The AR Show: Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on the Attack of the Clones and Magic Leap’s Wasted Opportunity (Part 1) | Otter.ai

The AR Show: Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on the Attack of the Clones and Magic Leap’s Wasted Opportunity (Part 1)

Jason McDowall1h 46min

Jason McDowall

00:03

Welcome to the AR show right 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 Karl Guttag, who you may know from his technology blog KGOnTech 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 both 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 Texas Instruments. It was named a TI fellow, the youngest in the company's history. And the 20 year 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 Raven, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission critical intelligence to military and first responders when they need it most. Well, he is dedicated to creating successful AR glasses. He's also the industry's resident skeptic,

Karl Guttag

01:07

lI sometimes say I'm the resident skeptic of the AR industry. Everything we're doing has a list of pros and a list of cons. And what's going to happen is the marketing departments going to tell you all the pros, and there's not many guys out there who tell you the cons, I guess that's the purpose of my blog some days is to tell you what's wrong with thing, because they're already gonna tell you what's right about it. So with not being cold,

Jason McDowall

01:33

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 c through AR is 10 times harder than VR, the importance of field of view in AR versus VR, the poor visual quality of the HoloLens to the challenges of diffractive waveguides, and laser scanning displays, magic leaps, 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 goes something like this. Let's dive in.

Jason McDowall

02:13

Karl, cloning seems to be part of tech culture. And even though this may be more, more than most recently, we've seen Facebook really actively leverage the innovation at snap and cloning features from them on the software side. And you know, you've seen it firsthand from the early days of the PC. I remember you telling me once that Sega and Nintendo were ultimately cloning your early chip designs, why were they so eager to kind of take what you had done and put it into their products? What was the mindset kind of behind this cloning within the tech industry?

Karl Guttag

02:45

Well, I don't know, I just think there's been a lot of success, probably the most famous clone back in back in that day. Now, the younger people here probably haven't heard of it. But it's been called the Z at their Intel did a chip called the 8080. And then zilog, who's long since gone, did a very successful clone of that chip, where they enhanced the feature set. So they basically took the 8086 instruction set, added some new instructions. And it turned out that that chip was extremely popular. That was where you saw CPM plugged into Apple's they were using z 80 chips and that chip with the enhanced instructions became more famous. And I think people knew the Z 80 better than they did the 8080 by the late 70s. This was all in the late 70s era. So So actually, even though Intel kind of invented the instruction set and everything most people know is the at the similar thing happened in video games I was involved. My very first chip at TI was the 9918. That was the first chip to have sprites. We call this sprites, we named them sprites. I know the guy who came up with the name. So we did the first sprite chip and I was one of about six engineers originally on that program. So I had a lot to do. And actually I was very heavily involved in the design of how the sprites work. Well it turned out that ship was pretty successful. It got designed into the clique of vision. It was originally for the TI home computer which wasn't so successful but had a certain following. And it also got designed into the MSS computer in Japan, there was a company called ASCII Microsoft, which is kind of a renegade and in, I met the guy a few times it's kind of a renegade operation back when Microsoft was tiny. They basically got a license and it was it was kind of a weird relationship. It wasn't quite part of Microsoft, but they call themselves ASCII Microsoft. Well, they they back this thing called the MSI x computer. And it used the 9918 in Japan. So it became really popular, and two companies both Sega and Nintendo developed games for that plan. form. And they were also involved in colico vision clico vision also use 918. So when Khalifa went out of business, Sega and Nintendo who were both developing games for that, and developing for the MS x computer, decided to go out and get different clones, or I'm not sure how they did it, whether they funded it, or whether they, whether they just used it, but they both got different chips that had sort of z 80. so to speak, the 918, they come up with the so the sprites worked very similar meta fact, many of them had many of the same registers. They were they were not quite register level clones, but they did have many of the same registers that were in the 1918. If you go back and you can dig this up through the archives, you'll see. And you talk about, like, why do we have five sprites in a line and then we don't get into that now. But I know all the reasons behind that. And what caused that, basically a memory bandwidth issue more than a hardware issue. But anyway, they copied the way that they work because they were already developing software around the the 918. So it's really an expediency at work. Well, they knew how to use it in both companies and develop software for two different platforms. And in some ways, the critically, the family con computer, which was the computer that came out of, of Nintendo was an, like a next generation NSX computer. So it kind of the Genesis is all there you can see how they were not it wasn't just a random accident. They were already developing for it. So anyway, that's kind of how that came about.

Jason McDowall

06:34

What about the IP ownership issue? didn t II kind of have all the intellectual property behind the patents behind the work that you're doing there at TI?

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