AR Show with Jason McDowall (Jason McDowall: Investor | Advocate | Entrepreneur)

Today’s conversation is a recreation of a South-by-Southwest Panel that didn’t happen this year because the conference was canceled. My guests are so passionate about their topic, we got the panel together to share with you here. This conversation was recorded the same week that SXSW was scheduled to happen in March. Here’s a bit from the show guide:

From Childish Gambino’s augmented reality dancing to Marshmello’s Fortnite concert in virtual reality to the mixed reality experience of Tonandi, immersive and spatial computing is closing the gap between the real and the virtual when it comes to music and art. Listeners can experience music in new and more profound ways. Musicians can take advantage of this shift to reach and connect more deeply with broader audiences. Artists can create a lasting emotional connection by letting their fans be in the center of the experience.

In the conversation, we explore new methods for listeners and artists to span realities with music. We talk about which experiences are getting traction, as well as where the technology shines, and where it still falls short.

We expanded the topics a bit to incorporate a discussion about survival advice for startups.

The four panelists include:

Amy LaMeyer is the managing partner of WXR Fund, where she invests in early stage spatial computing and artificial intelligence companies with female leadership. She’s a lover of music, and the author of the “Sound and AR” chapter in the book Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted With Data. She’s also an advisor for immersive music-focused startups: TribeXR, Stage, and Melodrive.

Eric Wagliardo is an internationally recognized artist and creative who resides in Brooklyn, NY and Dallas, TX. Eric has been working in XR for 4 years and recently collaborated with Childish Gambino to create an augmented reality musical experience. Eric is the founder and creative director of &Pull.

Rebecca Barkin is the VP of Immersive Experiences at Magic Leap, where she served as Executive Producer of Tónandi—a visceral, interactive audio-visual experience made in partnership with the band Sigur Rós. More recently, she teamed up with HBO and Framestore for Game of Thrones "Dead Must Die," a mixed reality experience brought to AT&T retail and Tribeca Film Festival. In 2020, opportunity informed a new focus on delivering services and solutions that bridge the physical and digital divide, ultimately expanding the reach of premium XR installations beyond any singular venue. She began her career at EMI Music.

Tony Parisi is a pioneer of virtual reality, a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. He is the co-creator of 3D graphics standards, including VRML, X3D and gl-TF. He’s also the author of several books from O’Reilly Media covering Virtual Reality, Programming 3D Apps, and WebGL. Tony has become one of the leading spokespeople for the immersive industry, and he was recently named to Next Reality’s 30 People to Watch in Augmented Reality. Tony is currently Head of AR/VR Ad Innovation at Unity Technologies.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Dominic Collins is the co-founder and CEO of Darabase, a platform to manage and monetize AR permissions on the physical world.

Prior to Darabase, Dominic was the general manager of international for Jaunt, which was a content capture technology company and studio focused on VR and later AR. He has also been the CEO or Director of Digital across a number of telecom companies, including Sky, Orange Digital, and T-Mobile, as well as the Chief Marketing Officer of financial services company, Legal & General.

In this conversation, we talk about the perspective that led Dominic to work with major property owners to help them control how digital content appears on their physical buildings.

He shares the strategy at Darabase for taking the best of traditional Out-of-Home advertising, and applying it to the complex arena of property rights within augmented reality.

He goes on to describe his entrepreneurial perspective on creating an augmented reality technology company, including some insight into his approach to building a business that is viable both today and for years to come.

Dominic also shares some lessons learned from his time at Jaunt, an early immersive content company for VR & AR.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

David Gull is the Founder and CEO of Outer Realm, a company within the Real Estate industry leading the shift from 2D screens to immersive Virtual and Augmented Reality for better decision making. The tool helps people visualize properties undergoing transformation.

David has both an architectural design and technology background, and he believes that creating experiences that engage both gut-level intuition as well as concrete factual presentation are key to gaining trust, and ultimately stakeholder buy-in, for real estate developments.

Prior to Outer Realm, David was a VP at Floored, a virtual technology startup acquired by real estate giant, CBRE. He also has 6 years of experience practicing architecture at the renowned firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. David graduated first in his class from Cornell University’s #1 Ranked Bachelor of Architecture Program.

In this conversation, we get into his perspective as an architect and what he sees as an opportunity, an imperative really, for the industry to incorporate better visualizations to help customers make better decisions, and ultimately for architects and real estate developers to create better homes.

He likens the traditional real estate shopping experience to buying a car after seeing only the frame. Just as it is very hard to imagine the feel of the seats and the rush of acceleration without being able to experience a car, it is hard to commit to a new home without seeing it as you would live in it.

We go on to explore his path as an entrepreneur, including his decision, and the consequences, of foregoing venture capital and bootstrapping the business.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Steve Sinclair is the SVP of product at Mojo Vision, a company enabling invisible computing with their AR contact lenses.

Steve has an amazing background in the product development and product marketing of personal computing technologies throughout the smartphone revolution. He worked at Handspring, Palm, Apple’s iPhone team, which he joined in 2007, as well as at HP and the Motorola division at Google, which was then sold to Lenovo.

He brings 20 plus years of insight to Mojo Vision, which imagines a world where information is there when you need it, and then technology fades away when you don’t so you can connect with others without distraction.

In this conversation, we dig into the details of Mojo Vision’s technology-infused contact lenses, including the underlying technology and how it works.

He talks about Mojo’s initial use case around helping the visually impaired, as well as other types of experiences that make sense in the early days of wearable displays.

We go on to dip into Steve’s history to extract some of the lessons he’s learned at the dawn of the smartphone era and discuss how they might apply to spatial computing.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Christina Heller is the CEO of Metastage, an XR studio that brings live performances into digital worlds through volumetric capture and complementary tools.

The resulting 3D content can be experienced in augmented reality using mobile phones or high-end AR headsets, or using 3D displays. Metastage uses the Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture system and is located in Los Angeles.

Prior to leading Metastage, Christina was the CEO of VR Playhouse, an immersive content company based in Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Advanced Imaging Society's Distinguished Leadership in Technology Award, and was named in the Huffington Post as one of 5 women changing the virtual reality scene. She has a long history in immersive media, having contributed to over 120 immersive projects. Christina comes from the world of journalism, radio, and television.

In this conversation, we dig into volumetric capture in general, and Metastage in particular. We explore a couple of the projects she and her team have done, along with some of the challenges and highlights along the way.

We discuss how people get to experience the end result, and the impact of the underlying capture technology. Christina also shares a new initiative to make it easier for creators to leverage volumetric content.

Christina share’s some of the lessons she’s learned from being an entrepreneur, including a lesson she picked up when she was young. She discovered the importance of envisioning the end state, and using that vision as a key motivator, while also recognizing the end result may look very different.

We go on to talk more broadly about trends in immersive content.

It’s worth noting this conversation was recorded in mid April, 2020, a few weeks after California issued its first “shelter-in-place” order in response to COVID-19. Some of the conversation reflects the newness of the crisis at the time.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Pat Antaki is the founder and CEO of seeBOOST, a company creating a prescription glasses solution for people with vision impairment. The device incorporates an optimized, video pass-through AR system over one eye of the glasses.

Pat is a former MIT grad with a long history in microelectronics design and engineering, including spending several years working with industry expert, Karl Guttag.

These days Pat is committed to improving the quality of life for millions of people with vision impairment due to Macular Degeneration and Diabetes. But a few years back, he took a detour from his career as an engineer and entrepreneur. As he was entering his 40s, Pat set his sights on becoming an Olympic athlete and participating in the 2006 Torino Winter Games.

In this conversation, we talk through his mindset as he embarked on his Olympic adventure, including his work on microdisplays at the turn of the century.

Pat goes on to describe his decision, his preparation, and some challenging experiences on his road to the Olympics to compete in the Skeleton. It’s a really great story where his technology innovation plays a key role.

We also talk about the impetus and focus of his work at seeBOOST, including some of the design tradeoffs and lessons learned in bringing the product to market. It turns out, aesthetics matter, even when the device is so critical, users can’t see these words without it.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Remi Del Mar is the senior product manager responsible for Epson’s visual displays and Moverio AR glasses.

Remi has been at Epson for almost 5 years. Previously she worked at BitTorrent and spent nearly 8 years at Logitech working on a number of different products, including on an early exploration in AR.

She brings a deep passion for the art of product management, of delivering a product that consumers truly love.

In this conversation, Remi explores some of the key use cases she’s seeing for the Moverio AR glasses, including uses around flying drones, remote assistance, education, HR, entertainment, and even art.

We talk through some industry projections, and discuss what’s necessary for AR glasses to breakthrough to ubiquity. In addition to wearability and interoperability, Remi goes on to describe the importance of capability and privacy.

She also talks about the challenges and responsibilities of being a good hardware product manager, as well as a couple of breaks she took during her career.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Angelo Stracquatanio is the co-founder and CEO of Apprentence.io, a software platform to help life sciences teams bring critical drugs to market faster and with higher reliability. Leveraging AR glasses is a key component of the solution.

Angelo was a competitive swimmer in college and studied finance, winning the New York Society of Security Analysts Annual Investment Research Challenge competition.

After starting his career in finance, Angelo shifted to mobile software development at the beginning of the iPhone era, and earned his MS in computer science from NYU.

With an eye towards making the world a better place with cutting edge technology, Angelo started Apprentice almost 6 years ago.

In this conversation, Angelo starts by sharing the story of his finance competition win, and how the lessons from swimming competitively in college carries over to his role as a startup CEO.

Angelo describes the unique challenges faced by teams focused on life sciences, and how AR plays a role in solving them. He shares how Apprentice has responded to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the change in mindset within the life sciences industry.

Angelo goes on to explain how AR isn’t just enabling greater efficiency, but is also unlocking new capabilities for their customers. We also talk about Angelo’s evolution as a CEO, and what he’s been doing to foster his growth.

This episode was originally recorded in June 2020.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Many of you know Matt Miesnieks as a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on Augmented Reality. Matt was most recently the CEO and co-founder of 6D.ai, a company building tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences.

Matt started his career in a number of engineering and business roles, before shifting his focus to Augmented Reality more than 10 years ago. Matt was head of customer development at Layar, an early consumer AR company. He founded Dekko, the first mobile mixed reality platform for iOS. Matt worked at Samsung as a director of product development in AR & VR. And he was a founding partner at Super Ventures, an early stage investor in AR & VR.

Most recently, he was the founder and CEO af 6D.ai, which gained a lot of recognition among AR developers and enthusiasts for the demos they published showcasing their advanced software APIs enabling more useful and exciting AR experiences. Earlier in 2020, Niantic acquired the company.

I caught up with Matt earlier this summer to talk about his entrepreneurial journey at 6D.ai. He shares an honest and insightful perspective across a number of topics, including

mapping the world for AR,

what 6D got wrong about their target customer and how they addressed it,

the worst mistake they made and what he learned from it,

how companies are bought and valued,

the responsibilities of a startup CEO in creating optionality,

the emotional rollercoaster,

the role of self care,

and more.

Matt shares a lot of hard earned wisdom. I think you’ll love this one.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Cory Grenier is the CEO of Geenee, a company on a mission to make the physical world around us easily recognizable to computers using mobile, browser-based technology. They combine image and video recognition, WebAR, and creative services to deliver unique value to brands.

Cory started his career at Lenovo in Beijing, becoming a global product marketing manager. He returned to the US in 2013 to join Vergence Labs, an innovative startup building AR glasses. Vergence was acquired by Snap to form the basis of Snap Spectacles. Cory stayed for several years at Snap as the first director of sales and marketing before returning to more entrepreneurial roles.

In this conversation, we chat about his efforts to build awareness of the Vergence Labs product, called Epiphany Eyewear. Cory shares how the Snap acquisition happened and some of the lessons he learned while he was there. Do you remember the marketing campaign for Spectacles with the pop-up vending machines, Cory led that.

He goes on to describe how Geenee is now pushing the boundaries for brands by thinking deeply about how AR complements consumer behavior around commerce and awareness building.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Angela Robert is the Co-founder and CEO of Conquer Experience, a company using VR to dramatically improve training for operating room nurses.

After earning a degree in math and computer science, Angela started her career as a software engineer before joining Electronic Arts where she contributed to more than 20 games. She became the development director of the initial and sequel release of the popular Skate franchise.

After several years of building and leading teams at EA, she set off to improve the lives of medical patients by improving the quality of training for nurses.

Angela is an active supporter of girls in STEM and women in technology and business, as an advisor, mentor, and speaker.

For this conversation, Angela joined me for a fireside chat at the recent VRAR Association Global Summit - the 2020 online edition - where the theme was adaptability.

We discussed how Angela pivoted her iPad-based and VR-based training company in response to COVID. Hospitals were no longer buying, and live in-person training opportunities for most procedures disappeared. Now hospitals are filled with out-of-practice operating room nurses, who had been reassigned or furloughed for months, that need to be ready to support a huge backlog of surgeries.

Much of the conversation happened live at the conference, but the last bit was recorded afterwards. Although it’s all presented here as one unified conversation.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Charlie Fink is a respected author and speaker focused on AR and VR. He has been at the bleeding edge of the intersection of entertainment and technology for more than 35 years. 

Charlie was a VP of Creative Development at Disney, where he created the concept for the Lion King. He was the COO at Virtual World Entertainment in the early 90s, which was the first company to bring VR experiences to retail locations across the world. Charlie was Chief Creative Officer at AOL studios, where he launched a number of early brands on the web. And after his startup was acquired by American Greetings Interactive, Charlie then took over as President and Chief Creative Officer and drove one of the most popular websites at the time to profitability and success.

Over the last few years, he has been applying all of that experience and insight to his current passion around AR and VR as an author, speaker, and now teacher. 

About 2 years ago Charlie joined me for an interview where we explored his career and his first book on spatial computing called Charlie Fink’s Metaverse.

Recently, about a week before the US presidential election, we caught up to discuss what he brings as an author and a teacher.

We go on to discuss the classes he is currently teaching at Chapman University as well as his latest book and current take on where we are as an industry.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Justin Barad, MD, is the CEO and founder of Osso VR, a fully immersive, and scientifically validated, surgical training platform.

Prior to starting Osso VR, Justin became a board-eligible orthopedic surgeon with a Bioengineering degree from UC Berkeley, and an MD (medical doctorate) from UCLA, where he graduated first in his class. He completed his residency at UCLA and his fellowship in pediatric orthopedics at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital.

His experiences as a medical student and practicing surgeon opened his eyes to the many challenges faced by surgeons striving to provide the best care in the face of expanding medical understanding, technology, and complexity. For example, after 14 years of education, nearly a third of graduating residents cannot operate without supervision.

These insights, combined with a conviction to solve the problem, led him to co-found Osso VR.

In this first part of my two-part conversation with Justin, we explore his life-long fascination with ways that software and technology can be applied to help people. He shares his journey of discovery, including some advice he got while still in high school. He was told if he really wants to invent something, then all he needs to do is understand the problem he’s trying to solve first. And the best way for him to solve medical problems is to be a doctor—an idea that did not appeal to him at the time.

Justin goes on to describe his experiences as a medical resident and practicing surgeon, and how he came to hit on the problem he wanted to solve. He also shares the internal struggle he faced when forced to decide between two divergent career paths.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Justin Barad, MD, is the CEO and founder of Osso VR, a fully immersive, and scientifically validated, surgical training platform.

Prior to starting Osso VR, Justin became a board-eligible orthopedic surgeon with a Bioengineering degree from UC Berkeley, and an MD (medical doctorate) from UCLA, where he graduated first in his class. He completed his residency at UCLA and his fellowship in pediatric orthopedics at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital.

His experiences as a medical student and practicing surgeon opened his eyes to the many challenges faced by surgeons striving to provide the best care in the face of expanding medical understanding, technology, and complexity.

In this second part of my two-part conversation with Justin, we talk about the imperative to improve medical education. He notes our approach to medical education and assessment is still largely based on what worked 100 years ago. But using today’s insights and technologies, while not a perfect, can dramatically improve and expand the quality of medical education. [quote]

Justin goes on to describe the opportunity to accelerate the "trust curve" during in-hospital training—the notion that before you can get hands on and work your way up the learning curve, you have to work your way up the trust curve. Justin also talks about startup leadership principles he’s learned and his take on Virtual Reality versus Augmented Reality.

Note: About half way into the episode you’ll notice we took a break and came back later to finish the interview.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Alex Hertel is the former co-founder and CEO of Xperial, and currently an inventor at Intuit where he is a director in their Futures group.

Alex completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto and is an expert in no-code languages as well as the use of immersive technologies to make the physical world digitally interactive.

After his PhD program, he co-founded Walleto, which was acquired by Google and became Google Wallet. After several years at Google, he left to become the co-founder and CEO of Xperiel, where he helped to create a user-friendly programming language called “Pebbles” with the goal of democratizing AR and IoT programming in order to connect the Internet to the physical world.

In this conversation, Alex explains how he applied his research to a concept he calls the “world computer” and how it relates to computing paradigms of the past. He sees the roles of displays being replaced by AR glasses, and our computing peripherals being replaced by the many internet-connected devices around us.

Alex goes on to describe how a new no-code language can make the process of creating AR experiences more accessible. He also describes lessons learned through his two entrepreneurial experiences and the benefits of now being an inventor in Intuit’s Futures Group.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Today I am kicking off 2021 with another annual monologue. I hope you and your family were able to have a safe and relaxing holiday despite the isolation and other challenges imposed by COVID.

This is the forth such annual kickoff episode, and when looking back at my notes from last year, 2020 played out pretty much as expected, with the glaring exception of the impact of COVID. However one thing COVID did not impact is the pace of progress at the bleeding edge of the technology. The industry continues to make slow progress—sometimes it feels painfully slow—towards addressing the biggest challenges of AR glasses.

In this episode, I restate why I believe AR Glasses aren’t a passing fad like 3D TV. I also share my take on some of the highlights of 2020 and what we might see in 2021 as it relates to augmented reality.

While the road in front of us is still long, I am a firm believer that Augmented Reality in general, and wearable AR glasses in particular, will have a profound impact on our lives.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Robert Scoble is a futurist, strategist and the author of four books about technology. His latest book is The Infinite Retina, co-authored with Irena Cronin, which explores the emerging era of spatial computing, including AR, VR, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Robert has spent his career at the intersection of technology and media, working as a journalist, an evangelist, and a futurist, most notably at Microsoft and Rackspace. During that time, he’s interviewed more than a thousand people from research labs to startups to major tech companies, including the likes of Tony Hseih, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. The interviews, mixed with his own insights, formed the basis for the four books on technology trends he’s published over the last 14 years.

But in 2017, he was accused of sexual harassment by several women, which became public during the Me Too movement. What Robert did was wrong, and he admits as much in our conversation. He goes further to describe the necessity for better behavior and better, more diverse company cultures throughout the tech industry. He seeks to counsel founders on the dangerous mindsets that lead to sexual harassment and the damage it causes to victims, their careers, and the companies where they work. He also counsels founders on the risks of loneliness, mental illness, and addiction, which are all far more common than many of us realize. (Jump ahead in the episode to 1:04:16 for this part of the discussion.)

We start our conversation talking about Robert’s latest prediction about Apple and their plans to create the next great spatial computing device.

This interview was recorded a few days before the recent Apple announcement about the AirPod Max, a device that forms the basis of Robert's predictions. He describes something with immersive spatial sound and visuals that can create an entirely new type of experience. 

We also talk about Google Glass and its violation of an implicit social contract we have with each other, as well as the role of Tesla in the broader definition of spatial computing.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

This episode features Nathan Pettyjohn and Mike Lohse at Lenovo. 

Nathan is the Commercial AR/VR Lead at Lenovo. He is also the founder and president of the VR/AR Association and the annual VR/AR Global Summit. Previously Nathan was also the founder and CEO of venture-backed asile411, a mobile indoor navigation and 3D product cloud platform.

Mike is the Hardware Product Manager for Commercial AR/VR at Lenovo. Previously Mike spent 9 years at ODG, which for a long time was the premier creator of AR glasses. As the VP of Advanced Products there, he was behind the impressive R7, R8, and R9 glasses.

In this conversation, Nathan, Mike, and I chat about the key use cases that Lenovo’s customers want to solve with spatial computing, and where AR or VR fit in the mix. We talk about the challenges of moving projects beyond initial pilots as well as Lenovo’s role in delivering holistic, end-to-end AR and VR solutions to companies. This includes software, services, and hardware. 

We talk about Lenovo’s ThinkReality A6 headset and the lessons learned in the two years since its release. We also discuss the new ThinkReality A3. This new device tethers to a smartphone or PC to satisfy industrial or work-from-home productivity needs. We discuss how this new product fits with offerings from Microsoft and RealWear, and the device agnostic approach Lenovo is taking to meet the needs of their customers.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Hannah and Matthew Arevalo are two of the co-founders of Pinfinity, an augmented reality collectible pin platform enabling interactive experiences around our favorite brands. 

Previously, Pinfinity’s CEO, Hannah Arevalo was the director of brands for several product lines at Loot Crate, a subscription box business focused on fan culture. There she worked directly with brands such as Warner Brothers and Disney and led a P&L of $100M annually. She also helped the team garner more than a dozen industry awards around fast growth, great products, and customer service.

Matthew Arevalo was a co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Loot Crate, and has spent much of his career focused on developing brand, community, and strategic business relationships.

AR is seeping into many corners of our daily lives, and now it’s coming to collectable pins, a category of collectibles popularized by Disney in the late 1990s.

In this conversation, we discuss fan culture, the pin collectable movement, and how augmented reality fits into a broader concept Hannah and Matthew call “fan commerce”.

They go on to describe some of the lessons from their previous experience in a high-growth subscription box business, and how they are applying them to Pinfinity.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Dr. Adam Davis is the founder and CEO of Amalgamated Vision, a maker of wearable displays optimized for use as a reference display in healthcare and enterprise. 

Adam spent a career as a practicing physician focused on neruo-radiology, and regularly explored and pushed the boundaries of using 3D imagery to better understand each patient’s physiology. 

Most recently, he was a clinical associate professor and the Director of the Image Processing Lab at NYU Medical Center. There he specialized in medical image post processing, volume rendering, user interface, data visualization, image based procedural and surgical guidance. He’s also done product development for Siemens Healthineers and Olea Medical.

It was from this deep appreciation for 3D medical imaging that Adam began developing a new type of wearable display highly suitable to medical environments. The team recently won the 2020 NASA iTech challenge alongside Mojo Vision.

In this conversation, we dig into the technology and the unique perspective that is driving its development.

The solution lies on your cheek bones, just below the primary visual field. It uses laser MEMs (laser beam scanning) with a novel pancake optic to project an image directly on the retina when you look down.

We start the conversation with some background on medical imaging and the impact that stereoscopy (that is seeing images in 3D) can have in medicine. 

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Julia Brown is the co-founder and CEO of MindX, the creator of a novel brain computer interface that combines neurotechnology, augmented reality and artificial intelligence to create a "look-and-think” interface for next-generation spatial computing applications. 

Prior to starting MindX, Julia co-founded EpiWatch, a digital health spin-out from Johns Hopkins that developed a seizure detection and condition management platform for wearable devices in partnership with Apple. 

She was also a founding member of the Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, where she oversaw a team of engineers and entrepreneurs to create 25+ novel digital solutions that improve patient care, many of which were spun out into independent startup companies.

Julia has an academic background in computational biology, engineering, and human-centered design.

In this conversation we get into the potential of brain computer interfaces and their contribution to private, personal computing when wearing AR glasses. Julia goes on to describe alternative approaches for brain computer interfaces, including those using EMG and EEG. 

And of course we dig into what Julia and her team are creating at MindX, which utilizes what they call Holographic Near Infrared Spectroscopy. We talk through where they are in bringing their product to market and what will be possible in the coming years. 

Julia also touches on lessons learned in working with academic research labs when bringing cutting edge innovation to market.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Karl Guttag, is currently most well known as a speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, memory architecture, and micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses. 

He’s got 150 patents to his name related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at TI (that’s Texas Instruments), and was named a TI Fellow - the youngest in the company’s history. In the 20 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

And these days he’s also the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders when they need it most.

Like my first interview  with Karl several years ago, this was a long and wide ranging conversation that I split into multiple parts. In this first part, we touch on cloning - both of microprocessors and AR devices. We also talk about why see-through AR is 10x harder than VR, the importance of field of view in AR vs VR, the poor visual quality of the Hololens 2, the challenges of diffractive waveguides and laser scanning displays, Magic Leap’s wasted opportunity, and more. 

Some of it gets technical, but Karl does a good job of making it accessible. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to sit down and have a drink with Karl, it’s something like this. 

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Karl Guttag, is currently most well known as a speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, memory architecture, and micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.

He’s got 150 patents to his name related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at TI (that’s Texas Instruments), and was named a TI Fellow - the youngest in the company’s history. In the 20 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

And these days he’s also the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders when they need it most.

In this second part of my conversation with Karl, we talk about matching display technologies to the right combiner optics technologies. Karl talks about which of those technologies he thinks have the best chance of being successful. He also discusses the importance of matching what the devices can do well to the user and the use case, and we get into some of those use cases across consumer, enterprise, and military.

On this last one, Karl goes deeper into the hard tradeoffs in delivering something of essential value to the military and other first responders in the field.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Karl Guttag, is currently most well known as a speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, memory architecture, and micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses. 

He’s got 150 patents to his name related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at TI (that’s Texas Instruments), and was named a TI Fellow - the youngest in the company’s history. In the 20 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

And these days he’s also the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders when they need it most.

Today’s episode is a postscript to the previous two episodes. After I concluded my interview with Karl, we started talking about Apple and their rumored pursuits of VR and AR devices.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Kirin Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Illumix, a company building an AR-first mobile gaming platform. You may be familiar with Illumix if you’re a fan of the horror franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s. The Illumix team has already found a lot of success with their first title, Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Delivery.

Prior to founding Illumix, Kirin was the founder and Executive Director of Shine for Girls, whose mission is to transform the lives of middle school girls by cultivating a passion for mathematics through a program that incorporates both math and dance. 

Kirin has a BS in Theoretical Math and Computer Science from MIT as well as three Masters degrees spanning mathematics, machine learning, and business from Cambridge, The London School of Economics, and Stanford.

In this conversation, Kirin shares how she thinks about creating compelling stories and gameplay for mobile devices where AR is a central component.

We go to talk about how the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise is a great fit for AR, and also why the Illumix team needed to go beyond AR Kit, AR Core, and Unity in order to deliver their vision for a compelling AR-first mobile experience.

Kirin talks about her broader ambitions and also has some amazing advice for building and maintaining self-confidence.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Japjit Tulsi is the CTO at Matterport, a company building a set of technologies to accelerate and simplify the creation of immersive 3D digital twins for real estate, project planning, hospitality, insurance, and more.

Prior to Matterport, Japjit gained more than 20 years of technical leadership experience, including as CTO at Carta, a tool for investors, founders, and employees to manage their equity. He was also VP of Engineering at eBay, leading engineering for new product development, including their AI-powered shopping assistant.

Earlier in his career, he helped build products at Google, including Google Analytics and YouTubes’ innovative content platform. He also held numerous senior leadership positions at Microsoft, along with entrepreneurial pursuits at StumbleUpon.

Japjit also serves as a board member at Grassroots Ecology, an environmental education and action nonprofit.

In this conversation, we get into the technology at Matterport and how Japjit and his team are leveraging machine learning to deliver greater insights with less data, essentially enabling you to “teleport” into a space.

But their vision is to do more than capture physical spaces. Matterport's Cortex AI and deep learning algorithms leverages the data to bring an unparalleled index of millions of spaces and new insights into the operational efficiency of buildings around the world.

We talk about the company, the technology, and the roadmap. And Japjit shares some great advice for building and maintaining strong engineering teams.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Amy LaMeyer. Amy is the managing partner of WXR Fund, where she invests in early stage spatial computing and artificial intelligence companies with female leadership.

Amy spent the first half of her career at Akamai Technologies, which helped enable the early web to scale. There she led the diligence and integration of 20 deals worth more than $1.5 billion.

Now she’s fully immersed in AR and VR as an advisor and investor, and she was named one of the Top 30 people to Watch in Augmented Reality by Next Reality. Amy is also a lover of music and the author of the “Sound and AR” chapter in the book Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted With Data by Charlie Fink.

In this conversation, Amy shares her observations on demographics and trends after attending the recent YC demo day and other events, and she makes the case for and challenges facing female founded companies.

We talk about market trends, the venture fund, and she profiles the areas in which she’s most excited. She goes on to describe some of the founder traits she wants to see, including being an expert in the area where the startup is attempting to disrupt.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Sly Lee is the co-founder & CEO of Emerge, a cross-reality presence company, building a platform that aims to enable more meaningful, engaging, and diverse interactions in XR that bring us closer to the people we care about through touch and emotion.

Sly is an entrepreneur and scientist who is passionate about creating positive global impact He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30, and he is a member of Global Future Council on Virtual and Augmented Reality at the World Economic Forum.

Earlier in his career, Sly was the founder of The Hydrous, an organization that assembled an international consortium to create and share 3D maps of underwater coral reefs.

In this conversation, we explore the concept of human connection in the age of the metaverse, and why the sense of touch has an important part to play.

Sly goes on to describe the product he’s creating, how it differs from haptic controllers, and the feedback he’s getting from early users. We explore how touch is incorporated into social interaction within our inner circles, and what the trends and differences are internationally.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Mark Greget is the founder & CEO of NuEyes, an AR hardware and software company that originally launched in 2016 to assist those with degenerative eye conditions. Recently the company has expanded its product offerings into enterprise, gaming, and entertainment with the launch of the Pro 3 and Pro 3e.

Mark is a U.S. Navy veteran and an accomplished medical technology entrepreneur. Prior to NuEyes, Mark was the founder of Los Angeles Low Vision, which was recognized as a leader in the medical industry and became the number two distribution company for visual assistive technology in the country responsible for millions in revenue.

In this conversation, Mark describes how the company got its start by changing the lives of the visually impaired using custom software, glasses from the now defunct ODG, and the patient's ability to learn how to see again through the glasses.

We go on to talk about the demise of AR glasses maker ODG, and the resulting struggles and opportunities for Mark and the team at NuEyes. Now they are tackling healthcare, enterprise and entertainment with a pair of new wearable displays. He also describes how he’s built an AR hardware and software company on a shoestring budget and the challenges of raising money as a hardware tech company.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

John Black and Mina Fahim are the CEO and CTO of MediView, a company working to give health practitioners “X-ray vision” in order to simplify minimally invasive procedures, enhance clinical workflow, and improve patient outcomes using Augmented Reality.

John Black, MediView’s co-founder and CEO, is a physiologist with an educational background in orthopedic sports medicine and cardiopulmonary physiology. He moved from allied health to the medical device industry early in his career. Prior to MediView, John was leading a sales organization as the Regional Vice President at Orthofix, a global medical device company.

Mina Fahim, MediView’s President and CTO, studied biomedical engineering and technology management as part of his career in medical device innovation. Prior to MediView, Mina spent 4 ½ years at Medtronic as a Principal Research Development Engineer.

In this conversation, John and Mina discuss the unique challenges and opportunities for using AR during surgery. Mina notes that surgeons understand and act on human anatomy in 3D, but use 2D visualization and plan procedures. MediView is able to combine pre-operative 3D images (MRI, CAT) with real-time imaging during the surgery (ultrasound). He notes this approach is even more important in minimally invasive surgery where doctors can’t directly see the treatment area.

We go on to discuss the benefits and lessons learned from their partnership with the Cleveland Clinic and how they see the landscape of immersive technology in the operating room.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Many of you know Matt Miesnieks as a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on Augmented Reality. Matt was most recently the CEO and co-founder of 6D.ai, a company building tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences.

Matt started his career in a number of engineering and business roles, before shifting his focus to Augmented Reality more than 10 years ago. Matt was head of customer development at Layar, an early consumer AR company. He founded Dekko, the first mobile mixed reality platform for iOS. Matt worked at Samsung as a director of product development in AR & VR. And he was a founding partner at Super Ventures, an early stage investor in AR & VR.

Most recently, he was the founder and CEO af 6D.ai, which gained a lot of recognition among AR developers and enthusiasts for the demos they published showcasing their advanced software APIs enabling more useful and exciting AR experiences. Earlier in 2020, Niantic acquired the company.

I caught up with Matt earlier this summer to talk about his entrepreneurial journey at 6D.ai. He shares an honest and insightful perspective across a number of topics, including

mapping the world for AR,

what 6D got wrong about their target customer and how they addressed it,

the worst mistake they made and what he learned from it,

how companies are bought and valued,

the responsibilities of a startup CEO in creating optionality,

the emotional rollercoaster,

the role of self care,

and more.

Matt shares a lot of hard earned wisdom. I think you’ll love this one.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop games to life. The Tilt Five system enables you to see, hear, and interact with realistic 3D holograms that entertain and educate.

By the time this episode airs, they will have recently completed a Kickstarter campaign where Tilt Five raised more than $1.75 million for their initial product.

Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017.

Previously Jeri was at Valve as the first member of the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. Through this, she contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller.

In this conversation, Jeri shares stories from along her amazing path from being a high-school dropout to building race cars to engineering electronic game systems to being recruited at Valve.

Jeri goes on to describe the painful end of her time at Valve and her tumultuous CastAR experience. From those ashes emerged Tilt Five. Jeri describes what’s different this time as well as some of the underlying technology and its tradeoffs, and the deep seated ethos and focus of the company.

She doesn’t mince words as she describes her missteps, setbacks, and successes along the way.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Steve Sinclair is the SVP of product at Mojo Vision, a company enabling invisible computing with their AR contact lenses.

Steve has an amazing background in the product development and product marketing of personal computing technologies throughout the smartphone revolution. He worked at Handspring, Palm, Apple’s iPhone team, which he joined in 2007, as well as at HP and the Motorola division at Google, which was then sold to Lenovo.

He brings 20 plus years of insight to Mojo Vision, which imagines a world where information is there when you need it, and then technology fades away when you don’t so you can connect with others without distraction.

In this conversation, we dig into the details of Mojo Vision’s technology-infused contact lenses, including the underlying technology and how it works.

He talks about Mojo’s initial use case around helping the visually impaired, as well as other types of experiences that make sense in the early days of wearable displays.

We go on to dip into Steve’s history to extract some of the lessons he’s learned at the dawn of the smartphone era and discuss how they might apply to spatial computing.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Cory Grenier is the CEO of Geenee, a company on a mission to make the physical world around us easily recognizable to computers using mobile, browser-based technology. They combine image and video recognition, WebAR, and creative services to deliver unique value to brands.

Cory started his career at Lenovo in Beijing, becoming a global product marketing manager. He returned to the US in 2013 to join Vergence Labs, an innovative startup building AR glasses. Vergence was acquired by Snap to form the basis of Snap Spectacles. Cory stayed for several years at Snap as the first director of sales and marketing before returning to more entrepreneurial roles.

In this conversation, we chat about his efforts to build awareness of the Vergence Labs product, called Epiphany Eyewear. Cory shares how the Snap acquisition happened and some of the lessons he learned while he was there. Do you remember the marketing campaign for Spectacles with the pop-up vending machines, Cory led that.

He goes on to describe how Geenee is now pushing the boundaries for brands by thinking deeply about how AR complements consumer behavior around commerce and awareness building.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Kris Kolo is the Global Executive Director of the VR/AR Association, an international organization designed to foster growth, knowledge, and connections between its members.

Previously, Kris was an executive at Verizon and Toys R Us, applying AR technology to business needs. At Toys R Us, Kris was working on digital in-store initiatives and shopping solutions, piloting the AR solution from Metaio (acquired by Apple). At Verizon, Kris was responsible for Media, Entertainment, and Location-Based apps & platforms, where he collaborated with Wikitude to integrate AR into Verizon's GPS Navigation. He also launched the Verizon Developer Program. In addition, Kris was an Advisor to FlyBy Media, an AR tech startup, acquired by Apple.

As an entrepreneur, Kris was the Co-Founder of Spime Inc, a Silicon Valley startup acquired by Trimble. He’s also published the ground-breaking book, Local Positioning Systems, on geo spatial and location-based services, and holds graduate degrees from MIT.

In this conversation, we chat about mapping and positioning in the early days of mobile, as well as the challenges and benefits of remapping the world for AR. Based on his insights from the Association, Kris describes what's working for VR & AR in healthcare and enterprise. He describes what he sees as a big challenge hindering adoption and the impact of Facebook's commitment to VR & AR on the rest of the market.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Susan Cummings is the Managing Director of Tiny Rebel Games and a founder of Fictioneers. Susan and her team were awarded a major UK grant for Augmented Reality storytelling, which led to "Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up." This effort was followed by the release this summer of "Wallace & Gromit: Fix Up the City", an ambitious city-scale AR game that takes place in San Francisco, Bristol, and Cardiff.

Including her work at Tiny Rebel, Susan has spent more than 20 years in game development and publishing. She was a key player at the origins of Rockstar games and held vital roles as the VP of Publishing and VP of Business Development at 2K games and parent, Take Two Interactive.

In this conversation, Susan shares insight into the origins of Grand Theft Auto and some other big deals and projects in the early days of console and PC games. She goes on to talk about the challenges in telling compelling stories with AR.

We also talk about some of the lessons learned in making compelling and accessible city-scale AR-based games for mobile and the challenges of “immersion” in see-through AR glasses.

(A quick note of disclosure: I’m an investor in Fantsmo, one of the partners Susan mentions when describing her efforts at Fictioneers.)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Paul Powers, the founder and CEO of Physna. You may have caught Physna in the news recently because they’ve raised $76M over the last year, including $56M earlier this summer from Tiger Global, Sequoia and others.

Paul and his team have created a new way to search and compare 3D models in a way that is faster and more effective than what’s come before. This ability to recognize and understand physical objects, combined with Thangs, their online database of 3D models, creates the potential for them to become the Google Search of AR.

Earlier, Paul attended Harvard at the age of 16, and went on to study in Germany, earning a law degree and passing the German bar exam. It was his work at a German patent law firm that inspired the foundation for what became Physna.

In this conversation, Paul describes his unique educational experience and his path to becoming a tech entrepreneur. He goes on to describe the origins of Physna and how they are enabling computers to understand 3D in the same way they understand text.

We talk through the technology and we discuss leadership, entrepreneurial mindset, a different way of thinking about goal setting, and aligning and motivating others. He also shares his perspective of the potential impact that glasses-based AR can have on the human experience.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Guido Groet is the Chief Strategy Officer of Luxexcel, a company that’s able to 3D print optical-quality lenses for smart eyewear.

Earlier in his career, Guido worked for many years in both Europe and the USA for technology giant ASML, which is a world leader in semiconductor equipment. He’s held VP positions in Finance, Business development, M&A, and Strategy development. He was also CFO and then CEO of a venture-back company in disruptive high tech manufacturing technologies.

Now at Luxexcel Guido is in charge of all commercial and strategic aspects of 3D printing of smart eyewear lenses. Luxexcel has been in the news recently for their partnerships with Lumus and WaveOptics where together they’re able to encase the waveguides within 3D-printed prescription lenses.

In this conversation, Guido’s talks about the challenges of finding product-market fit, particularly for technologies that don’t perfectly fit industry’s pre-conceived notion of how things have been done...or should be done.

We get into the meat of the technology and where it goes from here. He also shares his perspective on how and where smartglasses will find early success. Here he believes smartglasses will find success when we’re able to make fashionable glasses with some functionality, rather than focusing on field of view or functionality to the detriment of fashion.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Jay Wright is the founder and CEO of Campfire 3D, a company that is focused on holographic collaboration for design and engineering workflows.

Prior to Campfire, Jay spent 10 years building Vuforia from inception to becoming the leading augmented reality platform for developing handheld and headworn applications. Vuforia is currently part of enterprise software and services company, PTC, but Jay originally created Vuforia while at Qualcomm. There he was responsible for global commercialization of non-radio technologies, ranging from computer vision to neuromorphic hardware.

Previously, Jay had created two software companies focused on the cutting edge of mobile computing, dating back to the mid 1990s. On the whole, he has been a technology entrepreneur building his vision for future computing platforms for more than 25 years.

In this conversation, Jay shares stories from early days of mobile software, starting with his work on Apple’s Newton and his subsequent efforts to create the first App Store. We discuss the impetus for building Vuforia at Qualcomm, the lessons he learned about the AR market from that experience, and how that led to Campfire 3D.

We get into the problem he’s trying to solve with Campfire, and the specific strategy he’s pursuing. We go on to discuss his perspective on the AR hardware efforts at Facebook and Apple, and the historical clues about how quickly we can expect general purpose consumer smartglasses to arrive.

Jay shares a lot of wisdom about entrepreneurship and AR.

It’s worth noting when we recorded this interview, Facebook was still named Facebook, and Meta referred to an early entrant building productivity-focused headworn AR. They shut down a few years back.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Alon Grinshpoon is the Co-founder and CEO of echo3D, a 3D-ready cloud platform that helps manage & deliver 3D, AR, and VR content to apps & devices everywhere. echo3D recently closed a $4M round of funding to feed continued growth after seeing a tremendous amount of momentum over the past year.

Alon started his career in the Isrealli Intelligence Service, working on encryption and cloud technologies. After earning a B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, he spent several years as a software engineer working on improving the performance of cloud-based and client-server computer systems.

Alon went on to receive his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University with a focus on computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, and human-computer interaction.

In this conversation, we discuss how Alon’s background made him a good fit for solving the unique set of challenges for developing an AWS or Akamai for 3D. Alon is a passionate entrepreneur with great advice for early-stage startups, and we talk about his perspective on the concept of founder-market fit. [quote]

Alon goes on to discuss founder-investor fit, and the importance of pragmatically de-risking a startup as you go along. He also shares his funding and growth journey through the RLab and Techstars accelerators, and subsequent rounds of VC funding.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Brian Vogelsang is the Senior Director of Product at Qualcomm focused on Snapdragon Spaces, an XR developer platform for headworn augmented reality. This AR development kit is built on open standards and meant to complement the efforts by Niantic’s Lightship and others.

Brain started his career as the CTO and co-founder of a very early internet service provider startup. He then joined Qualcomm in the mid-1990s, back when it was still a young company. There he focused initially on IT Infrastructure and Security before shifting his focus to the very early days of mobile app development within Qualcomm.

For the last four years, Brain has been working with Hugo Swart and other members of the Qualcomm team on developing Qualcomm’s strategy, products, and ecosystem around Augmented and Virtual Reality.

In this conversation, Brian shares how his long history at Qualcomm gave him a front row seat to the development of the mobile app ecosystem in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the smartphone ecosystem a decade later. He pulls some lessons forward to the AR ecosystem that Qualcomm is helping build today, and looks ahead to 2022.

We go on to discuss the differences in stand alone vs companion devices (or “viewers" as Qualcomm calls them). And of course we talk about the recently announced Snapdragon Spaces, which is built on the Open XR standards and incorporates innovation around user and environmental understanding.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Kirin Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Illumix, a company building an AR-first mobile gaming platform. You may be familiar with Illumix if you’re a fan of the horror franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s. The Illumix team has already found a lot of success with their first title, Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Delivery.

Prior to founding Illumix, Kirin was the founder and Executive Director of Shine for Girls, whose mission is to transform the lives of middle school girls by cultivating a passion for mathematics through a program that incorporates both math and dance. 

Kirin has a BS in Theoretical Math and Computer Science from MIT as well as three Masters degrees spanning mathematics, machine learning, and business from Cambridge, The London School of Economics, and Stanford.

In this conversation, Kirin shares how she thinks about creating compelling stories and gameplay for mobile devices where AR is a central component.

We go to talk about how the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise is a great fit for AR, and also why the Illumix team needed to go beyond AR Kit, AR Core, and Unity in order to deliver their vision for a compelling AR-first mobile experience.

Kirin talks about her broader ambitions and also has some amazing advice for building and maintaining self-confidence.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Today I am kicking off 2022 with another annual monologue. I hope you and your family were able to have a safe and relaxing holiday despite the isolation and other challenges imposed by this latest spike in COVID.

This is the fifth such annual kickoff episode, and when looking back at my notes from last year, 2021 played out pretty much as expected, with the exception of Facebook’s parent company name change to Meta Platforms…and NFTs, but that’s for a different conversation for now.

Mark Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for all things VR and AR drove a lot of investment and broader awareness of the coming age of these technologies, even if everybody has a different idea of what “metaverse” means.

2021 saw very little meaningful progress at the cutting edge of hardware, but there were a few notable developments.

In this episode, I share my take on some of the highlights of 2021 and what we might see in 2022 as it relates to augmented reality. I also touch on a few concepts and mental models for how the consumer and enterprise market may come together.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Nicole Lazzaro. Nicole is the founder and president of XEODesign. Previously she was the designer of “Tilt,” the first true iPhone-only game, but it’s her research into player emotions that has attracted big firms like EA, Sony, and Ubisoft to seek out her expertise. By tapping into “emotion profiles,” Nicole helps designers create more engaging gaming experiences that resonate with all types of players, from casual to hard-core.

Nicole has been a leading expert in Player Experience Design for 30 years. She laid the foundation for her research and insights by earning a degree in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford.

In this conversation, we dig into her distillation of how we as humans engage with games. She calls this framework the Four Keys to Fun. Nicole shares how her work on Myst and the Sims franchises broaden the industry’s perspective and helped motivate her to pursue her research.

Nicole also shares how she’s turned her focus and insights to AR and VR, and sees a vast blue ocean of opportunity. We go on to talk about her work on the Bose AR glasses, and her current XR project, as well as her take on the biggest risk and hope for the new types of AR and VR experiences we’re creating.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Faisal Galaria is the CEO at Blippar, a company creating the tools to enable everyone to create compelling AR experiences. During the course of his career, Faisal has gained over 25 years of experience leading and growing teams in some of the world's most disruptive consumer technology companies including Spotify, Kayak, Skype and now Blippar.

Just prior to Blippar, he was the Chief Strategy and Investments Officer at Gocompare, which he helped digitally transform and IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2016. Previously, Faisal was one of the youngest ever Senior Partners of Alvarez & Marsal, the world’s largest turnaround and restructuring company where he founded and led the European Digital Media practice.

Faisal was previously a Senior Vice President at Spotify, where he launched Spotify in seven countries, including its biggest market the USA. He was also an early member of the Skype team, initially as Head of Global Business Development and became the European Director after Skype’s acquisition by eBay in 2005.

Faisal took over at Blippar about 2 and half years ago, after the company went from being an early AR pioneer and tech darling in the UK, to a company fighting its way through insolvency. Under Faisal’s leadership, the company is releasing new products and has regained its stature as a key enabler of a broad range of AR experiences.

In this conversation, we talk through the challenges of managing the downs and ups of tech startups and the recent product releases by the company. We discuss some of the challenges in working through a turnaround and how they’re similar to a fresh new startup. We also talk about the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that are common to the successful companies of which he’s been a part.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com

Brad Scoggin is the co-founder and CEO of ArborXR, an XR device management solution for enterprises that is currently being used by more than 400 companies and educational institutions around the world.

Brad and his team found companies are using consumer hardware, such as the Oculus Quest, but don’t have the right enterprise software to help them scale as they go from pilot projects to larger deployments.

The problems addressed by ArborXR are an extension of the problems Brad saw as the co-founder and CEO of Springboard VR. Springboard was a venue management solution for VR arcades, which Brad successfully sold during the height of the pandemic.

In this conversation, we discuss Brad’s insights on how to thrive as a non-tech founder pushing the boundaries of VR and AR, and his perspective on utilizing these devices as tools to enhance our experience with the real world, and not exclusively a means of escape.

Brad goes on to share some excellent insights into scaling up (and down) a startup in VR/AR as well as the importance of managing pace, creating transparency, riding the creative tension between focus and experimentation, and successfully building out a remote team.

And of course we get into the details of ArborXR, where Brad shares that they have multiple deployments of over 10,000 headsets!

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

David Bonelli is the founder and CEO of Pulsar, a company of mechanical and optical experts dedicated to solving the hard problems of AR hardware.

David is a U.S. Army veteran who went on to spend several years at the once-venerable Osterhout Design Group (ODG). After creating cutting-edge AR glasses at ODG, he also spent time at Rokid and KFS Industries. Across these companies he designed, managed, and brought to manufacture a range of products spanning optical engineering and augmented reality hardware. It was this set of experiences that really motivated the creation of Pulsar with the goal of lowering the hardware barriers to entry and speeding the design to market timeline.

At Pulsar he’s worked with companies such as Red6, Qwake, Microsoft, and others on AR hardware solutions to meet the needs of everyone from fighter pilots to firefighters to space explorers.

In this conversation, we chat about those projects as well as his experience at ODG building devices such as the R-8. He still uses an ODG R-8 to educate customers on what’s been done and what’s possible, including how much FOV is really necessary to deliver a quality experience.

We go on to talk about the current state of AR hardware and his highlights from the recent SPIE AR/VR conference at Photonics West. David also shares his opinions about which display and optics technologies have the best chance of winning over the long term.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Jon Gray is the co-founder and CEO, and So-Hee Woo is the Head of XR at Encore, a company building a live-streaming, interactive, AR-infused music performance app.

Jon is an entrepreneur and software engineer, who prior to Encore, was the founder and CEO of Cask, a big data analytics platform, which was acquired by Google in 2018. Before that, he was a software engineer at Facebook where he worked on Messages and several other large-scale data platforms. Prior to Facebook, Jonathan founded Streamy.com, a content-oriented social network of the web 2.0 era.

So-Hee has experience across many areas of transmedia industrial design, focused on experimenting with the future of products & experiences. Her special interests include, AR & VR of course, as well as the implications of AI and Tech Fashion.

Jon and So-Hee are both graduates of Carnegie Mellon University. Jon with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and So-Hee with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Industrial and Product Design. She went on to receive a Masters Degree in Industrial Product and Design from the ArtCenter College of Design.

In this conversation, Jon and So-Hee talk about how they empower musicians to create engaging AR art to complement their live musical performances. They go on to discuss how they are establishing a middle class of performance artists through the Encore fan experience app and the Encore Studio app for artists. We get into the business, the strategy, and even some philosophy about art and experience.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Dana Chermesh is the founder and CEO of inCitu, an Augmented-Reality-powered civic engagement app that democratizes city planning.

Dana is an architect from Tel-Aviv, Israel, and an alumna of NYU Masters program in Urban Data Science (2018). During her career as an architect, she specialized in urban renewal and developed a passion for leveraging technology, data and innovation to form smarter, more resilient, and more just cities and city processes.

In 2019 Dana co-founded *inCitu*, to bring together data and discourse with the aid of augmented reality helping citizens see the future of their cities. inCitu was incubated inside Eric Schmidt's social impact venture fund.

In this conversation, we discuss Dana’s deep love and appreciation for cities and urban development. We talk about her goal of developing viable, dynamic, data-driven tools to empower residents and leaders to better deal with 21-century urban challenges. She feels driven by a mission that feels bigger than herself or the company.

We go on to discuss Dana’s experience at Schmidt Futures, her perspective on the concept of the “metaverse”, and founding a company while being the mother of young children.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Andrew Hart is the co-founder and CEO of Dent Reality, a company building the digital layer for the physical world. Andrew and his team have solved key technology problems across indoor mapping and accurate indoor location at scale. And they’ve created a user interface centered around people, not AR gimmicks.

Andrew is a CEO by day and pioneering developer by night. Prior to Dent Reality, Andrew pioneered the location-based AR space, building the most popular open-source project for Apple's AR platform, and demonstrated AR navigation and POI landmark experiences for the first time, which have since been implemented by Google and Apple.

Today, Dent Reality is working with two of the UK’s largest retailers to develop solutions for shoppers and store employees. Andrew views Dent Reality’s place to be similar to Stripe’s payment solution: a thin layer of technology that’s easy to integrate and solves all of the complexities of location, navigation, and mapping.

In this conversation, we go on to talk about the benefits of building a holistic solution rather than a series of loosely integrated point solutions as well as understanding where to draw the line between what you build and others build. We also discuss Andrew’s approach to building things customers value, a North Star, core values, and the transition from developer to CEO.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Kai Ströder is the co-founder and CEO of tooz, a company on a mission to develop cost-effective smartglasses for consumers.

Early in his career, Kai was a research fellow at the University of Stuttgart, where he also earned a Ph.D. in Strategic Management. Over the next decade, he worked across various groups at Carl Zeiss, the world’s leading, high-end optics company.

Among other projects, Kai has been responsible for activities in the field of augmented reality and data glasses. In 2018, he transferred the "Carl Zeiss Smart Optics" group, founded in 2015, to the joint venture "tooz technologies" initiated together with Deutsche Telekom. The tooz team, based in Germany, develops technologies and production processes for complete smart glass solutions geared toward the end consumer market.

In this conversation, Kai shares the origin story for tooz within Carl Zeiss, and one key attribute of their approach that sets them apart from many competitors: namely, an uncompromising focus on manufacturability at scale.

We go on to discuss some of the tradeoffs between diffractive waveguides, birdbath optics, and tooz’s curved waveguides. Kai describes some innovative aspects of the design, their target use cases, and their very thoughtful go-to-market plan that focuses on the size of the glasses, affordability, and the ease of purchasing from your optometrist.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Tomas Sluka is the CEO and co-founder of CREAL, a Swiss technology startup that developed and commercializes a radically new type of display that brings natural focal depth to a truly 3D visual experience within Augmented Reality.

The inspiration for CREAL originated with the first commercial VR and AR headsets back in 2014. Like many others, Tomas suffered from very strong eye-strain and lack of immersion. He realized that the problem came from nonexistent focal depth in the 3D imagery. Since then, he and his growing team have been working to solve these problems and dramatically improve the visual experience.

Prior to founding CREAL, Tomas worked as a research engineer at CERN’s particle detectors and as a researcher at EPFL on the development of electronic nano-devices. He earned a PhD in Mechatronics, is a co-/author of over 50 scientific publications—multiple in top-ranking journals—as well as 10 patent applications, and is a regular speaker at prestigious conferences.

In this conversation, we talk about the visual discomfort many of us feel, called vergence accommodation conflict, in today’s AR and VR devices. Tomas describes how our eyes work and the difference between natural 3D and the stereo 3D we get in today’s devices.

We discuss light fields, how CREAL is able to achieve them, and the implication on the display technology. We go on to discuss early applications of the technology, the path to lightfield AR glasses, and Tomas’s journey as a founder.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Nils Pihl is the CEO and co-founder of Auki Labs, a company solving the limitations of GPS to accurately position virtual content, particularly for shared experiences. Nils and the team at Auki are building advanced, peer-to-peer positioning protocols and AR cloud infrastructure to enable a new era of spatial computing.

Nils is also the CEO of Matterless Studios, a venture-backed startup creating AI companions and pets made for the augmented reality metaverse.

Prior to founding Auki Labs, Nils was a behavioral engineer who studied Meme Theory and was a practitioner of Memetic Engineering. He’s also a serial entrepreneur bringing forward some key lessons learned into his current endeavors.

In this conversation, Nils shares his perspective on AR as a natural and inevitable extension of human language, arguing that all language is meant to augment and enhance our shared experience of reality.

We go on to discuss Meme Theory, how it applies to AR, and explore Auki Labs’ unique positioning technology. Nils also shares some of the lessons learned from earlier startup experiences.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Paul Travers is the Founder and CEO of Vuzix, a leading supplier of Smart Glasses and Augmented Reality technologies and products for the consumer and enterprise markets.

Prior to Vuzix, Paul was an engineer at Eastman Kodak, innovating the future of digital cameras. He went on to become a serial entrepreneur, having started multiple hardware technology companies, including in sound cards for PCs and USB connectivity products.

Vuzix was formed more than 20 years ago, and through it, Paul has seen spatial computing technology evolve from the early days of VR in the mid-1990s to the highly capable AR smart glasses of today.

In this conversation, Paul describes the Vuzix hardware lineup, including the Blade and the M-series. We discuss how they’re being used, where they shine, and what’s special about the upcoming Shield device. The Shield will be one of the first devices with a µLED display, and emphasizes “wearability” over field of view or functionality. [quote]

We go on to discuss why wearability is so important and how much field of view is big enough to satisfy a large number of use cases. We also discuss the importance of µLED technology and how to solve for prescription at scale. Paul also describes how he wants to support OEMs in the consumer market and provides an overview of how Vuzix will invest the 100+ million dollars they have recently raised.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Susan Cummings is the Managing Director of Tiny Rebel Games and a founder of Fictioneers. Susan and her team were awarded a major UK grant for Augmented Reality storytelling, which led to "Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up." This effort was followed by the release this summer of "Wallace & Gromit: Fix Up the City", an ambitious city-scale AR game that takes place in San Francisco, Bristol, and Cardiff.

Including her work at Tiny Rebel, Susan has spent more than 20 years in game development and publishing. She was a key player at the origins of Rockstar games and held vital roles as the VP of Publishing and VP of Business Development at 2K games and parent, Take Two Interactive.

In this conversation, Susan shares insight into the origins of Grand Theft Auto and some other big deals and projects in the early days of console and PC games. She goes on to talk about the challenges in telling compelling stories with AR.

We also talk about some of the lessons learned in making compelling and accessible city-scale AR-based games for mobile and the challenges of “immersion” in see-through AR glasses.

(A quick note of disclosure: I’m an investor in Fantsmo, one of the partners Susan mentions when describing her efforts at Fictioneers.)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Alon Grinshpoon is the Co-founder and CEO of echo3D, a 3D-ready cloud platform that helps manage & deliver 3D, AR, and VR content to apps & devices everywhere. echo3D recently closed a $4M round of funding to feed continued growth after seeing a tremendous amount of momentum over the past year.

Alon started his career in the Isrealli Intelligence Service, working on encryption and cloud technologies. After earning a B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University, he spent several years as a software engineer working on improving the performance of cloud-based and client-server computer systems.

Alon went on to receive his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University with a focus on computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, and human-computer interaction.

In this conversation, we discuss how Alon’s background made him a good fit for solving the unique set of challenges for developing an AWS or Akamai for 3D. Alon is a passionate entrepreneur with great advice for early-stage startups, and we talk about his perspective on the concept of founder-market fit. [quote]

Alon goes on to discuss founder-investor fit, and the importance of pragmatically de-risking a startup as you go along. He also shares his funding and growth journey through the RLab and Techstars accelerators, and subsequent rounds of VC funding.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Neil Sarkar is the CEO and co-founder of AdHawk Microsystems, a company creating the first camera-free eye tracking solution that offers unprecedented speed, data quality and power efficiency.

Prior to AdHawk, Neil was a co-founder at ICSPI, which develops scanning probe instruments on a CMOS-MEMS technology platform. They are commercializing the world's first Single-Chip Atomic Force Microscope.

Previously Neil attended the University of Waterloo, where he earned a Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In this conversation, we discuss Micro Electrical Mechanical (or MEMs) technology and its applications. Neil shares his path to founding AdHawk and his experience bringing AdHawk’s innovations to market.

We go on to discuss how AdHawk is trying to positively impact people’s lives, what’s special about their approach, and how you can get your hands on their tech in the near future.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu is the co-founder and CEO of Preamble, a company on a mission to provide ethical guardrails for AI systems by creating an AI-as-a-Service with a focus on ethics and safety. 

Jon earned a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he discovered a passion for the coming age of VR and AR technologies. He went on to co-found Vergence Labs, which had ambitious plans to create the AR glasses of the future. 

Evan Spiegel shared that vision and brought Vergence Labs into Snap as its first acquisition. Jon’s work became the foundation for Spectacles, and he went on to be the Project Lead for the first version of Spectacles and the most recent version with a display.

In this conversation, Jon shares his perspective on the history, hurdles, and future of AR glasses. He also discusses his perspective on the risks and challenges of creating and engaging with AI systems, which among other risks, increases the likelihood of misinformation and manipulation.

He goes on to describe the path he and his team are taking at Preamble to create ethical guardrails for these systems.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Dave Haynes is a founding partner at FOV Ventures, an investment firm backing the founders who are building the Metaverse. FOV Ventures is a new fund with a focus on European-based startups at the pre-seed and seed stage.

Dave previously led HTC’s $100 million Vive X fund in EMEA and was part of the investment team at Seedcamp (Fund III). Prior to investing, Dave founded two startups in the music industry and was part of the founding team of SoundCloud.

In this conversation, Dave talks about his front-row seat to the evolution of the digital music industry and the parallels to the current AR/VR ecosystem. He describes his new fund, areas of investment focus, and how they think about current investment market conditions. He also talks about the risk of market timing as it relates to AR: [quote]

Dave goes on to share some advice for pre-seed startups as well as his perspective on the evolution of the market and the risks ahead.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Mike Wiemer is the CTO and co-founder of Mojo Vision, a company enabling invisible computing with their AR contact lenses. Mike is a brilliant and accomplished technologist who is unafraid of tackling hard problems…and he and his team have solved many on their way to successfully demonstrating their wearable contact lens—working inside somebody’s eye—earlier this summer.

Prior to Mojo Vision, Mike was the co-founder and President of SolarJunction, a company that developed innovative, multi-junction solar cells that set the record for conversion efficiency, twice. Previously, Mike spent 8 years at Stanford, working his way through a Bachelors, Masters, and a Ph.D. with an emphasis on semiconductor physics and optics.

In this conversation, Mike shares some insights from his experience at Solar Junction, and how he came to discover the opportunity for smart contact lenses. He breaks down the set of very hard problems to solve in making these AR contact lenses, and the success Mojo Vision has had in clearing those hurdles, as well as the recent milestone of creating a prototype that people can now wear. 

He talks about the challenges of Mojo Vision specifically and AR more generally. Foremost among those challenges is the solution isn’t about a single technological innovation, but the integration of several integrations into a cohesive system. He goes on to share a broader perspective of the opportunity he sees for smart contact lenses and AR glasses.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com, and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

Matt Miesnieks is currently the CEO and co-founder of LivingCities, a company reimagining social engagement in the era of the Metaverse. Many of you know Matt as a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on Augmented Reality. Matt was previously the CEO and co-founder of 6D.ai, a company that built tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences. Niantic acquired 6D in 2020.

Matt started his career in a number of engineering and business roles, before shifting his focus to Augmented Reality more than 12 years ago. Matt was head of customer development at Layar - an early consumer AR company. He founded Dekko, the first mobile mixed reality platform for iOS. Matt worked at Samsung as a director of product development in AR & VR. And he was a founding partner at Super Ventures—an early stage investor in AR & VR—before founding 6D.ai.

In this, the first of a two-part conversation, Matt shares the evolution of his perspective on AR and creating successful startups after 6d.ai’s sale to Niantic. He talks about the foundational observations and ingredients for creating something special with LivingCities. Part of that is finding a unique approach to tying the real world to the virtual.

Matt goes on to describe key technology trends, his thoughts on market timing for LivingCities, and gives some hints on what social engagement might look like in the future of blended reality.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com, and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

Today’s conversation is a continuation of my discussion with Matt Miesnieks about LivingCities. Joining us for part 2 are co-founders John Gaeta and Dennis Crowley.

John won an Oscar for his visual effects work on The Matrix movies, and after many additional creative and visual effects projects, including Speed Racer, he went on to co-found ILMxLAB as part of Lucusfilm. He then served as the SVP of Creative Strategy at Magic Leap before returning to work on the latest installment of The Matrix franchise.

Dennis Crowley was the co-founder and CEO of location intelligence apps, Dodgeball and Foursquare. Both companies focused on using mobile phones to connect people to each other in the real world. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005 and Foursquare is still thriving today as a location intelligence provider.

John and Dennis have joined Matt at LivingCities to explore new ways of blending the virtual and real worlds. But as Matt explains, they are not making a game; the bigger opportunity is in social engagement and communication.

They go on to discuss the hard problems they are excited to solve and provide some hints at new forms of social expression in a 3D spatial environment. They discuss the tradeoffs of different technology choices as well as their ambitions, and what they want to do differently or better compared to their previous entrepreneurial experiences.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com, and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

Glenn Snyder is the co-founder and CTO of Red 6, a company that has developed an Augmented Reality solution to allow real pilots flying real aircraft to see simulated threats and other training scenarios. The AR solution works outdoors, in the bright sun and within high speed, dynamic environments.

Glenn has long held a passion for aircraft, technology, and visual effects. After gaining acceptance to the Air Force Academy, he shifted course and attended Savannah College of Art and Design to earn a BFA in Visual Effects. He worked on visual effects as an artist, technical director, and director of pipeline for Hollywood blockbusters before starting his entrepreneurial journey. After working for several years on innovative VR and immersive experiences, he met Daniel Robinson, a fighter pilot who would become the co-founder and CEO of Red 6.

In this conversation, Glenn shares his background in visual effects and some of the inspiring and difficult moments in his career. He also discusses some of the challenges he and his team have overcome in creating their solution at Red 6, and some of the progress and experiences they’ve made so far.

Glenn also shares his hunger for hard problems and belief in the possible, and we start with a story about a fun and slightly crazy early tech demo using VR and remote control of a real car.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

Kyle Jackson is the co-founder and CEO of Talespin, a company making immersive learning a reality for the future of work.

Kyle is a serial entrepreneur who has worked at the intersection of technology and storytelling for over 20 years. After studying interactive multimedia design and then earning an BFA from the School of Cinema-Television at USC, Kyle has persistently been solving the hard problems around creating and distributing digital media at scale.

About 10 years ago, Kyle was digging into the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and the coming age of AR & VR, and thought something was missing.

Kyle believes mixed reality, in combination with AI, can enable us to have higher emotional intelligence and enhanced capabilities to communicate, learn and lead.

In this conversation, we get into Kyle’s entrepreneurial journey and some of the lessons he’s learned along the way. We dig into the origins of Talespin and how he transformed the company from being focused on servicing one-off projects into a product company that raised a $20M Series C round earlier this year. We also discuss the concept of “proof of skill” and the future of skill development for work.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Eric Marcellin-Dibon is the Co-founder and CEO of MicroOLED, and Mark Prince is the General Manager for ENGO product line. MicroOLED is a company that develops high-performance OLED microdisplays for near-to-eye applications. Power efficiency and brightness are two areas where they excel, and the company is bringing that display technology to life through the ENGO Eyewear product line.

Eric studied physics, optics, and electronics in grad school before working on visual systems for defense contractor Thales. He then went on to work at, what is today named Technicolor, but back then was Thomson, on imager technologies and strategic sourcing. The company MicroOLED grew out of the work at Thomson Technicolor.

Mark spent the majority of his career in sales and marketing—initially in the ski industry, and then in technology and connected devices. Recent experiences include Head of Retail for Nokia Health, VP of Consumer Business for Withinings, and CEO of Qardio, a health monitoring technology company. Now he’s the General Manager of the ENGO product line and the Chief Business Officer of MicroOLED.

In this conversation, we discuss how MicroOLED competes against Sony as well as their initial focus for the ENGO product line. More generally, Eric talks about his perspective on what will enable AR glasses to achieve mass adoption.

We go on to discuss the concept of “light AR”, the thinking behind the full-stack platform offered by MicroOLED called ActiveLook, and their go-to-market strategy. We also discuss the types of early use cases that will motivate users to buy.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com, and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

David King Lassman is the founder of GigXR, a global provider of immersive 3D training solutions that transform collaborative learning, with an initial focus on healthcare.

David is a serial entrepreneur who grew up with a passion for music, and has since started 6 companies. His companies have spanned education technology, advertising technology, online content, and social media. He’s also raised an investment fund and operated as a VC.

Now with GigXR, David is reimagining training for healthcare workers using mixed reality devices.

In this conversation, we dig into GigXR, the impact of XR training on healthcare education and how it differs from VR. Dave also shares their strategy for growth and how he views the current investment appetite for XR companies.

David starts with some stories of his musical and entrepreneurial journey and has some sage advice to pass along.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Chen Zhang and Matt Udvari are co-founders of Aquifer, a company that has developed a SaaS platform to enable creators and teams create studio-level animated video without studios.

Matt is a polymath who has persistently pursued education and work experiences across computer science, music, and storytelling. His career has spanned video game design, executive creative director, CTO at a mobile SaaS startup, and filmmaker. Most recently, Matt started Part Time Evil as a story-based technology studio with leading expertise in VR, AR, video games, and mobile.

Chen spent the early part of her career in project management, marketing, and user experience design at major brands, including three years at Frog Design. She then joined Matt at Part Time Evil as COO before co-founding Aquifer as the CEO. Aquifer originated from Matt’s efforts as a filmmaker and Chen’s insight into customer needs.

In this conversation, Chen and Matt describe how they are helping big and small brands leverage the characters they’ve created through high-quality 3D animation, giving them new ways to tell stories across a variety of platforms.

We get into some of the nuances of product management, namely balancing near- and long-term goals, as well as the differences in leading a consultancy vs product-oriented company. We also explore how to ask customers questions about what they really want and need.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Today I am kicking off 2023 with another annual monologue. I hope you and your family were able to have a safe and relaxing holiday, even in the face of another arctic blast and spate of viral diseases.

This is the sixth such annual kickoff episode, and when looking back at my notes from last year, the big surprise from 2022 was the resounding commitment shown by Meta and others to continued investment in VR & AR technologies, despite heavy financial losses and Wall Street pressure. That commitment is necessary to see our industry through its slow progress for AR technology, and its still nascent growing pains.

I’m going to share my take on some of the highlights of 2022 and what we might see in 2023 as it relates to augmented reality.

Please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/thearshow.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Damir First is the co-founder and CCO of Matterless, a company creating genre-defining experiences in shared augmented reality—emphasis on “shared.”

Early in his career, Damir earned a Master of Arts in both Sociology and Art History before pursuing his Ph.D. in Anthropology. He has been a lecturer for a number of courses spanning design, history, architecture, and art, and he has since worked in blockchain technologies as well as a narrative designer for popular video games.

While a tech entrepreneur and academic, Damir is a D&D dungeon master at heart who thinks deeply about the role of technology within our human experience.

In this conversation, Damir shares his perspective on how AR fits within the spectrum of key enabling technologies, namely, as the next step in human communication.

Damir goes on to share what makes their technology unique, how the approach addresses privacy, the types of experiences they are creating and why, and the power of transformative narratives.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Ari Grobman is the CEO of Lumus, a company developing a novel optics solution for AR glasses. 

Before going any further, let me provide a little perspective up front: When I consider the biggest hurdles to delivering consumer-grade AR, optics and displays are at the top of the list. The display and the combiner optics are two separate, but intimately connected, engineering challenges. Lumus sells an “optical engine” that includes a microdisplay from a third party, but their real magic is in the combiner optics, the part that directs the light from the display system into our eyes and combines it with light from the real world.

Lumus has taken a different technical approach than most waveguide combiner optic companies. Rather than use the principles of diffraction to bend the light into and out of the lens, Lumus uses the principles of reflection—effectively partial mirrors—to get the light into and then out of the lens. Proponents of the diffractive approach cite that the manufacturing process is relatively easier and cheaper, and the performance of the lens is good enough with a very thin formfactor. Lumus argues its solution provides better performance with a manufacturing process that is good enough to be reasonably priced for consumer-grade glasses as the market scales.

Back to Ari…. Ari spent most of the early part of his career in sales, including 10 years as the VP of Sales and Business Development at Lumus before being promoted to CEO about 6 years ago. Ari has led his team through multiple successful customer engagements, advancements in R&D, and continued success in military and enterprise sales. In fact, Lumus technology is used by spinal surgeons across the US as well as fighter pilots flying A10 and F16 aircraft.

In this conversation, Ari discusses what he’s seeing generally across their various customer engagements, including some of the product strategy, potential early use cases, and the timing of new market entries. As a way to help frame some of the discussion, Ari describes some of the similarities and differences between components for smartphones and smartglasses. 

Ari goes on to discuss recent advancements the company has made in both the waveguide technology—namely delivering a bigger virtual image from a smaller display by expanding the image in two dimensions within the lens—as well as progress in improving the manufacturability of the lenses. Ari also describes how Lumus sets themselves apart from the competition in enabling both enterprise and consumer-grade smartglasses.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Cayden Pierce describes himself as a transhumanist hacker working to enhance our intelligence using AI, smartglasses, and eventually, neurotech.

Cayden posts regularly about the current state of smartglasses and is actively developing open source smartglasses hardware and middleware solutions. To support those efforts and to facilitate insights between end users and smartglass makers, he recently started the H2O Smartglasses community.

Cayden is also working on a contextual search engine at Emex Labs to help deliver meaningful utility to the smartglasses of the future.

In this conversation, we dive deep into potential use cases, current smartglasses hardware, and the potential of contextual search engines. Cayden goes on to describe his open source hardware solution as well as the thinking and work behind a middleware solution he calls the wearable intelligence system.

Cayden has developed a broad and deep understanding of the coming age of smartglasses, and I think you’ll really enjoy the conversation.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

David Jiang is the CEO and founder of VITURE, a company creating a smartglasses solution for video gaming and streaming content.

After studying human computer interaction and industrial design at university in China, David continued his studies into human computer interaction at Harvard, where he fell in love with the Boston Celtics basketball team.

David joined Google in the early years of their work on Google Glass and went on to become the Chief Designer and Head of AR for AI company, Rokid. David then became CEO of Meteorolite, where he pushed the boundaries of AR positioning technology and designed a number of AR experiences for retail and theme parks, before setting out on his own with VITURE.

In this conversation, David shares some of the challenges of human computer interaction design, and he describes the early rationale for Google to make Google Glass. He goes on to explain where they missed the mark and the lessons he learned from that experience. He describes how he continued to refine his understanding through his enterprise-focused work at Rokid and the B2B2C-focused work at Meteorolite.

He summarizes four factors affecting consumer adoption and applies them to AR glasses and his work at VITURE. There we get into the core use case, some product details, his successful customer engagement Kickstarter, and how he recruited NBA player Gordon Hayward to endorse the product.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Stan Larroque is the CEO and co-founder of Lynx, a company creating the first all-in-one mixed reality headset. The Lynx R1 offers a unique VR device with good video-passthrough of the real world to create mixed reality experiences.

Stan was inspired by the early Oculus device, the DK2, but wanted a better connection to the real world. As he finished his university education, he embarked on the journey to establish the leading European mixed reality hardware technology company. Along the way, he’s received support from industry founders and insiders including Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey, and optics expert, Bernard Kress, of Microsoft and Google.

In this conversation, Stan shares how his passion, a great team, and a few mentors have helped shape the company into Europe’s leading mixed reality hardware company.

Stan starts by laying the foundation for why he believes the Lynx approach to video passthrough is the right path for the market.

Stan goes on to touch on:

- the retention issue for VR devices,

- why the fully-featured AR headsets such as Hololens will cease to exist,

- his approach to establishing a contender to compete against Meta,

- Lynx’s approach to privacy, and

- the opportunity and imperative of being based in Europe.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Ohto Pentikäinen and Jamin Hu are the co-founders of Doublepoint, a company creating human-computer interaction technologies which are initially focused on detecting the moment of touching an object.

Ohto is a serial entrepreneur having been a co-founder and CEO twice by the age of 20 before co-founding Doublepoint. His earliest venture was reimagining the high school learning experience by creating a platform for multidisciplinary, self-directed learning.

Jamin has a passion for music and earned a degree in Classical Piano Performance before expanding his focus to pursue a masters degree in biomedical engineering.

In this conversation, Ohto and Jamin share how they crafted a unique high school curriculum to train entrepreneurs, what's missing in AR and other gesture sensing tech, and how mixing piano with bio engineering results in a new type of touch sensing technology.

They go on to share their vision for the company and their approach to getting there.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Maryam Sabour is the General Manager and Head of Business for the AR Headsets group at Niantic, where the goal is to enable everyday adventures and real-life social interaction through location-based augmented reality.

Maryam studied law and business at university, going on to earn a Juris Doctorate at McGill University. Early in her career, she was drawn to entrepreneurship, having founded an e-commerce company and a legal clinic for startups.

Maryam was drawn into the world of VR, where she spent several years working as a founder or consultant across several projects, before taking on the role of the business development lead for Niantic’s then nascent Lightship AR platform about 5 years ago.

In this conversation, Maryam shares her path from law to entrepreneurship to Niantic, and explains why Niantic became a hardware innovator.

Maryam goes on to discuss: 

- the tradeoffs and challenges in making a device suitable for outdoor gaming, 

- some lessons learned from early explorations, 

- how the hardware fits into the broader Niantic strategy, 

- and how the company thinks about privacy.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses. 

He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

He was also recently the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders.

Like my previous interviews with Karl, this was a long and wide ranging conversation that I split into multiple parts. In this first part, we touch on:

- rise and fall of high-end digital photography, 

- silicon-based camera sensors, 

- challenges of unique manufacturing processes have with volume and price, 

- the downsides of the smartphone supply chain, 

- rumors about Apple's efforts in VR and AR, 

- the size of the VR market, 

- the military and enterprise opportunity for AR, 

- "four-corner markets" and how they apply to VR & AR, and

- the benefits and risks of video-passthrough VR.

Part 2 will continue with a deeper dive into µLED display and popular optics technologies.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses. 

He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

He was also recently the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders.

In the second part of my conversation with Karl, we talk about:

- the current state of µLED tech, 

- challenges with AR displays and optics, 

- diffractive vs reflective waveguides, 

- the unique opportunity for Lumus, 

- history/comparable of DLP and LCOS to today's pursuit of µLED and AR glasses, 

- importance of "hands free" and implications on device input, 

- if or when AR glasses will replace a smartphone, 

- which technologies will win in the mid and long term.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop, multiplayer games to life.

Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017.

Previously Jeri was a race car driver, computer shop owner, and toy industry veteran. She was also recruited to Valve to lead the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. She contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller. It’s also where the story of Tilt Five originates.

I last chatted with Jeri as she was wrapping up a Kickstarter campaign for Tilt Five, just prior to COVID.

In this conversation, the first of two parts, we rewind the story back to its origins at Valve and the early decisions about what to do with their technical innovations. We continue the story through the trials and tribulations of an underfunded hardware company fighting to survive, and Jeri brings us to the present day, sharing many insights along the way.

Jeri describes how she and her team have found a solution to a difficult set of problems for AR glasses, and now Tilt Five is generally available and establishing a niche that combines the best of board games and video games.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop, multiplayer games to life.

Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017.

Previously Jeri was a race car driver, computer shop owner, and toy industry veteran. She was also recruited to Valve to lead the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. She contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller. It’s also where the story of Tilt Five originates.

In this conversation, the second of two parts, Jeri shares her fundraising journey and offers some practical advice. She offers an honest look at early product feedback and discusses what users really care about. <quote>

Jeri goes on to share a deep reflection on mentorship, including important mentors in her life and how best to find and utilize your own. We also touch on AI for creators and game players, and given this was recorded before Apple’s announcement about the Vision Pro headset, she shares her expectations for the device and its impact on Tilt Five.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Sophia Dominguez is the Director of AR Platform Partnerships and Ecosystem at Snap, where she’s been the last three years.

Previously, she started the widely followed “All Things VR” newsletter and joined Rothenberg Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence before co-founding her first company, SVRF. There she created the first API and SDKs for searching and rendering 3D face filters. They powered over 280M AR experiences, and Sophia successfully sold the company to Poplar before joining Snap.

Sophia began her career by attending NYU with a focus on how technology impacts human interaction. She then organized one of the world’s first wearable technology conferences, before working in product and operations for a startup focused on visual messaging.

In this, the first of a two-part conversation, Sophia shares a number of insights, including:
- her unique and early perspective on head-worn AR,
- the pivot she took at her VR platform startup,
- how Snap sees the evolution of AR in wearables,
- some of the numbers around AR usage at Snap,
- the evolution of the partner program, and
- the core pillars of Snap's AR platform focus including the recent addition of shopping and commerce.

Sophia describes how Snap has set a path to become the comprehensive developer platform of choice in AR.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Sophia Dominguez is the Director of AR Platform Partnerships and Ecosystem at Snap, where she’s been the last three years.

Previously, she started the widely followed “All Things VR” newsletter and joined Rothenberg Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence before co-founding her first company, SVRF. There she created the first API and SDKs for searching and rendering 3D face filters. They powered over 280M AR experiences, and Sophia successfully sold the company to Poplar before joining Snap.

Sophia began her career by attending NYU with a focus on how technology impacts human interaction. She then organized one of the world’s first wearable technology conferences, before working in product and operations for a startup focused on visual messaging.

In this, the second of our two-part conversation, Sophia talks more about utility and the role technology should overtly play in our lives.

We go on to talk about about:
- Snap’s wearables strategy as well as the hopes and recognized gaps,
- expected benefits of being laser focused on AR rather than also working on VR or MR,
- Snap’s perspective on privacy, and
- how recent advancements in AI fit into AR.

As an added bonus in this episode, we hear from two Snap partners:
- Yusuf Omar, co-founder of SEEN, and
- Michael Nicoll, founder and Creative Director at BLNK Digital

I had a chance to briefly chat with them both at the recent Snap Partner Summit, and we’ll start the episode there.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

David Fattal is the founder and CTO of Leia, a company dedicated to revolutionizing visual experiences through light field display technologies. Lightfield displays are able to create 3D images without glasses. You might remember Leia for its work on the LumePad tablets and the Hydrogen One Smartphone from Red.

David is a quantum physicist who got his Ph.D. from Stanford with a focus on Quantum Computing and Quantum Communications. His research experience led him to HP Labs, which was at the forefront of Quantum Information Processing. He co-authored numerous scientific papers at both institutions.

A moment of serendipity while at HP Labs led to the creation of Leia. David spun the company out of HP in 2014 and has been the chief innovator since.

In this conversation, David makes the case for why every screen should be capable of 3D. He goes on to discuss:
- the basics of quantum computing,
- how his pursuits in quantum computing led to new type of display technology,
- what are light fields, why consumer should care and early use cases,
- the challenges of bringing light fields to mobile devices and lessons learned from working with Red cameras in building a mobile phone,
- and their go-to-market strategy.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

acine Achiakh is the co-founder and CEO of Wisear, a company creating neural interface devices for AR glasses and other wearables.

They are packing their technology into normal-looking earphones and working to deliver the capabilities of the mouse and keyboard, hands free.

Earlier in his career, Yacine studied mathematics and business before joining Criteo, a fast-growing tech unicorn in France. There he led AI-driven products focused on advertising technology. It was also there he met his co-founder, Alain Sirois, who has a background in neurotechnology.

You will find Yacine on stage at AWE EU in Vienna in October 2023.

Replay of an interview originally published in September 2022:

Matt Miesnieks is currently the CEO and co-founder of LivingCities, a company reimagining social engagement in the era of the Metaverse. Many of you know Matt as a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on Augmented Reality. Matt was previously the CEO and co-founder of 6D.ai, a company that built tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences. Niantic acquired 6D in 2020.

Matt started his career in a number of engineering and business roles, before shifting his focus to Augmented Reality more than 12 years ago. Matt was head of customer development at Layar - an early consumer AR company. He founded Dekko, the first mobile mixed reality platform for iOS. Matt worked at Samsung as a director of product development in AR & VR. And he was a founding partner at Super Ventures—an early stage investor in AR & VR—before founding 6D.ai.

In this, the first of a two-part conversation, Matt shares the evolution of his perspective on AR and creating successful startups after 6d.ai’s sale to Niantic. He talks about the foundational observations and ingredients for creating something special with LivingCities. Part of that is finding a unique approach to tying the real world to the virtual.

Matt goes on to describe key technology trends, his thoughts on market timing for LivingCities, and gives some hints on what social engagement might look like in the future of blended reality.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com, and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

Replay of an interview originally published in September 2022:

Today’s conversation is a continuation of my discussion with Matt Miesnieks about LivingCities. Joining us for part 2 are co-founders John Gaeta and Dennis Crowley.

John won an Oscar for his visual effects work on The Matrix movies, and after many additional creative and visual effects projects, including Speed Racer, he went on to co-found ILMxLAB as part of Lucusfilm. He then served as the SVP of Creative Strategy at Magic Leap before returning to work on the latest installment of The Matrix franchise.

Dennis Crowley was the co-founder and CEO of location intelligence apps, Dodgeball and Foursquare. Both companies focused on using mobile phones to connect people to each other in the real world. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005 and Foursquare is still thriving today as a location intelligence provider.

John and Dennis have joined Matt at LivingCities to explore new ways of blending the virtual and real worlds. But as Matt explains, they are not making a game; the bigger opportunity is in social engagement and communication.

They go on to discuss the hard problems they are excited to solve and provide some hints at new forms of social expression in a 3D spatial environment. They discuss the tradeoffs of different technology choices as well as their ambitions, and what they want to do differently or better compared to their previous entrepreneurial experiences.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com, and become a patron at patreon.com/theARshow.

Replay of an interview originally published in April 2023:

Maryam Sabour is the General Manager and Head of Business for the AR Headsets group at Niantic, where the goal is to enable everyday adventures and real-life social interaction through location-based augmented reality.

Maryam studied law and business at university, going on to earn a Juris Doctorate at McGill University. Early in her career, she was drawn to entrepreneurship, having founded an e-commerce company and a legal clinic for startups.

Maryam was drawn into the world of VR, where she spent several years working as a founder or consultant across several projects, before taking on the role of the business development lead for Niantic’s then nascent Lightship AR platform about 5 years ago.

In this conversation, Maryam shares her path from law to entrepreneurship to Niantic, and explains why Niantic became a hardware innovator.

Maryam goes on to discuss: 

- the tradeoffs and challenges in making a device suitable for outdoor gaming, 

- some lessons learned from early explorations, 

- how the hardware fits into the broader Niantic strategy, 

- and how the company thinks about privacy.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Ross Finman is the CEO of Augmodo, a company utilizing AI and AR to revolutionize grocery store experiences and economics starting with the personal shoppers who fulfill online grocery purchases.

Previously Ross spent 4 ½ years at Niantic. There he founded the AR mapping and Visual Positioning System (VPS) effort before becoming the AR Strategy Lead and then the general manager for the AR Headset group.

He joined Niantic through the acquisition of his first startup, Escher Reality, which became the foundation for Niantic’s AR Platform, now called Lightship.

He started Escher Reality as he was finishing his Ph.D. in Robotics from MIT, after previously completing his undergrad in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

In this conversation, the first of two parts, Ross describes his perspective on the AR market opportunity. Specifically, we get into his journey at Escher Reality: how it started, a couple of key moments during the company’s early days, the sale process to Niantic, and some lesson learned along the way.

He discusses some reflections on his time at Niantic, including the open mindset they had about developing new hardware. And he shares his current perspective on where AR has the most immediate potential.

We come back in part 2 with a discussion about his current startup, Augmodo.

Links From The Episode

- Article: [Innovating Category Management – Groceryshop 2023](https://retailwire.com/blog/innovating-category-management-groceryshop-2023/) by Georges Mirza for RetailWire

- Article: [Pokémon GO creator Niantic buys Escher Reality AR startup](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/01/niantic-buy-escher-reality-ar-startup/) by Lucas Matney for TechCrunch…and related [Niantic blog post](https://nianticlabs.com/news/escherreality).

- Article: [BMW introduces Smartglasses for Motorcycling](https://mixed-news.com/en/bmw-connectedride-smartglasses-announced/) Benjamin Danneberg for Mixed News

- Video: [Star Wars: Jedi Challenges Review - Lenovo Mirage AR Mobile Headset](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-hsJ0xeaT4) by TWiT Tech Podcast Network

- Patent: [Augmented Reality Hat](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2022219603A1/en) by Ross Finman, Michael Miller, and Maryam Sabour

- YouTube Channel: [Perun](https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU)—an Australian covering the military industrial complex and national military investment strategy.

- [Episode Transcript](https://otter.ai/u/5KVmmaOHVjMliriCJLzbsA1Tj8E)

Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Ross Finman is the CEO of Augmodo, a company utilizing AI and AR to revolutionize grocery store experiences and economics starting with the personal shoppers who fulfill online grocery purchases.

Previously Ross spent 4 ½ years at Niantic. There he founded the AR mapping and Visual Positioning System (VPS) effort before becoming the AR Strategy Lead and then the general manager for the AR Headset group.

He joined Niantic through the acquisition of his first startup, Escher Reality, which became the foundation for Niantic’s AR Platform, now called Lightship.

He started Escher Reality as he was finishing his Ph.D. in Robotics from MIT, after previously completing his undergrad in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

In this conversation, the second of two parts, Ross digs into his current startup, Augmodo.

We discuss:

- the problem they are solving,
- the importance and approach to customer discovery,
- how AR and AI work together to form a solution,
- why now is the right timing and this the right opportunity, and
- some recent progress and announcements.

Ross goes on to share additional lessons learned and advice for deep tech startup founders.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Links From The Episode

- Article: [Innovating Category Management – Groceryshop 2023](https://retailwire.com/blog/innovating-category-management-groceryshop-2023/) by Georges Mirza for RetailWire

- Article: [Pokémon GO creator Niantic buys Escher Reality AR startup](https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/01/niantic-buy-escher-reality-ar-startup/) by Lucas Matney for TechCrunch…and related [Niantic blog post](https://nianticlabs.com/news/escherreality).

- Article: [BMW introduces Smartglasses for Motorcycling](https://mixed-news.com/en/bmw-connectedride-smartglasses-announced/) Benjamin Danneberg for Mixed News

- Video: [Star Wars: Jedi Challenges Review - Lenovo Mirage AR Mobile Headset](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-hsJ0xeaT4) by TWiT Tech Podcast Network

- Patent: [Augmented Reality Hat](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2022219603A1/en) by Ross Finman, Michael Miller, and Maryam Sabour

- YouTube Channel: [Perun](https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU)—an Australian covering the military industrial complex and national military investment strategy.

- [Episode Transcript - Part 1](https://otter.ai/u/5KVmmaOHVjMliriCJLzbsA1Tj8E)

- [Episode Transcript - Part 2](https://otter.ai/u/m50rbDodqw1gwz1NHJgMytTr9vw)

Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Evan Rose is the founder and president of Rose Digital, a company specializing in using augmented reality to help brands engage and delight their customers. Beyond that, Rose Digital serves as an innovation partner for its clients.

On the side, Evan is the founder of AR Post, one of the leading news sources for AR and VR. He’s also the co-founder and board president of The Steve Fund, which is the nation’s first organization focused on supporting the mental health and emotional well-being of college students of color.

Prior to Rose Digital, Evan worked in finance at hedge funds and investment banks before pursuing his desire to create, and learning how to code. Evan showed his entrepreneurial drive early in life and then went on to attend Harvard to study anthropology.

In this conversation, Evan describes his desire and early efforts to create and add value to the world. He goes on to describe:

- how Rose Digital got started,

- examples of how they are operating at the cutting edge of AR/VR and machine learning,

- being the "Woz" to the client's Jobs-like vision,

- whether clients/users know what they want,

- potential implications and impact of the Apple Vision Pro device,

- advice for startup founders borne from the experience of working with major brands, and

- the challenges of being one of the fastest growing companies (as recognized by INC for the last four years).

Links From The Episode

- Site: AR Post – source for the latest news, reviews and opinions on augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality technologies.

- Article: [ROSE Partners With Premier League for AR Experience Celebrating Summer Series](https://arpost.co/2023/07/12/rose-premier-league-ar-experience/) by Jon Jaehnig for AR Post

- Case Study: [Bloomingdale's celebrates 150 Years with AR Catalog](https://www.8thwall.com/customer-work/bloomingdales)

- Article: [Mastercard Launch Priceless Platform with Partners ROSE](https://www.xrtoday.com/augmented-reality/mastercard-launch-priceless-platform-with-partners-rose/) by XR Today

- Article: [ROSE and Mastercard Augment the Miami Design District in a New Immersive Experience](https://arpost.co/2023/01/11/rose-mastercard-miami-immersive-experience/) by Jon Jaehnig for AR Post

- Article: [FT ranking: The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies 2022](https://www.ft.com/content/6ee8f978-a2e0-4644-b7c7-0718a334adb7) and [INC profile](https://www.inc.com/profile/rose-digital)

- Book: [Daemon](https://amzn.to/3FHr7Ko) by Daniel Suarez

- Book: [Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears](https://amzn.to/3QIiHsQ) by William Hertling

- [Episode Transcript](https://otter.ai/u/sV_2KIrnG9Z8SASF4eTMMgA53zw)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Kirin Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Illumix, a company building the digital infrastructure for real world venues.

You may be familiar with Illumix if you’re a fan of the horror franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and the mobile game, Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Delivery. While the game found a tremendous amount of success, the company has shifted its focus to enterprise customers and raised $18M in Series A financing in early 2023.

Prior to founding Illumix, Kirin was the founder and Executive Director of Shine for Girls, whose mission is to transform the lives of middle school girls by cultivating a passion for mathematics through a program that incorporates both math and dance.

Kirin has a BS in Theoretical Math and Computer Science from MIT as well as three Masters degrees spanning mathematics, machine learning, and business from Cambridge, The London School of Economics, and Stanford.

Kirin and her team have been on this journey for over six years now. Kirin originally joined the podcast back in early 2021. In our most recent conversation, she shares how the company’s focus has evolved to working with major venues and brands, such as theme parks or sports stadiums, to provide the digital infrastructure for guest experiences.

We go on to talk about:
- the evolution of the company as they went through the Disney Accelerator in 2021,
- how they are working with major venues and expanding consumer experiences,
- the underlying cultural and technology shifts that are helping to drive success,
- the fundraising journey,
- confidence - how to build it and how to lose it, and
- setting the right mindset to thrive during the fundraising process.

Links From The Episode

- Article: [Kirin Sinha’s Illumix AR Tech Could Be A Fashion Game Changer With New Round Of Investment](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccasuhrawardi/2023/03/20/kirin-sinhas-illumix-ar-tech-could-be-a-fashion-game-changer-with-new-round-of-investment/?sh=3a2f30fd1aea) by Rebecca Suhrawardi for Forbes

- Article: [Kirin Sinha Is Leading the AR Charge With Illumix](https://foundr.com/articles/building-a-business/kirin-sinha) by Luke Ferris for Foundr

- Article: [Mark Cuban just broke one of his own investment rules]() by Eleanor Pringle for Fortune

- Video: [Mixing the Digital and Real Worlds at Disney’s Parks](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-12-16/mixing-the-digital-and-real-worlds-at-disney-s-parks-video) by Bloomberg Technology

- Article: [Disney Accelerator Showcases Eight Companies at 2021 Demo Day](https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-accelerator-showcases-eight-companies-at-2021-demo-day/)

- Book: [Mythos – Book 1 of 3: Stephen Fry's Greek Myths](https://amzn.to/47rvxkX) by Stephen Fry. The hardcover is excellent. Also highly recommended as an audiobook.

- Book: [The Alchemist](https://www.amazon.com/Alchemist-Paulo-Coelho/dp/0062315005/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2Q2FE3UVMGHXA&keywords=the+alchemist+by+paulo+coelho&qid=1700519903&s=books&sprefix=the+alchemist+by+paulo+coelho%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-1) by Paulo Coelho

- Other handles: [Kirin](https://www.instagram.com/kirinsinha/) and [Illumix](https://www.instagram.com/illumixofficial/) on Instagram

- [Episode Transcript](https://otter.ai/u/n6nwMYUeDVj14fvVzARjz-acOnI)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Bobak Tavangar is the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant Labs, a company creating an open-source AR glasses hardware platform and pairing that with powerful generative AI models to help you engage with the real world.

Bobak studied at George Washington and Georgetown universities before completing a graduate degree at Cambridge University.

Bobak is a serial entrepreneur with a core theme running through his entrepreneurial experiences: how to create better ways for people to find and utilize information based on the context of where they are and what’s around them.

Bobak also worked for a while as a program lead at Apple.

In this conversation, Bobak covers a number of topics, including:

- dating advice for physicists,
- finding the essential essence of a product,
- his rationale for developing open source AR hardware,
- the powerful combination of generative AI and AR,
- the lure of pursuing a broad set of use cases vs being laser focused,
- recent fundraising success and advice,
- where the company is going,
- and more.

Links From The Episode

- Article: [This AR Monocle Device Is Designed To Be Hacked](https://vrscout.com/news/this-ar-monocle-device-is-designed-to-be-hacked/) by Kyle Melnick for VRScout

- Article: [Singapore AI-Powered AR Wearable Startup Scores $3 Million From Oculus And Siri Cofounders](https://www.forbes.com/sites/zinnialee/2023/06/28/singapore-ai-powered-ar-wearable-startup-scores-3-million-from-oculus-and-siri-cofounders/?sh=47e427995d2a) by Zinnia Lee for Forbes

- Article: [Brilliant Labs raises $3M for generative AI-based AR glasses](https://venturebeat.com/metaverse/brilliant-labs-raises-3m-for-generative-ai-based-ar-glasses/) by Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat

- Article: [Brilliant Labs Monocle: The World's Smallest AR Glass Is Here!](​​https://blog.learnxr.io/extended-reality/brilliant-labs-monocle-review) by Dilmer Valecillos for Learn XR

- Video: [Monocle: The Future of Open Source AR + Interview with the CEO!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N3TPATaFyo) by Sumit Basra

- Book: [The Creative Act: A Way of Being](https://amzn.to/3Rb0suO) by Rick Rubin

- [Episode Transcript](https://otter.ai/u/IFvUlHLeMMXLtkDvGlKTe2ORnLY)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Yi Xu is the director of XR Technology at OPPO, a leading Android smartphone company that's innovating in AR with their Air Glass product line.

Prior to OPPO, Yi received a PhD in computer science, specializing in computer vision. He utilized these skills as computer scientist and engineer at GE Global Research and CapsoVision, working on a number of projects revolving around 3D computer vision. He then worked as a technical leader at JD. com, shaping the roadmap for their mobile augmented reality research.

Yi then joined OPPO in 2019 as the lab manager of Mixed Reality Lab, and quickly rose to be the company wide director of XR Technology. In this role, Yi remains close to the product and technology as he leads the development of Oppo's AR and MR product lines.

In this conversation, Yi describes his early interest in 3D and computer vision, and how this led to a passion for XR. Yi goes on to describe why OPPO, a major Android OEM, is so interested in developing smart glasses and similar technology as well as the use cases that he sees as killer apps for consumer smart glasses.

Yi stresses OPPO’s focus on design, so we go in depth on comfort, aesthetics, and requirements for smart glasses that consumers will actually wear. We also take a tangent to discuss how generative AI, both textual and visual, might help form the future of AR interfaces. Yi also discusses the massive technical challenges in the way of achieving this vision, and how OPPO is tackling those challenges.

Links From The Episode

- Review: [The Oppo Air Glass 2 are the first AR glasses I could see myself using](https://www.trustedreviews.com/opinion/the-oppo-air-glass-2-are-the-first-ar-glasses-i-could-see-myself-using-4305360) by Lewis Painter for Trusted Reviews

- Article: [The OPPO Air Glass 2 Is Easily the Most Fashionable Sleek AR Wearable on Display at MWC 2023](https://www.yankodesign.com/2023/02/28/the-oppo-air-glass-2-is-easily-the-most-fashionably-sleek-ar-wearable-on-display-at-mwc-2023/) by Sarang Sheth for Yanko Design

- Article: [OPPO pursues tech-augmented reality via MR & Health Science](https://www.ungeek.ph/2023/12/oppos-pursues-tech-augmented-reality-via-mr-health-science/) by Colin Chan for UnGeek

- Press Release: [OPPO Empowers Collaborative XR Innovation with the Launch of OPPO MR Glass Developer Edition for Snapdragon Spaces™ XR Developers Platform at AWE 2023](https://www.oppo.com/en/newsroom/press/oppo-mr-glass-developer-edition-launch-at-awe-2023/)

- Blog Post: [Introducing Smart Glass | AIR GLASS 2](https://communityin.oppo.com/thread/1222179266759491585)

- Press Release: [OPPO Introduces Air Glass, Featuring Creative Cicada Wing Design and Self-designed Spark Micro Projector](https://www.oppo.com/en/newsroom/press/oppo-air-glass/) - about the original Air Glass

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Michael Hoffman, or “Hoff” as most know him, is the co-founder and CEO at IQXR, a company solving the hardest problems facing global-scale, enterprise XR deployments, and doing so with an open source approach.

Previously Michael spent nearly a decade working with the Microsoft Hololens team. He was a Principal Engineering Lead at Microsoft for a couple of years, left to be the founding partner of Object theTheory, where he and his team worked with enterprises to leverage AR and VR technologies, often in combination with IoT and AI/Machine Learning. And then he went back to Microsoft for a couple of years to lead the development of the Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) project.

Earlier in his career, Michael worked in software engineering roles at Google, Nike, and several startups.

In this conversation, Hoff describes how 3D visualization, with AR and VR technologies, changes our comprehension of digital information, contributes to the value of having your hands free to interact with the world, and enables better efficiency and better insights.

Within the enterprise setting, Hoff notes it’s relatively easy to get to a pilot and prove value, but it’s really difficult to deliver that value at scale.

We go on to talk about making AR/VR solutions viable within an enterprise setting at scale, including challenges around visual and audio haptics, working both online and offline, and other key bits of plumbing, as well as the misconceptions that many enterprises have about the technology.

We also discuss:
- the rationale and corporate strategy for building open source solutions,
- the role of AI in accelerating software and content development,
- the art of the AI prompt, and
- how Apple Vision Pro accelerates the market.

Hoff wraps up by discussing neurodivergence and his own growing awareness and acceptance of the challenges and benefits of neurodivergence for both his children and himself.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Links From The Episode
- Press Release: [Microsoft Talent Joins The Mesmerise Group to Drive Growth of Immersive Technology Solutions for the Enterprise](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/microsoft-talent-joins-the-mesmerise-group-to-drive-growth-of-immersive-technology-solutions-for-the-enterprise-301856247.html)
- Article: [What is ikigai and how can it change my life?](https://www.betterup.com/blog/what-is-ikigai) by Elizabeth Perry for BetterUp
- Book: [Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life](https://amzn.to/48pf15s) by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles
- Book: [The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers](https://amzn.to/2ZpiQ8m) by Ben Horowitz
- Book: [Ready Player One](https://amzn.to/2X9Eu2t) by Ernest Cline

Nils Pihl returns as our guest for a second time on the podcast. He is the CEO and founder of Auki Labs, a company dedicated to revolutionizing augmented reality positioning.

Auki’s technology uses peer-to-peer communication to establish a distributed spatial computing protocol. In this episode, we revisit some of the themes from the first episode, such as the concept of language as the oldest form of augmented reality and Auki's role in enhancing communication through augmented reality positioning.

Nils background as a behavioral engineer specializing in Meme Theory and Memetic Engineering adds a unique depth to his approach in the AR space. A serial entrepreneur, Nils brings invaluable insights and experiences from his previous ventures to his current projects.

During his first time on the podcast, Jason and Nils discussed the unique challenges of positioning for AR and looked at AR from the perspective of memetics.

Today, we first dive into how growing up online influenced Nils’ work in memetic engineering and AR. We look at look at AR use cases like retail, gaming, people-finding etc. from the perspective of meme theory.

Nils brings a unique perspective, viewing AR and meme theory as integral to evolving human communication, human ways of being, and our relationship with future AI. We also discuss neural interfaces, living and working in Asia, and more.

Links From The Episode

- Book Summary: [Ender's Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game)
- Book: [Software Agents (story of Nicholas Negreponte translator)](https://amzn.to/3weTwWF)by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
- Article: [The Egregore Passes You By](https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-planetary-egregore-passes-you) by Erik Hoel
- Video: [If You're Not The Hero In Your Novel What Kind Of Novel Is It](https://youtu.be/puHHjl77uKM?si=Joe77oPxBmg0Y6xU&t=450) by Terence McKenna
- Video: [The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fVOF2PiHnc) by Jenny Nicholson

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Zac Duff is the co-founder and CEO of JigSpace, a company focused on making it simple to create and share 3D instructions for anything, or, as their tag line suggests, making the hard to explain hard to forget.

If you’ve watched the introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, or seen the demos or device itself, then you’ve had a glimpse of JigSpace when you saw the beautifully rendered Formula F1 car with the animation of the airflow around the wings and body.

Zac’s story starts in Tasmania, where he developed an early passion for 3D and game design. He studied game design in Australia before working in the games industry and beginning to teach digital art and game design. It was in early efforts to use 3D to teach a concept that Zac found the first seeds of inspiration for what became JigSpace.

In this conversation, we go onto discuss:

- Zac’s path from game design to 3D to the discovery and pursuit of "embodied cognition",

- the origin story for the company,

- raising early funding,

- highlights and lessons learned at Boost VC's accelerator,

- explanation of a "jig" and the axioms for building a product and company around them,

- example early customers and use cases,

- the relationship with Apple and being part of the Apple Vision Pro launch,

- the cultural shift in expectations around 3D and communication, and more.

Links From The Episode

- App: [Vermillion](https://vermillion-vr.com/) - VR painting app

- Book: [Dune](https://amzn.to/4bL3ijT) by Frank Herbert. There are 6 books in this series.

- Game: [Gorilla Tag](https://www.gorillatagvr.com/) - VR game

- Game: [Frog Fractions](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1194840/Frog_Fractions_Game_of_the_Decade_Edition/) - Classic Flash game, now available on Steam.

- Blog Post: [JigSpace is in the driver’s seat](https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=mjvi0bc2) from the Apple Developer Blog.

- Product Page: [JigSpace on the Apple Vision Pro](https://www.jig.space/apple-vision-pro)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Alex Westner is the CEO and co-founder of Xander, a company at the forefront of using augmented reality (AR) technology to create innovative solutions for individuals with hearing loss. Xander's product, live captioning AR smart glasses, allows users to engage in conversations with real-time transcriptions displayed directly in their field of vision. This approach positions Xander to directly address the challenges faced by those with hearing impairments in everyday communication.

Before embarking on his journey with Xander, Alex's career was deeply rooted in the audio industry, where he developed a keen interest in the intersection of sound and technology. His background includes a rich tapestry of experiences, from working on audio plugins and contributing to the development of cutting-edge audio technology to running a band, which he describes as a blend of music and business.

These diverse experiences have equipped Alex with a unique perspective on the power of sound and the potential of technology to transform lives. At Xander, he leverages this expertise to drive innovation and deliver solutions that enhance communication accessibility for people affected by hearing loss.

In this episode, Alex shares his journey from a background in audio to developing the captioning solution that Xander builds today. We explore the challenges of deploying AR glasses to real users, the balance of designing a new type of UI, and the profound impact these glasses are having on their users' lives.

Alex also discusses the future of transcription and translation in AR, sharing insights into how this technology could evolve from speech-to-text transcription to speech-to-text translation. Join us as we uncover the potential of AR to change lives and the passion driving Xander to push the boundaries of what's possible in augmented reality communication.

Links From The Episode

- Company: Vuzix - https://www.vuzix.com/
- App: Otter.ai - https://otter.ai/
- Company: Sierra Entertainment - Space Quest, King's Quest , Leisure Suit Larry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment
- Company: Orcam - https://www.orcam.com/
- Product: Transcribe Glass - https://www.transcribeglass.com/
- Company: XRAI Glass - https://xrai.glass/
- Company: heARsight - https://hearsight.net/
- Book: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin - https://amzn.to/3Puy9aJ
- Product: Ray-Ban Meta Stories (smart glasses) - https://www.meta.com/smart-glasses/wayfarer-shiny- black-plano-g15-green/
- Product: EssilorLuxottica Nuance (hearing smart glasses) - https://www.essilorluxottica.com/en/2023highlights/nuance-audio/
- Book: Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday - https://amzn.to/4cpITRy
- Podcast: Joel Osteen Podcast - https://www.joelosteen.com/how-to-watch/podcasts

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

L.Michelle Salvant has been wearing smart glasses daily for years, harnessing their potential to enhance personal therapy, healing, and self-discovery. Her engagement with wearable technology began as a Google Glass Explorer, which sparked her interest in documenting and reflecting on life’s moments through what she developed as “Immersive Journaling”. This approach has not only transformed her personal experiences but also encouraged others to explore their own stories in profound new ways.

Following her passion for technology and storytelling, L.Michelle founded LMichelleMedia. The company focuses on utilizing emerging technologies like AR and VR to support educational and nonprofit projects, integrating innovative media to foster personal development and community engagement. With her company, she continues to push the boundaries of how technology can be used to enhance understanding and growth within communities, always prioritizing ethical use and privacy in development and application.

In this episode, L.Michelle shares her personal journey from experimenting with Google Glass for content creation to developing a new use case for smart glasses: “Immersive Journaling”. She recounts the pivotal moment when using video from point-of-view smartglasses for therapy and healing. While reviewing footage of her son, she abruptly came to a deeper understanding of herself and her interactions, marking the beginning of her immersive journaling journey.

L.Michelle discusses the evolution of her practice into a therapeutic tool, not just for personal reflection, but also as a means to foster self-awareness and growth in others. She highlights the impact of immersive journaling on students participating in her cohorts, revealing how this unique form of journaling has led to significant personal revelations and changes in their lives.

L.Michelle shares her aspirations for immersive journaling to become a widely recognized and utilized tool for personal development, emphasizing the importance of transparency, ethical use, and the transformative potential of viewing life through one's own eyes.

Links from the Episode:

- Google Glass - Early smart glasses by Google - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass
- Flip Video “FlipCam” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video
- Snapchat Spectacles - Smart glasses by Snap - https://www.spectacles.com/
- Florida A&M University - LMichelle's alma mater and a client for virtual tours - https://www.famu.edu/
- Meta Horizon Worlds - A virtual reality space by Meta - https://horizon.meta.com/
- Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses - AR glasses - https://www.vuzix.com/products/vuzix-blade-smart-glasses-upgraded
- Humane Ai Pin – AI wearable - https://humane.com/aipin

Paul Travers is the Founder and CEO of Vuzix, a pioneer in wearable computing, augmented reality, waveguide optics, and display engines. 

Prior to Vuzix, Paul was an engineer at Eastman Kodak, innovating the future of digital cameras. He went on to become a serial entrepreneur, having started multiple hardware technology companies, including in sound cards for PCs and USB connectivity products.

Vuzix was formed more than 25 years ago, and through it, Paul has seen spatial computing technology evolve from the early days of VR in the mid-1990s to the highly capable AR smartglasses of today. 

In this conversation, Paul highlights the potential of their new OEM platform technologies, as embodied in the recent Z100 developer edition glasses. As Paul describes, these glasses utilize Vuzix’s own light engine and waveguide optics, and they are designed for all-day wear.

We go on to discuss:

- Vuzix Z100 Smartglasses reference design,
- consumer and enterprise applications and use cases, including captioning and language translation,
- AI Integration,
- the new OEM strategy and some strategic partnerships,
- recent advances in optics, 
managing the stress and challenge of running a public company, and
- advice for entrepreneurs.

The conversation starts with the recent solar eclipse.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Links From The Episode

- Article: [Vuzix Ultralight Innovation Award at CES](https://www.ces.tech/innovation-awards/honorees/2024/honorees/v/vuzix-ultralite-s.aspx)

- Press Release: [Vuzix Z100 Introduction](https://ir.vuzix.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/2060/vuzix-introduces-z100-smart-glasses-to-seamlessly-connect)

- Article: [Vuzix Shield: Revolutionary Smart Glasses Promising Safety And Game-Changing Technology](https://www.ibtimes.com/vuzix-shield-revolutionary-smart-glasses-promising-safety-game-changing-technology-3417126) By Nica Osorio for International Business Times

- Press Release: [Vuzix Enters into a Partnership Agreement with Quanta Computer](https://www.vuzix.com/blogs/press-releases/vuzix-enters-into-a-partnership-agreement-with-quanta-computer)

- Press Release: [Vuzix Acquires SAP Software Solution Provider Moviynt](https://www.vuzix.com/blogs/press-releases/vuzix-acquires-sap-software-solution-provider-moviynt%E2%84%A2)

- Product Page: [Vuzix Ultralite](https://www.vuzix.com/pages/vuzix-ultralite)

- Product Page: [Vuzix Shield](https://www.vuzix.com/pages/vuzix-shield)

- Book: [13 Things that Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time](https://amzn.to/4dTh0Cn) by Michael Brooks

I moderated a panel at the recent AWE conference that took place a couple of weeks ago in Long Beach, California. The panel featured Karl Guttag from KGOnTech, Adi Robertson from the Verve, Jeri Ellsworth from Tilt Five, and Ed Tang from Avegant.

The session was titled: Current State and Future Direction of AR Glasses and the session description reads:

A panel of experts will discuss the current and future state of AR spatial computing devices, given the influence of the new Vision Pro world. Has the Vision Pro influenced the XR industry to change the direction of the development of consumer-oriented devices? If so, what should those new directions be, and what limitations are there to implement them? The discussion will center upon examining the technical development of spatial computing with light weight glasses and the roles that they should now have.

You can find a video version of the session on the AWE Youtube channel, but presented here is an audio version I cleaned up a bit.

You can also find the show notes at thearshow.com.

Links From The Episode

- Panelist: Jeri Ellsworth of Tilt Five

- Panelist: Adi Robertson of The Verge

- Panelist: Karl Guttag of KGOnTech

- Panelist: Ed Tang of Avegant

- Breakdown: Karl outlined the panel discussion and added extra detail in a blog post.

- Video: AWE PANEL: Current State and Future Direction of AR Glasses

Driving from the flats of Beverly Hills up into the hills themselves feels like I’m entering into a different world. Here the picturesque, tree-line streets filled with beautiful homes give way to narrow, winding roads that snake their way to the tops of hillsides. In these hills, each home looks like an architectural marvel, delicately perched at the very edge of a steep slope, with expansive views of Los Angeles.

It was in one of these homes where I met with key members of the Snap marketing team to preview Snap's latest efforts to build AR glasses, the 5th generation Spectacles.

In this episode, I share my impressions of the device and my perspective on its place in the larger narrative of AR Glasses.

To help set the stage, I had a chance to catch up with Sophia Dominguez, the Director of the AR Platform, at Snap. 

Prior to her four and a half years at Snap, Sophia started the widely followed “All Things VR” newsletter and joined Rothenberg Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence before co-founding her first company, SVRF. There she created the first API and SDKs for searching and rendering 3D face filters. They powered over 280M AR experiences, and she successfully sold the company to Poplar before joining Snap.

Sophia began her career by attending NYU with a focus on how technology impacts human interaction. She then organized one of the world’s first wearable technology conferences, before working in product and operations for a startup focused on visual messaging.

You may remember Sophia from my interview with her published in the summer of 2023. Check out that two-part episode for her wonderful backstory and broader perspective on the market.

Here we keep things very focused on the 5th generation Snap Spectacles.

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Callout: Developers in the U.S. can join the Spectacles Developer Program for $99 per month with a one year commitment by visiting www.spectacles.com/lens-studio.