say,
“Remember these folks.” And they’re the ones we don’t want
getting through the gate. And it’s like, really? So what they’re
doing now is they’re using glasses, like Vuzix’s glasses with the
cameras built in, and/or we have company partners like Sword, who
have a separate sensor head, effectively, that works with an iPhone
and that transmits the feeds to the glasses. And now you have an AI
engine that can help you pick out these people of interest in the
crowd. It’s not about recording folks who might be coming in the
front gate. It’s about simply helping these guys that are trying to
do a good job of preventing the bad guys from getting into these
venues. And it’s a great example. We have guys that are doing it with
servers that you– wearable computing server that goes on your belt,
that averages upwards of a million faces in the database and running
in real time frame rates. You know, there’s upwards of 15 pictures in
a frame of video. It will, within a second, determine if one of those
people is in the database. So it’s pretty good there. And then
there’s other folks.

Alan: And if you unpack that
just a little bit further, this kind of eliminates personal biases as
well. You’re using AI to identify potential threats. You’re not using
AI to say, “OK, you look like you’re from Iran. So I should pull
you over.” Like, this is actually a much better tool than just
giving some photos to some people and saying, here, pick these ones
out of a haystack.

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: It’s crazy.

Paul: You’re absolutely right.
And I don’t want this to come across the wrong way, but to some
people, some people all look the same.

Alan: It’s true. Listen, you get
20,000 people, they all look the same. They look like a bunch of
faces.

Paul: Yeah, they do.

Alan: So, being able to laser
target people of interest, I think, is big. Let’s move on from–
unless there’s anything else you want to talk about with first
responders, because I think there’s also some stuff in the medical.
Like the first responders from the medical standpoint.

Paul: Well, that’s where I was
going to actually continue the conversation. So this whole idea of
you’re in an emergency truck and this particular person has a problem
you don’t know how to deal with. They’re starting to use our glasses
to stream real-time to a doctor. And the doctor can help before the
ambulance trucks even gets there with certain treatments. So that–
and time counts in these situations when it comes to saving lives, as
you can imagine. We’re also doing that same thing with companies like
1Minuut where they’re doing remote telemedicine, where you’ve got a
person who has a basic degree to treat people and to nurse people,
but they don’t have enough to be able to know whether or not that
person should be visiting the hospital. So they’re remotely in the
field. And then a doctor will call in and diagnose and say, look,
give him a aspirin, we’ll see him in the morning or get him in an
ambulance, this is actually the critical thing. So remote medicine,
from that perspective and from training, you have a doctor who’s
doing an operation and there’s 15 people seeing through his eyes as
you’re streaming HD video out of the glasses while he’s looking at
the operation in real time. So there’s many, many applications for
medical space that are starting to be used around our glasses.

Alan: Medical seems to be that
sweet spot, that XR in general — virtual/augmented reality, mixed
reality — seems to be a really good use case. And it’s unlocking
huge potential to save lives, and that’s really, really important.

Paul: Yeah. It’s wonderful.

Alan: So what are some other use
cases of these glasses? So let’s just talk about the different types
of glasses that you have first, because I know you’ve got the Vuzix
Blade, which are these sexy Oakley like looking glasses. Then you’ve
got your more industrial use cases for the M400 glasses. What are the
differentiators between the different glasses, and what are the use
cases that you’re seeing in the field?

Paul: So we all the way back to
when the Special Forces guys asked if we could make Oakley style
sunglasses, Vuzix has been working on the optics and the display
engine technology to get to that point to where these things can look
like Oakley style sunglasses. And I have to say, what we’re doing
today is pretty darn awesome for sure. But we’ve got Next Generation
Tech — which we can, again, talk about in a minute here — but it’s
going to take yet again another step towards cutting the frame sizes
down, the look and feel of these getting even sexier. But that has
our WaveGuide tech in it. And it does have this sort of cool look and
feel. And the optics are different than the M Series enterprise
products that we make, in that they’re optically see-through. So when
you put the Blade on, it’s like wearing a regular pair sunglasses.
But floating out in front of you, just like the HUD on a car or a
fighter pilot’s cockpit, images just float out in space. And so
they’re real trim looking glasses, Android, everything built into
them, but they’re optically see-through. Now, on the enterprise side
today, the M Series products, we started with the M100, moved to the
M300, which was Intel based, and just recently announced the M400,
which is Qualcomm’s XR1 series Silicon Inside. And it uses an
occluded display. Now, this is like looking through a camcorder. The
thing that is really nice about the M400 is, you’re looking through
this thing and the image quality is pitch black. The contrast ratio,
I think is 10,000 to 1 because it has an OLED display.

Alan: Wow.

Paul: Yeah, it’s really
beautiful. And the camera that looks out the front is a– Matt, is it
12 megapixel camera?

Matt: 13.

Paul: 13 megapixel camera, image
stabilized, auto focus. It’s just beautiful. Also, when you put these
two things together, working in concert with this XR1 processor, you
can do some amazing stuff. Streaming video today on the M300 series
— not that I’m throwing it under the bus — but it works really hard
to do even a wide VGA stream at 20 or 30 frames a second. The M400,
it can do 720p 30 frames a second. Snap, snap, snap. It’s like it’s
just beautiful. And it records for a video at the same time. So it’s
like having a digital camcorder with 4K recording capabilities. I
mean, this thing is a racehorse.

Alan: So, OK, so let’s just stop
there for one second. So the M400s have 4K camera front. They have a
720 display inside. So why would you want that? Then I actually
interviewed the team at PTC today, which kind of goes really
hand-in-hand with this, because one of their killer applications is
their Vuforia Chalk system where you can kind of have an expert —
like you said, maybe a doctor or a team of doctors — looking over
your shoulder– well, not really over your shoulder, but they’re
literally looking through your eyes because they’re able to use that
4K camera to project back and give information real-time as needed to
the person in the field. And I think this is a use case that’s going
to unlock a huge amount of value for enterprise clients, because if
you’re in a factory and that machine, whatever it is you happen to be
working on, it goes down, downtime can be anywhere from a thousand
dollars to millions of dollars an hour. And being able to pull an
expert up and have somebody that’s already there on the field not
having to fly somebody in, this is huge. And your glasses enable
that.

Paul: They do. And they do an
amazing job. I would suggest they’re probably the most state of the
art pair of glasses on the street today that can do this, because the
XR1, the processing, the graphics processing capabilities, everything
built in there and that beautiful camera that we have. It just– it’s
really hard to compete with this one. And there’s probably 10
companies that do remote support software using our glasses. Vuzix
has its own sort of modest one called Vuzix Remote Assist.

Alan: OK.

Paul: Then there are guys like
PTC that actually can do the rendering on top of the camera image, to
give you a augmented image that does this Chalk thing where you
actually circle stuff and the likes and it stays locked there. And in
fact, the Vuforia side of the stuff from PTC, you can look at an
engine and have the oil filter highlighted telling you that that’s
got to come off first. It can put torque specs on the engine and they
can be all locked to it in real-time, so you can do the remote
assist, but you can also do call avoidance with stuff like that,
where you have the glasses on and you’re working it through on your
own on this piece of equipment.

Alan: Oh, that’s right. Because,
you know, and once you have somebody do an assist for one, because
it’s recording everything.

Paul: Yes.

Alan: So you can use that assist
as the general assist for anybody that does that. So before they even
call somebody, they can help. Oh, wow.

Paul: Yeah. And there’s a lot of
companies that their first– they have a lot of equipment in the
field, right? And they don’t want to have a 500 tech support guys,
all waiting for a phone call. They want people to be able to do it
first, so they like the call avoidance side of it. But to your point,
think about you’re on an oil rig and on the oil rig, the equipment
goes down. That tech can’t just willy-nilly make a fix, right?
Because if he does it wrong, the rig could blow up and you end up
with another Gulf of Mexico mess on your hands. And so there’s all
kinds of protocols that go into the fix that gets done. Normally,
what would happen was a $50,000 custom jet helicopter ride out to get
the thing fixed in the middle of the Gulf. Then two or three days
later, it’s finally back up and running and it’s millions of dollars
a day versus being able to do this remote assist call and do the
instructions on the fly. You can do it in literally hours in a
comparison. So remote assist is going to be a very big piece of
business. And it’s anywhere’s from case equipment, big tractors in
the field, to companies that are looking at bundling our glasses with
their equipment, so that there’s a way to get tech support without
having to put somebody on an airplane.

Alan: It’s interesting you say
that, I’m speaking at a printing conference this week and my original
presentation was talking about bringing print to life with AR and
that sort of thing. And as I started to think about it, I was like,
these are people that are making printers, big format printers and
stuff. They’re not really all that concerned about bringing print to
life. They want to make sure that their machines can be fixed fast.
And printing is one of those, if anybody’s ever had a unjam, a
printer, a complicated printer, it’s a pain in the ass. This is a
tool that can give those manufacturers an upper hand in keeping those
machines up and running faster.

Paul: Yes, no doubt about it.
That’s the remote support side of this. And you can imagine market
after market after market where these kinds of things are. The ROI is
measured in one use. It’s paid for itself.

Alan: Yeah. Or ten times over. I
mean, the cost of the glasses is– the M400 is $1,500. That’s like a
second of downtime in an oil rig.

Paul: Right, right. And I think
one of the things you should notice here, through many of these
descriptions — again, I’m not trying to throw the competition under
the bus here — but full up spatial computing just is not required.
That’s why we prefer this, the ground up approach where we’re putting
the right technology in to deliver an experience that’s required to
solve problems today first. Ultimately, we’re convinced this tech is
going to shrink. It’s going to come down. It’s going to end up being
like the Kingsman style glasses. [chuckles] But the technology,
there’s work that needs to get done before you can do that in a form
factor that gives you everything that you want, plus has that sci-fi
look and feel.

Alan: I have a really great pair
of North glasses.

Paul: That’s a step in the right
direction in some way.

Alan: A step in the right
direction. But the field of view is so small, it’s actually not that
useful.

Paul: And it has a pupil that’s
so tiny that if your eyeball gets moved off the glasses in any
direction, you lose the image and–

Alan: I had to go and get them
refitted the other day, because they get them and you start showing
people, and people got big fat heads and stuff, and all of a sudden I
put them on, I can’t see anything anymore. There’s a very, very small
sweet spot where your eye has to be perfectly aligned with the image.
I mean, that’s not useful for enterprise, at all.

Paul: There’s mix. There’s a
nice mix between field of view. The one size fits all side of it. And
the technology that does full up spatial computing, which is big,
bulky, all in thing. So there’s the right spot to be where it’s
highly functional, but it’s also highly wearable. And that’s where
Vuzix is pushing to be.

Alan: Right in the middle. And
that’s the sweet spot.

Paul: Yes.

Alan: So let’s talk about the
Blade then. Because those things are– what is the difference? So the
Blade, you’re kind of able to see right through?

Paul: Yes. Well, so– if you
wouldn’t mind it, let me take a step back to the M400.

Alan: Sure. Please do.

Paul: We talked about a few
applications there, like the remote assist, the remote support in the
whole world of logistics there’s big opportunities coming here also.
The world of brick and mortar is– every other time you turn around,
another Sears is going out of business. And it’s because of companies
like Amazon that are out there, and everybody’s buying online and
using FedEx as the logistics partner. But there’s a lot of brick and
mortars, if you think about it. And North America alone have
thousands and thousands of stores that effectively are an amazing
distribution channel already. And devices like these glasses can
enable employees in those stores to become pickers. So guys like some
of these big retailers are getting themselves in a position to where
they can compete with the online guys because they have distribution
already in hand. They just need to turn their stores into picking
warehouses.

Alan: Wow. That’s an amazing use
case.

Paul: You are going to see a lot
of it coming up. See, these companies aren’t all rolling over to
Amazon, frankly.

Alan: No, of course not.

Paul: And that’s again, you can
use a form factor– and in fact, in some cases, they want kind of
this technology looking form factor, so that when people come in the
stores and see people picking, they want them to be perceived as an
advanced sort of forward looking companies and those kinds of things.
So the M Series products has a bunch of things in enterprise that
range from warehouse picking, work instructions, remote support,
right on through to people even turning around aircraft at the
airport. There’s many, many applications that are coming, pretty
exciting. And with the Blade — nice roll into that here — it has
this look and feel that’s starting to be a normal looking sunglass
style design. And it delivers an experience much like the original
videos that Google came out with for Google Glass. It’s got this nice
field of view out in front of you. You’re in the library, it’s
telling you where your friend might be in the library. Instructions
walking down the street. All of those kinds of things, but not in
this little tiny field of view that’s up in your right hand corner of
the glasses. It’s right out in front of you, very comfortable. You
turn the glasses off, it’s absolutely clear to look through. You turn
it on, you get these beautiful imagery that’s out there. And it’s
done because Vuzix has Waveguide technology that we’ve been working
on now for years.

Alan: All right. I’ve read a lot
about Waveguide, I still don’t really understand it. Can you walk us
through the basics of Waveguide?

Paul: Yes. So this is how it
works. You’d have a lens, it’s flat. But it looks a lot like the
outline of a regular pair of glasses lenses. And what we do, is we
put a little hologram that’s really a surface relief grading hologram
to kind of equate to the same thing in some ways. But bottom line is,
it’s these little 150 nanometre deep, 300 nanometre pitch scratches
on the surface of the glass. It’s a little tiny round circular dot,
maybe two or three millimeters in diameter. And we project the light
from a display projector, just like the projector, the front
projector that you use in your living room to watch movies. But it’s
tiny, custom built by Vuzix. And if you were to point that thing at
the wall, you’d see an image up on the wall. Well, we inject that
into that little two to three millimeter circle. And when it hits the
circle, it bends into the glass itself. So now you’ve got a one
millimeter thick piece of glass that the light is bouncing away from
your eye towards your eye and propagating towards the bridge of your
nose. So it’s in your temple, bouncing around back and forth. And at
some point in time, it hits another set of gradings in front of your
eye that allows the light to leak out and project this image out in
space. So there’s a really thin piece of glass. You’ve injected this
image into it. And instead of projecting out onto the wall, you
projected out in front of you through this Waveguide. And because of
the way our input and output pupils work on this, you can put your
eye anywhere in the output set of gradings, and see this image.

Unlike North, where they are a little
tiny pupil, this thing’s got as big as we want to make it. It can be
an inch by an inch. It can be the whole glass. And anywhere you look
through it, you see this image out in space in front of you. So
they’re very, very forgiving. And the field of view is defined by the
projection engine that injects the light into it. And a bunch of
other things, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say that’s it. So
with that, you can get small displays, thin optics and put them in
form factors that start to look like regular glasses and that give
you a much, much forgiving display systems. So you want one size fits
all, you put them on, and the image is just beautifully out there. So
we put that in the Blade on our first version. We have another
version of the Blade that’s coming, Blade 2, which has got even
sexier front end on it. And then if you project down the road a
little ways, we’re developing some display engines that will be a
third of the size of our current display engines and they will be a
fraction of the power. We’re talking like two watts versus two
hundred milliwatts for a fully lit up engine. So, significant
reduction in power. Huge drop in sizes and nothing but sexier and
more sexy over time here.

Now, the Blade itself, because it’s got
this really cool form factor, it’s opening up opportunities from
enterprise to prosumer that just haven’t been there before because
it’s finally a pair of glasses that people would actually wear. And
we talked early on about the security marketplace. Security is one of
them. I mean, you know, wearing a Hololens as a security officer–

Alan: [laughs] You’d look like
an idiot.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right. You
won’t be taken seriously with that.

Alan: But the question really
comes down to when are you getting Wesley Snipes to be your
spokesperson?

Paul: It’s so funny you say
that. We were at CES last year, and the guys– I don’t know where
they were, but they happened to run into him when he was there,
right? When they were out there at the show and they showed him the
glasses because they’re the Blade, right?

Matt: [laughs]

Paul: And he just loved them.
And we got a couple of pictures with him wearing them.

Alan: Oh, that’s so cool.

Paul: But he won’t let us. He’s
like, “Well, you really probably shouldn’t.” because he
didn’t really own that trade name, right? So.

Alan: Yeah.

Paul: But yeah, no, he’d be a
great spokesman for it. And they’d look good on him at the same time,
so.

Alan: That’s awesome. Yeah, I
figured you’d be like, that is literally his MO is those glasses and
like they’re perfect.

Paul: They are, actually.

[laughs]

We’re almost made after him, frankly.

Alan: And I love that the
passion of your team to track him down and get him to try them on.
That’s awesome.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. They’re– my
guys are proud of what we’re doing here. We’ve been at it for a long
time. Most of the folks here have been with me through it all.
Although I will admit we’ve gone from 20 employees to 80 in the last
three or four years.

Alan: Wow.

Paul: But, you know, everybody’s
a shareholder here and they’re all very proud of the fact that we’re
doing this really cool stuff. And quite frankly, competing with some
of the biggest names out there today.

Alan: Agreed. Yeah. But I mean,
the work you guys are doing is pioneering, not only the technology
side, but the adoption side. You know, I keep saying it’s not a
technology problem anymore. We got the technology. It’s an adoption
problem. We’ve got to get people to buy these things and use them in
there. And I think it starts with enterprise, obviously.

Paul: Yeah, we’re with you. I
mean, even the Blade right now, at 1,000 bucks a piece is– they’re
not really inexpensive, so. And it’s mostly enterprises that are
using them. But I have to admit, I love to fly drones now and it’s
because of my Blade.

Alan: Oh, so cool.

Paul: It is really cool because
you can look through the glasses, see the drone flying out in front
of you. And at the same time, get the video feed through the glasses.

Alan: Oh my god, that’s so cool.

Paul: Yeah. And it’s with a
single connection to the controller. Or you can run it wi-fi,
wireless to the glasses. And so it’s really a cool way to fly a
drone.

Alan: Oh man. This is so cool.
I’ve actually tried the DJI drone pilot goggles, whatever, the VR
ones. Oh my god, they’re so nauseating. [chuckles]

Paul: Yes. I think most–

Alan: It takes a special person
to get inside that thing.

Paul: A lot of those were
designed for the racer guys, you know.

Alan: Yeah. OK. So one of the
backbones of any hardware product is software. And without a solid
software operating system, you really have nothing. And I know you
guys have been working hard on your operating systems. You wanna talk
to to us about the Vuzix BladeOS?

Paul: Sure. I mean, we have done
a lot. First of all, it’s based on standard Android. And the cool
thing about the M400 is, it’s the latest version of Android and I
think you’ll see all the way out to 10 supported. But yeah, we built
our own launcher and a lot of custom UI based interfaces. We have a
ton of software on our developer site, on our website. We have Tier 1
and Tier 2 support for people who are writing applications for the
Blade and/or the M400, quite frankly. And so there’s all these
applications out there, etc. And by the way, on that front, since
we’re here, we do have a developer contest with upwards of $110,000
worth of prizes. I think November the 4th is when it ends ,and it’s
around the Blade. There’s — gosh — a pile of people that have
signed up to develop software for it. Anybody who wants to do that,
if they put in an application that works with the glasses, there’s
kind of some minimum standard there, you can’t just see “Hello
world” on the thing. But they’ll win a free Blade, also. And so
it’s a great opportunity to get in the game, to learn about it, and
to have your expenses covered for the cost of the hardware and stuff.
If you put the app in, so.

Alan: Incredible.

Paul: On that software front, if
you go to our developer site, you’ll see there’s a graphical styles,
recommended styles, much like an iPhone and an Android have certain
ways icons should look and et cetera. All that stuff is out there.
There’s even shortly there’s gonna be ONVIF security camera driver
support examples out there. There’s all kinds of demos and examples
of streaming video for security applications and the likes, basically
to get started. There’s a ton of stuff out there and the OS itself
has been completely reworked to run in our form factors at the same
tim, with APIs for voice input and the likes, APIs for barcode
scanning, QR code scanning and the likes also available.

Alan: You can read barcode
scanning as well?

Paul: Yeah, we have. We work
with a bunch of companies that actually have barcode scanning
software that they’ve written, that they’re just selling them as
tools. And we also work with like zebra crossing and the like. And
the drivers are built in with a common set of API calls. So if you’re
using QR code scanning or barcode scanning for either just simple
log-in kinds of things, right on through to a barcode scanning in a
warehouse, there are tools available to just make function calls to
our glasses to do that. Even when you pair it to your phone on the
Blade, let’s say. So the Blade’s got a full ecosystem, that’s been
written for it. There’s a companion app that runs on your phone. When
you pair the two, you literally put the companion app on your phone.
It practically comes up in pairing mode and it puts a QR code on the
phone itself. And you look at it with the glasses turned on, with the
camera running and boom, it does the pairing automatically. So it’s
really simple to connect it to your phone, and it will run with
Android and/or iOS phones. There’s a companion out for both. And that
companion app allows you to easily push notifications and stuff from
your phone from any application that might receive notifications to
the glasses. So if you’re walking down the street and a text message
comes in, the glasses wake up and the text message comes up on the
glasses, just like it might on a smartwatch. Or turn-by-turn
instructions can come up and do the same thing in the glasses. You
can also turn those alerts on and off, as you run the companion app
you can select what you want messaging from, so you’re not swamped.
Because some people have messaging from Linked-In, messaging from
Twitter. Yeah, it can be overwhelming. Bling bling, bling bling,
bling bling. [laughs]

Alan: Actually, one at one of
the things that I thought was really an interesting feature that
North Glasses just pushed out, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago was
basically they turn off notifications when they detect that you’re
having a conversation with somebody. And I thought that was really
interesting because the last thing you want is to distract when
you’re actually having a physical one-to-one conversation with
somebody. Have you ever be in a meeting, and people are checking
their phones. But even worse is the watch, people will be checking
their smartwatch while talking to you. And you’re talking to someone,
all of a sudden you ask them a question and they’re not there
anymore, they’ve kind of drifted off to check their messages on their
watch. And glasses are going to get even worse, so I think having
that functionality of knowing when you’re having a conversation with
somebody to focus on the people in front of you. I think that’s
great.

Paul: I rather like that, too.
And you can tell, people wearing our glasses, they get into the
glasses. And although I will say walking in New York City and the
like with your face buried in your phone, this can be a better
experience than that. I mean, for instance, Yelp trying to find a
restaurant, instead of your head down, etc. with this, the glasses
on, you just look and it tells you as you’re looking the restaurant.
There’s one on the other side of the building. It will tell you that
it’s over there and you can get just by looking and walking in the
direction that you’re looking. You get information that’s related to
the world around you. So in those cases, it kind of makes the real
world work better. That’s the whole idea behind AR in the end. And
even though it’s simple AR, Yelp works really well in our glasses for
that kind of an application. I do like the whole “I’m talking
turn off notifications while this person that’s close to me is
talking.” That’s an interesting one.

Alan: Yeah. I mean, it can
probably– I don’t know, they don’t have a camera on their glasses.
So I’m assuming it’s just based on you’re talking, but you guys have
a camera so you could literally do facial recognition and say “OK,
somebody is within three feet of me, don’t show displays when there’s
a conversation going and there’s somebody in front.” I think
it’s a great feature. Your display’s a mono-display, right? So it’s
in one eye?

Paul: Yes, that’s correct.

Alan: The one eye– so you’ve
got the display in one eye and then you’ve got the camera in the
other. What are your– and then this is a little bit off topic, what
are your concerns around people driving with these technologies?

Paul: The number of car
companies that have every intention of implementing AR and glasses
inside the car is surprising to me. But I have to say a heads-up
display can make things much more situationally aware. For instance,
we are working with some motorcycle companies and if you look down at
your motorcycle’s console to see how fast you’re going, or to maybe
look at your phone for directional information that’s mounted up on
the front, that time to look down and look back up, you can be in the
middle of an accident. Whereas with the glasses on, if the imagery is
floating down the road, you don’t have to look anywhere except down
the road in the same focal point that your eyes are looking safely
down the road with. And so they can be much more situationally aware
than looking down. When in a car, you look down at your dashboard on
the right to look at the map, that’s taking your eyes off the road.
Whereas the HUD in my car, it’s all in the HUD and I can just look
down the road. I think the same thing is gonna be true with glasses
and it’ll get better with glasses, because the camera feeds and stuff
that are around the outside of almost every car, collision avoidance,
all of that, that stuff will be able to be portrayed in your glasses.
So when you look to the right, you can literally look right through
the car as if quarter panels weren’t there and stuff. So it’s about
being situationally aware now. I’d be the first guy to say that
watching Netflix driving down the road is not going to happen.

Alan: You know it’s a plain bad
idea.

Paul: In this case, there’s
going to be driving modes, just like there is in your car now. And
your phone will not do certain things when you’re driving down the
road. You’ll see the same thing happen in glasses, I believe.

Alan: Yeah, I think so. I mean,
when I first got the North glasses, I was walking down the street and
I almost walked into some poor woman, because I was paying attention
to the little image and not my situational awareness. I only did that
once. [laughs] Within the first hour. [laughs]

Paul: You learn that pretty
quick. But I will say that I think binocular systems, this gets way
better. Monocular systems, what happens is the display engine image
gets put out in space somewhere horizontally left to right. And based
upon where that is, even your convergence system– your eyes have a
tendency, when they’re looking at something that’s only on one eye,
to look as if that’s where it’s going to converge out in space, left
and right.

Alan: Yeah.

Paul: Based on focus, there are
some disparity issues with focus and with convergence etc, that most
of that gets way better if the images are at infinity, they’re
focused at infinity, and they’re binocular. So I think you’ll see
binocular systems in the long run will be the better way to do this.
But the display engines today currently are way too big to make
really sexy glasses binocular just yet. But that’s gonna change so
fast your head spins out.

Alan: You know, I haven’t taken
the long view on all of this. I’m saying, “OK, 2025 we’ll have
some AR glasses that are Magic Leap, Hololens, with all the bells and
whistles. But in the form factor of the Vuzix Blade.”

Paul: [chuckles] Yeah. And maybe
sooner. [laughs]

Alan: Hey, I’m going to go with
2025. If it’s sooner, great. That’s awesome. Nobody ever really slams
you for making predictions too soon or too far out. They always kill
you if you make a prediction too early.

Paul: You know the story of the
frog that was sitting in the water and it slowly turns the heat up
and it wasn’t smart enough to jump out.

Alan: Yep.

Paul: This industry is going to
happen like that. All of a sudden it’s going to look back and say,
“Holy mackerel, look how far we’ve come. This is amazing now.”

Alan: Okay. Let’s just put our
“look how far we’ve come” hat on for a second here. In
2014, I tried VR for the first time, and I ended up with an HTC– the
Pre, the first one. And I mean, that thing was like a giant fish tank
on your head. Even like Pimax, they’ve got this VR headset, this 8K
VR headset, but it’s like strapping a twenty inch monitor to your
face. We’re going to look back at this and laugh. But if you look at
where we’ve come, in VR specifically, we’ve gone from these giant
supercomputer driven things to the Quest — which is a standalone
headset, wide field of view, four year, four hour batteries, all the
rest of it — in three years.

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: And AR glasses. I mean,
the Vuzix Blade, that is a pair of glasses that you can wear all day,
everyday, and that didn’t exist four years ago. I mean, you guys were
probably working on it, but it wasn’t something that you could
commercially buy. And now it’s available, and it’s just happening
faster and faster and faster.

Paul: It’s very true. And the
optics systems are getting better along the way. And with MicroLED
coming, the display engines are gonna shrink huge. And when you only
light up the pixel that you want, power consumption is going to go
through the floor. I’m telling you, man, Kingsman’s–

Alan: And you power all that
using cloud computing and 5G.

Paul: Right.

Alan: My last interview was with
Sandro Tavares from Nokia. And they build the 5G infrastructure that
will all rely on. And it’s interesting how if you factor out, let’s
call 2025, or push it out to 2030. We all wear glasses. The glasses
are super lightweight. The compute power is in the cloud, not on our
face. So they’re super light, super cheap. And now our mission, we’re
launching a new company next year and the mission of the company is
to democratize education globally by 2037. So if you buy into the
fact that will wear glasses in 10 years, those glasses will be
running in the cloud. Add another five years to figure out how to
make content at scale. And we should be able to theoretically give
away the world’s most advanced, efficient, effective training and
education to every human on earth. For literally nothing.

Paul: That’s a great vision. And
I could agree with that.

Alan: Great. Because then I
don’t think I’m so crazy. [laughs]

Paul: I tell you, Alan.
Connecting the digital world to the real world is going to change so
many things coming up.

Alan: I agree.

Paul: There’s a lot of people
that say to me, “I’m never going to give up my phone.” And
my mom still has a wired connection to her phone, to the wall. So I
can’t discount all of that. But you are going to be able to do things
that just can’t be done any other way. And there are going to be so
many people that want to do those things. They won’t go back to a
phone. They might still have a phone in their pocket for other use
cases. But these things that are coming are game changing.

Alan: Agreed. You know what?
Listen, we still have TVs. VR is not going to replace TVs, AR is not
going replace your smartphone. TVs and computers didn’t replace
books, even though tablets. Hardcover books still outsell digital
copies. So when we invent new communication mediums, it doesn’t
replace the previous one, other than color TV replacing black and
white TV. But majority of times, they don’t replace previous
communication mediums. It just makes a new one.

Paul: Yeah, radio is a case in
point.

Alan: Yeah, we still have radios
in every car. We still use a printing press. These technologies
didn’t go away, they just became part of a complete communications
tool box.

Paul: Yep.

Alan: And I think your Vuzix
glasses are one tool in an arsenal that is creating enormous value
right now for enterprises.

Paul: Well, it’s off to a good
start at Vuzix. I mean, it’s been long years in the making, but
finally it’s reached that point of critical mass. And I’m looking
forward to this fall to start sharing with more folks some of the
things that are happening in that regard.

Alan: Well, I can’t wait to see
all the cool stuff that’s coming out and I can’t wait to get our
views explained. I’m pretty excited to start building some cool stuff
on it. So thank you so much for taking the time to share the
information about Vuzix and to share your passion for this as well.
It really comes through.

Paul: Thanks, Alan. We like to
tell the story, so we appreciate guys like you to help us get the
word out around Vuzix, too.

Alan: Well, it’s a great story.
You guys have been in it from the beginning and grinding it out,
because I know what it’s like to build hardware. Hardware is–
there’s a reason it’s called hardware, because it’s hard.

Paul: [laughs] Touché!

Alan: You know, I promised my
wife, I said we will never make hardware again. And I’ve stuck true
to that promise. But it’s one of those things that I tip my hat to
you guys, because you’ve taken on a world class challenge and you’ve
met it with all success. So I wish you all the best in that.

Paul: Yes. Thank you very much,
Alan. We appreciate that.