The AR Show: Neil Sarkar (AdHawk Microsystems) on Tracking the Eyes Without Cameras and Creating a Fitness Tracker for the Brain | Otter.ai

The AR Show: Neil Sarkar (AdHawk Microsystems) on Tracking the Eyes Without Cameras and Creating a Fitness Tracker for the Brain

Jason McDowall58min

Jason McDowall

00:03

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. Today's conversation is with Neil Sarkar. Neil 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, Niel 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 bachelor's, master's and doctorate in electrical and computer engineering. In this conversation, we discussed micro electromechanical devices or MEMS technology and its applications, Neil shares his path to founding ad hoc in his experience, bringing ad hoc innovation to market.

Neil Sarkar

00:55

In the early days, we were just a bunch of you know, grad students that were trying to sell a chip. And we thought of ourselves as a fabulous semiconductor company. And we figured these big OEMs, they'll be able to take our chip and build the system around it to do eye tracking. Turns out that was very naive. And you know, at the time, we were frustrated by the fact that like, Hey, we've solved the problem for you, why can't you guys use it? It turns out that if you want to sell any sort of reference design, you really need a full stack solution, you can't just be the chip, it has to be the embedded system, it can't just be the embedded system. It has to be applications that show how accurate you are. And surely you can do with it. It can't just be those applications, it has to be some games in unity that allow you to experience like how much better things get with eye tracking. And it doesn't even stop there, you got to have cloud based analytics so that you can actually improve your algorithms in the field, and also extract these things about your state of mind.

Jason McDowall

01:48

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. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, thearshow.com. That's theARshow.com. Let's dive in.

Jason McDowall

02:08

Sometimes you're working at the cutting edge of technology, the demos we put together can be a little, I don't know, janky. And fragile, it read a situation like that.

Neil Sarkar

02:16

Yeah, you're bringing up some some past trauma here, you know, when the demos don't work, and the stakes are actually really high. That's when you remember things most vividly. So I remember when we were still on the campus at the University of Waterloo. And we thought, you know, we should spin off this company. I was doing a lot of traveling with my with my CFO at the time, Sandro. And we had to try to demonstrate eye tracking to folks in California and elsewhere. But the only time we'd ever gotten to work in the past was in our lab. So the prototype that we traveled with was these glasses with breadboard wire hanging off of the front of them. And they would suspend this unpackaged really fragile micro device in front of the wearer's eye, for the longest time, I would have to continuously bend that wire to get it just at the right angle. But the scary thing was whenever we would have to go through airport security or customs and someone would open up the box and start, you know, poking and prodding the device with their fingers. And you know, hours would go by where I was just convinced this system was not going to work. They touched a chip. It's over. But somehow that that one device managed to survive through dozens of meetings, and there were lots of close calls. But we were able to convince folks that this was the right way to do eyetracking. So yes, demo days are always stressful.

Jason McDowall

03:32

What was the core technology there that you implemented for eye tracking?

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