The AR Show: Guido Groet (Luxexcel) on Solving Prescription for Fashionable AR Smartglasses

6:40PM Oct 18, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Keywords:

waveguide

lenses

technology

print

people

glasses

lens

prescription

optics

device

company

customers

big

industry

product

smart

thought

lux

years

machine

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 Guido Grote, the Chief Strategy Officer of Lux XL, a company that is able to 3d print optical quality lenses for smart eyewear. Earlier in his career, we don't work 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 the CFO and then the CEO of a venture backed company in disruptive high tech manufacturing technologies. Now at Lux XL, Guido is in charge of all commercial and strategic aspects of 3d printing of smart eyewear lenses. Lux itself has been in the news recently for the partnership with Loomis and wave optics, we're together, we're able to encase the waveguides within 3d printed prescription lenses. In this conversation, we don't talk about the challenges of finding product market fit, particularly for technologies that don't perfectly fit the industry's preconceived notion of how things have been done, or shouldn't be done. We get into the meat of the technology and where it goes from here. And he also shares his perspective on how and where smart glasses will find early success. Today,

nobody wears smart glasses in everyday life, right? Maybe people tried it with Google Glasses at the time, but it didn't work out too well. And nobody's wearing Microsoft HoloLens in their everyday life, right? Maybe in the enterprise environment, but not, you know, at home or in the streets. So I think what the industry needs is we need to devise out there that people are willing to wear, so it needs to be first of all fashionable, and have some functionality. And what I find in this in this whole industry is everybody's extremely focused on field of view, functionality and all these other things. I think what we need is we need basic functionality that is fashionable. And the thing that will probably convince consumers that this is a serious thing.

As reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show calm, let's dive in. We don't you've worked and lived all over Europe and the US in all that back and forth. Have you ever had any trouble at the airport?

It's funny that you asked that you must have known this. We all started traveling again. As you know, I think we have to get used to it again. I'm a music player. I love playing on kind of instruments, principally the the saxophone. However, it turns out not to be a very convenient instrument to take with you when you're on a business trip. So actually, I I downsized, I got myself a little harmonica, you know, like a blues heart that you can keep playing in the palm of your hands. And I take that with me when I go on a business trip. So I show up at this airport the other day in Switzerland. And I put my backpack Yeah, on the on the security belt and take up on liquids and all that usual stuff and walk through the gate and go to the other side both for my bag. And all of a sudden the huge noise starts up. Now there's the blinking lights and the siren and there's two security guards police officers that stick comes down behind me I go What did I do? And then I see from the distance I see the screen if the guy sitting there right and I see that there is this symbol of a GM blinking. Okay, so let's take out my back and they represent it and they they pull out my my harmonica, right. And then this quiet right. So the two police officers disappear. I'm bearish that the guy yeah, the security guy stands out with this harmonica enhancing goes up. Okay. He needs to find a way out of this. And he goes, Okay, well, I guess our AI system recognizes as a loader for a handgun. Ammunition clip. Yeah, for a handgun. And that's why the alarm went off. But he stood there trying to find a solution. So he hands me a harmonica. He goes, you have to play it though.

So I play a little tune. And there's all these other people's security standing there and

I went from a regular anonymous traveler now went to a potential terrorist. I went to a world famous music player in security.

That is amazing. That's phenomenal. play the clip, play the magazine. Yeah. Funny. Wow. What was your heart rate doing in that moment when those police officers stood right behind you?

Yeah, I mean, in Switzerland people are very rigid. Yeah, they're very organized. So these police officers, they they didn't look very nice, you know, they had big guns with him. So what did I do initially until I saw the screen I got I know I don't have a handgun with you. You always feel that there's probably something you did wrong, right? But that's pretty funny.

Oh my gosh, that is It is incredible. What a moment there is this the beginning, I guess, of your street performer career in are going to go to airports and just play

Exactly. A little hathcock. Like my Koreans, you know?

So maybe even before, I guess, after your, I guess you discovered your love of music. You studied finance, as well as engineering back in school, but you kind of started your career in finance. How did you ultimately find your way to high tech manufacturing,

I was working for a car company, Citron, they make a very weird automobiles. Pretty cool. But I wasn't really my thing. I mean, I love doing the stuff that was in charge of dealer, dealer developments of finding new dealers and stuff, which was kind of cool, but not really my thing. And then Mike started talking to asml, which at the time was today is the most valuable European tech company, but at the time, it was a small company with probably a couple of 100, maybe 1000 employees. And so I started talking to them. And then they asked me if I wanted to become a representative for Israel in the US, because there was an office in the US, but there was a bit of problem communicating between the the office in the US and the headquarters in in Holland, so on, they want to send the Dutch guy over. So they've asked me if I wanted to go, which, yeah, seemed like HTML was the big tech company. I believe that technology understood it a little bit at the time. And I thought, this is cool. This is gonna go somewhere. And at the time, the company was pretty small, right? So it had like a market share of, I don't know, five or 10% worldwide. And the big competitors Nikon and Canon and SVG and Birkin, Alomar and whatever else with and so it was fairly small company then and then was really entrepreneurial company. I mean, everything went I mean, it's a small company that had to prove themselves stuff needs to happen. It's exciting times really, really cool company to work for amazing technology. And initially, they barely understood it. But then slowly, I hear you start getting your hands, your head around it, and then turns out it's really cool technology. And I see you look at these machines, they're amazing. There's so much electronics in there. It's it's a different world, which really is a big difference from a car company.

What was the technology? What is it that asml was doing back then? And is it changed much? No, your sense of

smell basically makes lithography machines did it at the time. And that's the only thing they do today. And basically the tog Rafi machines are the machines that enable Moore's law. What they do is they're big projectors, if you like. And they project an image on the wafer, which then gets etched. And so it's like we used to develop photography in the past in the distant past. And basically, that's what the name of our machine does. And it does it today, the more advanced way and the lines get thinner and smaller. But it is basically a big projector. And very expensive big projectors today that costs 250 million apiece and like I read yesterday that there's a three jumbo jets are required to transport one machine to go somewhere. So it's it's a big thing. At the time when I joined, you know, they fit it in a crate. Things have changed considerably since then.

What's also amazing is that the overtime, the level of resolution is increased. Technically need less light less space to create the same chip, right the same. But now I guess they grow larger because volume, the volumes are higher, and they want to be able to shove more chips through the thing. Yeah, absolutely.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's pretty exciting. And let the time is a mother was a fairly small as a small companies little market share. And the company went through an amazing growth, and basically ate up all the competition because nobody took them seriously. And they come from they came from from back there. And then all of a sudden, the trick phase of all was offer as much value as possible to the customers, where other companies were focused very much on let's create the best possible technology, which can end up being in the same spot, but usually it doesn't. So as long as really focused will make the machine 20% more expensive, but it gives you 40% more value. Where other companies were saying not all that has to be a very, very precise without thinking throughput without thinking cost of ownership and those kind of things. And that was really what made his mill what it is today.

And now the number one competitor for them is applied materials. No, not even

I think in lithography there is no competitor. So for traditional mythography there's a as much as March of 80% for traditional stuff. And for advanced stuff. It has 100% there is no competitor. There's nobody else that's gonna make this the same technology. When you read about tsmc and Samsung and Intel, competing for high end chips. Basically what they're saying is they're competing for who can buy the most advanced machines from asml is really what it's about. It's really exciting. It's amazing how this car And it came out of nowhere. And it's the biggest unknown technology company in the world, I guess, which is Yeah, it's pretty funny. I mean, I've worked there for many, many years, and they've a lot of friends that still work there. I think it's a great company. Except at some point I decided to leave because I'm more entrepreneurial guy, I'd like to be able to get myself involved in all kinds of different stuff. And if you win companies, once, I believe that once they go over the hurdle of 50%, market share, things change, before they're fighting for something, they're trying to go somewhere, you need to be aggressive, you need to do things, you need to move quickly, you need to be nimble on your feet. And once a company biases 50% market share, then things change, because then there's so much to lose, that it's about not making mistakes, it's about having the right process in place, not making, not not having anything that might disrupt what the company does. And I think at that stage, companies need different people, they need process people, they need quality engineers, those kind of people, they don't need entrepreneurs, they don't need people who make a difference. They need people who don't rock the boat. And that the point I decided to leave and pursue other ventures,

you stayed in semiconductor, though, for your next handful years, as well

as Yes, I did. I was approached by private equity company that wanted to develop a new technology, that we're trying to put together a management team that will help them enter this space. So we did a lot of acquisitions, and we did them, we, we build out the technology. And eventually we we sold off the company, which was pretty cool was was exciting time. So a lot of Europe of the world travels around a lot. And we really build up the technology, really, you really have to make it happen, it was us or nothing. And you know, private equity guys, they don't tend to be very patient, they want to see results. So I did that for a while that we sold the company. And I looked around a little bit and then I came across Lux XL. And of course it was my I didn't mention this, but that's one of the things one of my responsibilities at asml was was in charge of the optics side of the business. So trying making sure that we we had the as long as the lenses from Zeiss and you know, the right technology and the right, the right supply of lenses. And so when I came across Lux Excel, I go, Okay, I know this stuff, this is all optics, very familiar with optics. That's also what they studied in the in engineering. So hey, this looks cool on these guys claim. That's what I thought at the time, these guys claimed they can 3d print lenses, well, I know how hard it is to make lenses or the polishing that goes into it. And all this see and seeing and all the measurements and all the coating complications in the knife, these guys claim they can 3d print these things, I got to see this. So I started talking to them. And then I realized that yes, the company had the technology. But what the company was was missing was really the rights business approach the right market, the right product. And so what the company was doing at the time it was they were they had developed 3d printing to address illumination applications at the time, LEDs came along. And every led needed a different lens because they were they the size of the spot size was different or whatever. And so these LED developments went so quickly that they needed new lenses all the time. And they were all injection molded. That the guy these guys thought about let's develop this 3d print technology. And then we can address this problem. So they had a problem. But like always, you know, in three things in a technology company, you need the problem, you need the customer that has the problem, you need the product that solves the problem. And these guys, they had a problem. But by the time they figured out how to 3d print lenses, the problem was gone, because the LED market can get stabilized. So we had so I joined the company and we thought well let me let's figure out how we can find a better application for this amazing cool technology. And what we did on this we did a little bit of prototyping, prototyping so hard business because there's no clear problem to trying to solve. Because every everybody who shows up with a lens that needs a lens prototype has a different problem that needs to be solved. So therefore I thought well wrote it out he's probably not it. And then we had some luck

as you were going through the prototyping phase was just a bunch of hypotheses you're throwing on the table like we think these might be the problems that we could solve that there might be customers there or you're literally just offering a prototype for hire service that people would come to you and say hey, I have this thing can you 3d premiere one off solution

when people started hearing that we can 3d print lenses people started approaching us now out of the blue next door started calling us up saying hey, we know you print these lenses but you can also print these lenses and can you also do this? I mean we're automotive Can you make us interior lenses? Can you make us headlights or real lights? for aerospace companies that call us up and go well can you make your the lenses go in the front of a missile? Or can you make the interior lighting of an Airbus All right. I mean, people showed up out of the woodwork that they wanted us to make lenses. And that's why we thought, well, there must be a business here. Because there's so many customers calling us. We started doing some of this prototyping, but then we realized that every time we printed these lenses, there's a different challenge that we're trying to address. For example, the automotive people, they need lenses that last 20 years, you know, and they can give resist to temperatures of 150 C, and the vibrations and stuff is completely different than what people in no industrial measurement want, they will precision you need to be resistant to, you know, we have good infrared performance and those kinds of things. So everybody had a different requirements. And that's when I realized what prototyping is very hard, because nobody's really willing to pay the money takes to develop the full product, because they only want a few of them to test them out. And then they're gonna make an injection mold in a different way. And so prototyping is a tough business, especially in optics. And we can do many different types of lenses, but we realized, well, we're never going to be able to deliver 100% of what the customer wants. So you only gonna be able to go to Anil 90%, or 80%, or whatever. And that's probably not good enough to make a good prototype.

So this is very much driven by inbound requests. Did you at that point, take a step back and think, okay, we're gonna hypothesize and do some more outbound exploration in trying to figure out what the right fit is for us.

Yes, absolutely. So we did a lot of that optics market is very, there's many different types of lenses, there's hundreds of 1000s of different types of lenses and different applications. There's, it's there's no homogeneous market for lenses. And so we did that we actually tried to take the the scientific approach, and try to identify, markets are big enough for once we could potentially solve, and that's a hard, very hard thing to do, we start calling up companies, for example, we thought, well, we can also print, I don't know, decorative stuff, you know, we can print for example, things on Windows, you know, so you can have like a shop window, you can have printed on it, the whatever cool the brand name or something, or you can add color to the to plain glass. And all of that. It's all very interesting. But everybody says, well go develop this product, make the machines and then we'll we'll talk about it. Very, it's hard to, we tried to be proactive and tried to figure that out. And then we found out well, you'll need a lot of money, you'll need to pick one application, and be successful in that one application, and then develop your technology to watch that one application. And make sure that you can satisfy all the needs for that one application. That's the only thing you can do. You cannot do them. That's during the whole process. We kind of stumbled upon the one that we that made most sense.

And was it purely by accident, you stumbled upon this area, we knew

about the area, but it was one of the opportunities. But we did a little thing. And that's the story. I wanted to tell you a little bit earlier how we stumbled across you,

how did you stumble across that sweet spot that you've discovered?

Well, there was a trade show. And we knew the Dutch King was going to show up. And so we thought that you know, the Dutch King is the house of orange, right? And so therefore, the National color of Holland is orange. So we thought, Well, you know what, we'll make these guys some orange glasses. So the orange frame with the other lenses in it. So we printed this thing. And so the king was his entourage and he shows up. Now the Kings don't travel alone, I think I traveled with them to interact with journalists and security guys, and whatever they show up. So we go King here, breeding for white King, here's the glasses, you put them on and we laugh, you show if you looked at the camera, and now people flashing flashes and videos being taken. So this took like a minute minutes, two minutes. And then he gave the glasses back and he walked on with the evening. On the new they actually showed the only thing they showed was this moment that he put his glasses on, and this whole video of environment. And then all of a sudden we've got all these inbuilt interests of Can people order glasses, and then we go and we never had that much interest from any other application. And all of a sudden, we realized that 75% of the people in the world needs glasses. And each of these glasses are different. And there's an obvious need, because everybody starts calling us. So we looked better more into this one specific application and we realized that there are billions of glasses of prescription lenses sold each year. And each of them are basically different, which is of course a perfect fit for what our technical for 3d printing can do. And that's kind of how we what we knew about it, but we can roll into it and we got a head start. We got to kick start out of these little little events.

Which was pretty nice. Given you've been through all of this exploration leading up to this point, how did you kind of explore evaluate this opportunity? recognize that from a, from a broadening perspective 75% people need vision correction, billions of lens units sold each year. So it's a giant opportunity there. But how did you ultimately approach what you're going to do in that market and how you're going to participate relative to the all the existing companies producing those lenses?

Well, the first thing is, I guess, figuring out what are the real requirements for the market. So that means talking to many, many people. So that's what we first did we we actually hired some consultants we hired also, we also started talking to all kinds of people started visiting and inviting ourselves to all kinds of events, then we you learn more and more, we really had to build up the knowledge. What do these people do eyeglasses really need? What is required? And then you need to distinguish between what How is it done today? And how could it be done with her technology? Because simply saying, Okay, so how do you guys do it and try to copy it is not necessarily the best solution. So you need to figure out okay, so this is what people are asking us. But do they really need this? And that is a difficult question. Because the people that are in the industry cannot answer it. People don't know why glasses are made in a certain way. They just do it because everybody's been doing it for 400 years. And the knowledge right choice was made to make another certain curvature in the lenses or not another curvature. And why is this color good for lenses? And these color knots? And why is it that the diopters jump in the quarter diopter, and not in half? diopter. I mean, nobody knows. It's just it's there, people have been doing it forever. And it is something we needed to understand. Because with our technology, you can do different things, which you cannot do everything you can do things different in you can make different products, but you need to understand will those products work? And if you develop this technology, if you invest a couple years, a couple million to develop this technology, you need to make sure that you focus on the right things. And that is really the hardest part. So figuring out what is important, and what is not working add value. And where can you make something that is different and better? And that is that's difficult.

That is difficult, you have to get a toehold, right, you have to convince the buyers of these lenses ultimately that the ways in which you can be different are meaningfully better, and they're willing to buy from you. And so in what ways did your technology allowed the lenses from Lux XL to be better than existing products,

we started off by trying to make an old glasses and just see you know, which ones would make most sense. And then we realized that there are certain types of lenses that the industry struggles with, because the industry has figured out a way how to make mainstream lenses, but they struggle with everything that's outside of the mainstream. So we started off by making difficult lenses that are disruptive to normal manufacturing processes. And then while doing that, we realized there were certain other areas also in the mainstream that people were struggling with. Because the whole industry is very good at making lenses that look like the lenses You and I are wearing. But if you want lenses that are a little bit different than at its heart, because if you walk into from everybody who wears glasses knows that if you walk into a shop, there's many colors of frame you can choose and brand names and that kind of thing. But the lenses are kind of ignored a little bit they you just rely on the opticians telling you which ones you should be getting. And then they have some, some marketing material to convince you of that. But at the end of the day, you kind of rely on this guy to tell you what's possible. And all these solutions basically look very similar one to another. And that is I think, where we found out that we can make a difference, we can do something that these other guys cannot do. But you need to work together with designers to figure out okay, what what if we do this? What if we remove these limitations that you have in your lens design are in your frame design? What if we have we remove those limitations? What can you do, and then all kinds of interesting things come up. But the one thing to remember about the eyewear industry, though, is that it's dominated by a few very large players that have every interest that as little as possible changes, because every change is a risk for them to lose market share. They're the people that actually have 80% market share, right? So those are the people that don't want to rock the boat.

Like that looks out because of the world, for example.

Yes, exactly. Absolutely. Those are the ones that I'm thinking of. Yeah.

How is it as you're exploring all these harder to make sort of lenses outside of the mainstream and then some of the some of the challenges within the mainstream kind of giving them different shapes of the lenses allowing them to do different things maybe with the frame and how that lens is connected. How did you ultimately discover the opportunity around waveguide waveguide combiner optics within the augmented reality wearable space?

Well, we ran into this problem that the industry the AI we're in the feed doesn't really want to change. They're sitting on a goldmine and they don't want to rock the boat. They Love it that everybody pays $1,000 for their glasses. And that was really aware of what happens behind the scenes. These guys like that. So we started looking around and going well, these classes have been state basically remained the same for hundreds of years. I mean, you look at the cell phone business that has the phone business has changed dramatically. The camera business has changed dramatically running, the writing business has changed dramatically. But the eyewear business has not changed dramatically. It's basically doing the same thing. The products aren't the same. So we thought, let's look around, what can we do? Where we think change is going to be? It's going to be started. So what can we how can we enable change? Now we thought, well, we started talking about smart glasses. So is there other functionalities you can add to your glasses that do not exist today? And then we realized, yeah, sure, we can integrate things in lenses, we can print on top of electronics. So making all kinds of filters, films, devices, part of prescription lenses, because we can just incorporate them inside the lens, I mean, intuitively, you understand this, right? So you can have a device and we just print over and we print on the other side, and then this device sits in the middle of lens. So for us, it's extremely straightforward to integrate smart devices into prescription lenses, where with traditional technology, you would kind of glue or screw them together and try to make a device out of it, where we can just make it the one unit. And that's when we started pitching this idea to a number of the tech companies that operate in this smart Irish space, we found out that they were not aware of our capabilities. But they were struggling with this problem. And they were being told by the traditional IRA industry that the only solution is to glue some things together. And intuitively, they understood this was not what they were looking for, but they didn't know of another solution. And that's how we got started in this in this space.

A couple of the big announcements over the last handful of months have been some relationships that you've developed with wave optics and with Loomis. Why specifically, are they a good fit, they each have different sorts of technologies at some level, what unique challenges that each of them pose uniquely, maybe from each other even?

Well, the important thing to remember is that we're agnostic to whatever we incorporate into a lens, we can put anything in the lens, right? So we can do all kinds of waveguides or kind of devices, from hv to liquid crystals to displays the way out there are all kinds of other different types of waveguides, we can all put them in the middle of the lens. The reason that we originally started first talking about wave optics is that we saw that when we talked to big tech companies that they didn't really get what we were saying about what our technology could do. They either didn't believe it, or they couldn't get their heads around it or it was completely different than what the traditional lens industry was telling them. What was possible. So we found out that wave optics had the similar challenge. So they felt that their technology was not being used to its fullest. They were told to Well, here is the box you need to fit in make a solution for this problem. And they did that. But they knew they could do more. And we knew we could do more. So therefore we started talking to them. We said you know what? Why don't we do something where we feel that our customers should be doing so we'll make something that we think uses our technology, both hard technologies to its best. And that's why we started working with wave optics. And we made this device where we integrated their waveguide inside our lens. And at the same time generated the mountings for the projector and all the other stuff that we've been discussing along with you. But so we created this demonstrator that we made a lot of noise about and we showed it to the world. And at the same time, we did the same set the same thing with lumens, of course and the way you're gonna be seeing some some more videos about that pretty soon. So where we can actually we integrate and we show how, by thinking out of the box, using the new technologies to their best to their full benefit you can get you can make the products already today that a lot of people dream about for I have over three years.

What prevents a waveguide companies such as wave optics from just using the waveguide on their own without any additional lens material edit.

Well, a wave guides, the idea of wave edges make those things possible. So these things tend to be like kind of a millimeter thick. You can imagine if you put the millimeter thick piece of glass in front of your eyes, it's dangerous for you, the brief guide to this will be damaged pretty easily. It's dangerous for the people wearing it, it's certainly not going to be FDA compliant. There's no prescription on it and then you can of course click prescriptions on it but then you end up again with these big devices become almost like devices goggles if you like. So you cannot really put a waveguide in front of your eyes It will not fit in a frame there will be too fragile. So what you need to do is you need to give it the carrier and in our case, the best carrier is of course to prescription which you'll need anyway. So there's a huge benefit in having the prescription being the carrier because it has two functions right it correct your vision and it makes the waveguide safe and durable. So it's a better solution, you cannot have a waveguide on its own in front of your eyes. Part of

the enthusiasm for the potential of waveguides is its thinness, ultimately, when you ultimately encasing it to make it safe, and to add prescription, how does that change the thickness of a pair of lenses? Like, kind of considering, I don't know what a normal level of corrective vision question is, but we give some sense for like how much material we'll be adding to these lenses,

while normal traditional eyewear lens is roughly depends on the prescription and many other aspects of, let's say, roughly two millimeters thick in the center. So waveguide is probably pretty much a millimeter thick, at the moment state of the art. If you would glue lenses to a waveguide, you'll end up with a device that is five, six millimeters thick in the center. With our technology, you can actually make a device that is two and a half millimeter thick, probably. So you basically have the thickness compared to gluing together screwing together traditionally made lenses. So it is a little bit thicker. But it's also because the waveguide itself has some thickness, of course of a millimeter, but you can basically make the waveguide disappear in the prescription lens.

That's pretty remarkable. And the waveguides themselves are flat though, and here you're able because you're doing prescription ultimately and because ultimate looks better. You're doing curved lenses which account for the prescription and they they make them look more like regular glasses Is that right,

we can integrate the flap waveguide inside the curved lens, because you'll have curvature on both sides and we can add the curvature on both sides. And the reason to have the curvature is well to address the prescription for of course, but the other reason is that it looks better to have some curvature on the front aesthetically looks better. And the other reason is it also avoids reflections from the from the outside world. So you need some curvature you cannot have flat waveguides so we add some prescription to the outside for those two reasons reflections and fashion. And on the inside we like the prescription to correct division.

And so for for wave optics or for Loomis or any one of these wave guides ultimately challenges they still have to get the display light into the lens into that waveguide before it can traverse down that waveguide and come back out into your eyes. How does that work? How do you ultimately marry the whatever the display engine is going to be the visual engine into the into the waveguide

so what we can do is we can apply only material where it's needed. So what we can do is we can actually keep the the the the coupler clear of anything so we can just print around the coupler. So that means that you have clear access from light from the light source in light ancient straight into in coupler. So that's one thing. The second thing we can do is we can even print a mounting for the for the projector so that you can actually glue or screw or add or print around or figure out the way to attach the permanently attach the light engine to the waveguide at the exact right spot so that it's perfectly aligned. So there's no alignment issues whatsoever. I remember when we made the project with wave optics, we had scheduled in the whole project three weeks off integration time between the projector and the waveguide. Well, we shipped everything to them, they clicked on the projector, and it worked in the minute which made us gain three weeks. But that is because we can we print so accurately for the prescription side of the product. And we apply the same precision, of course to the mounting side. And that makes perfect fit.

Yeah, I remember with wave optics, specifically in some of the waveguide said, the density of materials that that light passes through is really carefully controlled and here they they needed an air gap between the waveguide itself and the lens, how do you manage to print an air gap, I cannot

tell you all the details that's part of our little secret. But you're absolutely right so what you need to do is you need to have a jumping refractive index to keep total internal reflection in the waveguide and that increases the efficiency of the of the device or even the functionality the actual functionality of the device. So some waveguides have cover plates and we can print on top of the cover plate you know the cover plates actually enable the air gap in this case so we can print on top of the cover plates that's one solution or with our technology through a special process with developed we can actually create the air gap ourselves so that there's no cover plates required which is also weight saving. And so we can make it old part of of one device inside our process and then we can also extend of course the aggregate all the way through the encounter. So it's all part of this one device and the one process step that we applied to create both the air gap the mounting the prescription for the for the whole device and thereby you get something that looks like a lens that you pop into your frame.

You talked a bit before about the the way things have been done for so long. And a big part of that effort is The polishing side of it. After you construct that lens, you polish it down. So it has a really nice, clean, smooth surface. How do you manage that within your current process.

So we use droplets I have not explained really maybe that's helpful at this point, to explain a little bit how the technology works. So we 3d print. And what we do is we do not start off with lens blanks, or injection molding, or whatever we use, what we do is we start off with a bottle of liquid, we call that an ink because we put it in a 3d printer. But it's really a plastic, liquid plastic, a monomer. So our printer, what it does is it creates tiny, tiny little droplets of a few picoliter. And we apply those droplets exactly in the right spot that we let them flow a little bit, we let them flow because we need to make sure that there's no air bubbles inside the lens. But also we want to make sure that they're perfectly smooth, you know, you can imagine that if you use a liquid to deposit it gets very, very smooth. And that is why we don't need any polishing. And we get the service reference of six to seven nanometers standard out of our process. And then once the lenses come out, they're ready to be used. But inside our process, we can also print different types of materials, we can even print the coating materials or colors or filter materials as part of our process.

So it's fully done, including whatever sort of anti reflective coating or something else they might want on that lens. And you still have to pop them in the frame, there we go 35 on the frame, are you able to put different versions of ink into the printer at the same time, can you print multiple materials,

we can do that because for example, today we print an already anti scratch coatings with our with our technology. And that is because we can add different materials inside our printer. Everybody's dream, you know, every optical optical designer's dream is probably to be able to make green lenses. Those are like the holy grail of optics where you can have focus doesn't come from the curvature of the lenses, but it comes from the differences in refractive index across the lens. And to do that, of course, you'll need different materials or different index that you can print at the same time. And we've we've already tried that in a lab environment. But today, there's not really an application for it because nobody can do it. So there's not people have to get used to the idea that there is an additional level of freedom. And so we can do it. But for now we're focusing on regular lenses. But yeah, we can mix different materials with different properties inside the same printing job. I'd love to

dig into that just a little bit more. So you describe this ability to ultimately create different densities material with it within the lens, different refractive index indices. Are you then potentially able to build the birdbath of waveguide optics directly with a 3d printer?

He would say yes, it depends very much on exactly what you want to do. Of course, we cannot print everything, but we have lots of freedom in our designs. And we can sometimes in these I mean, okay, let me rephrase that. Sometimes in these birdbaths designs, there's like special coatings that are required to be left to look into whether you know, you really can apply those coatings or you need a different process to apply those coatings. But we can put all kinds of different lens designs, even within one device. So we can add prisons, if it's required, we can add the special layers or or deviating diopter powers somewhere in the lens of some layers of the lens, we can print little dots on it, we can add microstructures there's lots of things we can do to create the right product. And people come to us with all kinds of wild ideas and we always need to figure out which ones we think will end up being okay, we need to be careful not to end up in prototyping again. So we always tried to focus Okay, do we think this product will end up in a volume product anytime soon? That's really usually our the determination we need to make. But yes to your answer yes, we can print all kinds of birdbath like structures.

Yeah, the waveguide though that structure is is different. Suddenly for like a diffractive waveguide. I'm guessing that based on kind of the ink and getting it smoothed out makes the waveguide diffractive waveguide structure a different sort of animal is that fair?

I don't expect we'll be printing wave guides anytime soon. To make wave guides, I think you need different material, first of all, typically tends to be glass and we print plastics, I don't think you can get plastics up to a 1.9 index of refractive index. So for now, I think we'll be relying on glass and also there's structures that go on diffractive waveguides, right. So they usually apply through lithography or nanoimprint. And that is a precision that it's not within our current process window.

A lot of flexibility, a lot of capability within the current solution. Often that

is the that is the good In the bad of the technology, it can go in so many different directions that we need to be extremely disciplined in what job what projects we take on. Before, you know, you'll be making, again, flat playing glasses for Windows.

I think that the alternative for some types of lenses you talked about is injection molding. Can you talk a little bit about the trade offs versus injection molding, if somebody I guess is relates to integrating with a waveguide, you could build injection molded bits of plastic to sit in front and behind of the waveguide to provide a corrective vision, vision correction, as well as safety strength to that waveguide. But you noted there that challenges that you then have to print those separately, glue them together, and you end up with twice the thickness ultimately, than you could if you directly 3d printed? There is Yes, absolutely.

That's certainly true, maybe about injection molding for a second. So injection molding is a great technology, if you want to make a million pieces. And they're all the same. It's a great technology, except that it takes you like six months to get good molds. And once you have them, you cannot change them. Or you need to have another six months and not spend another X amount of dollars to get those molds sure you want to get what you want to get. You're sure about the shape you're sure about to design, then you should get a mold and make a million of your pieces. And that's great. Where if you want a million pieces, but they need to be all different, then you need our technology for some other CNC technology or something. Well, is there a way you can use injection molding to insert stuff into lenses? Maybe, but it's going to be very, very difficult to many people have tried and they've all failed because injection molding? is high temperature high pressure usually, well, yeah, most cases. And that usually damages whatever you want to put inside. And so with our technology, you don't have that there's no pressure, there's no high temperature, we can control the process extremely accurately. And we can even keep it at room temperature that's required. So I think the obvious way to do this to make smart glasses with prescription is to use 3d printing. I don't think there's any other. I cannot imagine any other technology that can do it as easily as we can.

Yeah. How do you get to scale? How do you get to print a million units? Even if they're all unique? How do you get to that manufacturing at scale.

So our technology is precise, because we use very small droplets. And it's very fast, because we don't apply one droplet at the time, but we apply 1000s of droplets at the time. And so it's a massively parallel process that we run. That means also that it's very scalable, you can make the machine faster, we're just printing more droplets at the same time. So currently, we run a print job of four lenses, and they can be all be different. But we typically run them in force at the moment because that makes sense in glasses, right? Because people tend to have two eyes with four lenses at the time. And then things in between, depending on the prescription between 20 minutes and an hour to print one of those jobs. If you want to go to higher speeds, you can just increase the print stage as we call it, and just print more lenses at the same time. So from our perspective, nothing changes. It just requires you bigger machine. That's it.

So scale through increasing the number of units in that print under that printhead. I guess in where is the printing done as you kind of have you constructed the business model of our around what you've created here. What do people do the printing? How do they get the ink? How about that? Okay, so

let's go through the phases. So typically costs about approach us and we determine what it is that they want to do we and how we can best do it with our technology. So that we usually tune our process a little bit to meet the requirements, because everybody has different requirements, bigger lenses, smaller lenses, thicker, thinner, different waveguide arrogates, no air gaps mounting, so so we need to create a process that fits exactly the needs of our customer. After we've done that, then we typically run pre production in house, so volumes of a couple of 100 pieces. And then usually the customers ask us well, we'd like to start a pre production plant. And then we provide them all the technology to run it themselves close to our facility usually or not necessarily, but that's convenient. And then at some point that's usually done until they run out and then 15 20,000 pieces. If they want to run more than the they'll select usually a contract manufacturer, we provide all the manufacturing technology licenses and whatever they need all the support they need. And then they can make millions of pieces wherever they want.

So in some ways, it sounds like asml that's

you know, everybody goes back to their roots. So, in some ways you're absolutely right. tsmc is a contract manufacturer at the end of the day is the biggest customer evasive, oh AML provides all the technology for them to make these lenses and that's what we do. In that respect. It's we're not reinventing the wheel. The only difference is that we have all sells their equipment and today currently, what our customers seem to prefer is to just get access to the technology so we'll rent them the equipment and we'll deal with all the money Everything that comes around with it,

given that eyeglasses are so personalized, right, every prescription is just a little bit different. When we start to incorporate this technology into wearable technology into, you know, eyewear into smart eyewear, we phrase it that way. And we're going to get basically print jobs on demand, a consumer would submit an order through their favorite vendor, big tech company, and then that big vendor is gonna add that to the next print job. And they're gonna get it very personalized pair of lenses coming out of that.

That's a very good question, Jason, very good question. Because when we talk to our customers, we find that everybody's very focused on the product itself, nobody's thinking of distribute, well, not many people are thinking of distribution. But distribution is very important. Because today you buy your, your prescription lenses, you buy them through your optician, right, and there's a whole flow that goes with them, but your phone, you buy it through an Amazon, or Best Buy or some other, you know, big big box electronics shop. So there's, those are different things. And I think that is something that people have to come to terms with. There are a few companies out there that also control distribution in their technology. And we all know who we're talking about here, I think that is an important choice, because our technology can do both. So we can either do small scale, machine or platform that makes you two lenses in either 20 minutes. Or we can provide a machine that does millions lenses a year in the central facility in an industrial facility. So we can do either one of those. But our customers need to make a choice, how is their gonna distribution gonna work? Do you want to make lenses right there on the spot? We're in prescription for your customer right there. And then there's one choice and then we need to start focusing on the smaller machine that does everything 20 minutes? Or are you more interested in mass manufacturing and the customer sending their prescription and then somewhere in some mega factory somewhere this your product is being made? I mean, both of them work for our technology, our customers need to make a choice. I think the

industry is, as you can have noted, there's not a lot of thought being given to that yet. And we're still working, I think I'm making the electronics good enough to be useful. It's an important problem. And ultimately for this to be successful at consumer scale, right? We're selling millions or 10s of millions or hundreds of millions of devices a year as the big tech companies ambitiously hope we can with these things, then we're going to have to solve you have to be able to answer this question, figure out what to do the distribution.

It's very possible that the answer that the distribution that is optimal for this product doesn't exist today. It's clear to me that opticians is probably not the solution not Titian is not going to be able to sell you your smart device. At the same time. You know, there's technical limitations, why best bike and not sell you prescription lenses, because that is something that they are not familiar with, they have they think SKUs they have like a large stock of stuff, and they want to sell you one of those. So if you're going to have custom lenses custom products, requires I think this sort of a hybrid type of distribution. And yeah, people need to think of that, then that is at least as important as making a cool device. Today, let's first make the cool device. And we're helping people with that and ensure that the first cool devices will be manufactured centrally in some big plant somewhere. And then you're gonna have to wait two weeks to get your your smart glasses on prescription.

How long do you think will be before we can buy a pair of glasses with Lux XL lenses.

But we're ready today. We can show today that we can make the prescription we can do the integration, what needs to happen, of course, it needs to turn into a full device now that people start realizing what you can do with our technology we can do what people were planning to do in three years. So all of a sudden, we find that people have to scramble because all of a sudden their roadmaps have this one item that they thought were the gating item suddenly is not a gating item anymore, you can make fashionable prescription smart eyewear today. That means that now all of a sudden, you need the processor, you need the frame to go with it, you need the battery, the content needs to be there. So what we find from our customers, they have this, oh, let's think this through how we're gonna change our roadmaps. And that's what's happening now. And we see it with many of our customers. So we of course have some stuff to do on our end. Absolutely. So we need to make sure that we have this machine that makes a million pieces a year, or the machine that makes two of them in a small thing, the small box that sits in the shop, either one of those. So that is something we have to do. But if people want to make them 20 3040 50,000 pieces a year, we have the equipment available today to do that. I think we're going to be seeing in the next few years from some of our customers their first product.

That's awesome. You talk about some of those customers and wave optics. One of your one of your partners was recently acquired by snap, perhaps as a defensive move against Facebook and exactly sure But that was a exciting moment in the in the industries, we see some pieces coming together. How does a company like yours think about acquisition overtures at this stage in the product and market development?

I think for us, we're the only ones in the world able to do what we do. So there's I know that, like you mentioned that there's, there have been a couple of acquisitions of waveguide companies. And I'm not sure what the motivation for SNAP was. But I'm sure that they felt that they needed to get their own waveguide like everybody else in their space. So I think what we are doing is, we are the only ones able to do what we're doing. I think companies are coming to terms that they need prescription, you'd be surprised how little big tech companies at booth thought wise into a prescription. But now people are starting to realize if you want to address 75% of your market, you better have prescription. So people are starting to get to terms with prescription, we are making products for a number of those companies. And I think today our technology is a good fit for many of those companies. And as far as we're concerned, we draw to work with many different customers, then, you know, be an in house captive technology, because I don't think you can serve the world and your owner, right? I think we prefer being independent at the moment, they just make the products for everybody. We think we can we'd like to be like you said earlier, we'd like to be the HTML of this of this business.

Fair, nice. And what does that look like over the next five years? What are your What are your goals, my major milestones, as you look out over the next five years,

we need to of course, make sure that we get one of our customers to have a product in the market. That's that's paramount. Next thing we need to do is we need to make sure that we either make Well, we are in the past to make the fast machine that does a million pieces year, we need some time to work out the details of that. Or am I invite you to make the small machine. But more importantly, I think what we want to do is we want to make sure that there start to be products out there that actually interest consumers. So I think for us, that's very, very important. Because today, nobody wears smart glasses in everyday life, right? I mean, maybe people tried it with Google Glasses at the time, but it didn't work out too well. And nobody's wearing Microsoft HoloLens in their everyday life, right? Maybe in an enterprise environment, but not, you know, at home or in the streets. So I think what the industry needs is we need a device out there that people are willing to wear. So it needs to be first of all fashionable, and have some functionality. Well, I find in this in this whole industry is everybody's extremely focused on field of view, functionality and all these other things. I think what we need is we need basic functionality that is fashionable. And I think that will probably convince consumers that this is a serious thing. I mean, look at your first phone. I had your first smartphone. It didn't do all the stuff that you have today. But still, we bought them right. I think that's what needs to happen here.

Yeah, that transition from feature phone to smartphone. That email machine was the one that took off the fastest, right? The one from rim and Blackberry, that thing did one thing. Well, it was a phone. But you could also, you know, bang out an email very quickly. That was kind of one of those transitionary devices, kind of partially enterprises bought by enterprises, because they love the email infrastructure integration into the corporate email. And it was the use by though their employees everywhere, right? It was work provided consumer device anyway. But it did one thing, kind of to your point at one thing other than make a phone call, which was sent email, exactly. It happens in communication is a key piece of technology that everybody loves to have benefits from maybe is communication that's related for smart glasses. Or maybe it's something else more mundane, utilitarian.

I think if you look, I mean, what I will do, I can look at myself, right? I think I would use the IMA basic functionality, like, for example, navigation in a large city the other day, and you ran into all these tourists around with again, with their phones in front of your eyes, trying to young walk the streets trying to find their way around. I think these people will all be happy to have a device that they don't have to hold in their hands that makes them look fashionable the normal glasses and tells them where to go. I think navigation. I mean, it's a simple one. For me, navigation would be a perfect reason to buy smart glasses. And I think for many other people, I think certainly all those people walking the streets of these big cities with a phone in their hands. And I think today you have so called smart glasses that only have audio right? I don't think that works. I mean, it's minimalistic, I think that's not a minimal viable product. I think that is one step short of it. It's like the instead of the rotary phones, the push button phones, right? That never made. I mean sure, cool. Yeah, I'll get one of those, but it's not what makes the difference. I think the big difference like you mentioned earlier on smartphones was emailed or maybe the camera but I think for glasses, I I think probably navigation or some kind of information, certainly simple information that you can access without using your hands. I think that's probably that's the entry point. This is, I think that's the entry point. So and of course, it's cool to have something that interacts the virtual world with the real world as well. Cool. Yes, of course, I would want that. Let's relate.

There is a lot of talk about this notion of immersion, as a relates to see through augmented reality. And I am not at all convinced that the concept of immersion is actually going to apply in anytime soon as it gets in how you define immersion, because you can have a relatively small field of view display hanging on your wall. And even though it doesn't occupy much of your field of view, you are fully immersed in the story being told on that screen like that there's one level of immersion, we talked a lot about this, you know, completely altering your reality, this notion that suddenly we live in, you know, Renaissance Europe, as we're walking down the streets of New York, or whatever, whatever it is. I love the idea of this. But I think that the practicality of that just given the limitations of see through AR is, that's a little ways away.

That's what I think that's what i think i think we're not ready for full immersion.

Yeah. Let's wrap up with a few lightning round questions here. What commonly held belief about this industry about spatial computing or smart glasses? Do you disagree with

what we just said? I think that's my little thing. I don't think immersion is going to be the enabler. I don't think we need that. I think we need information. That's it. So all spatial computing is great if you sit somewhere. And if you use VR, sure, you know, spatial computing is great. If you just want to go about your life, you just want to have some information, you want to know what time the train leaves, you want to know what gate you need to be at at the airport. Those are the things that are of interest. So I think that's where it's gonna start.

Besides the one you're building, what tool or service Do you wish existed in this market?

I think we need a basic tool that looks a basic smart lines that looks fashionable, that people can buy so we can get started. I mean, I think we've all been playing around with wild ideas, but nobody really knows. I mean, what I just said, is my belief, but maybe I'm wrong. But I think what we need to do is we need to get a tool out there something that people are willing to wear. So that needs to be first of all fashionable. And that doesn't exist. If you look at all these products that are out there. They check all kinds of boxes, the one box they don't check is, are you willing to wear it every day? None of them? Not really, literally none of them you would want to wear every day. So I think that's what we need. We need a basic tool that gives you some functionality, and then we can figure out which ones work best. And then some very smart young kids will come up with an app that we can install and that we all go Wow, I didn't think of that. But we first need to create the platform.

Yeah. What book Have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

I recently read a book that I read a long time ago. It's by Douglas Adams. It's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And in particular, one book is called mostly harmless. So let me tell you a little story here. That is this guy, this spatial traveler, who's in there as a writer for a book, The Lonely while the space Lonely Planet, basically, right? So he ends up on Earth, he spent 15 years writing about the restaurants and bars waiting to go visit the way he used to go. And for a space traveler, right. And then now he submits his copy of the 15 years of writing this stuff, and he submits his copy. And it goes to his editor, his proofreader, and mostly the lawyers, and they check everything, and all of them cross out something. And out of these 15 years, two words remain about Earth, mostly harmless. The story of course, the the core of the story is that what you need to do is you need, you develop an idea, right? You develop, you have an idea, you develop content, whatever, you have an innovation, I think you should not ask too many people, I think what you need to do is you need to follow your intuition. Have a belief, or check your belief, of course, but don't take every comment into account. Don't try to make a product, or develop a technology that satisfies everybody, because it will be useless product. Make sure that you think of something, make sure you keep your core idea. And of course verify to make sure it still fits some market. But don't compromise too much.

Don't compromise too much. If you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old we don't

be more focused. I think if you're young, you think the world is at your feet and you grab opportunities as they come along. I think it's helps this what I tell my kids think about it. Yeah, it's really what is this where you want to go? I mean, think about where it brings you I mean, and find opportunities. Your opportunities are not the only opportunities that come to you. And of course you need to you can be lucky you need to get some opportunities to come to you. But you need to also make choices and select where you want to go and then you'll find opportunities that bring you there and when I was younger, you know I kind of took out Ever I've waited until HTML calls me to go to work for them. But I could, of course, also try to actively look, talk to them and go to them.

Any closing thoughts you'd like to share? Well,

I think as an industry, we're emerging. And I've seen the same things that we are doing now in AR, I've seen them in semiconductors. And it's a small world and you run the same people all the time, everybody worked on similar problems. But before you know, this whole industry, is gonna make a couple of really big jumps. And then all of a sudden, we know where the future lies. And so I think you need to keep your eyes open to make sure that you have the right technology for when the train starts rolling. So I think we're in the right spot. We're happy where we are today, we've developed this technology over many years. And I think we've really made some, some real choices to get where we are today. And I think, given the interest we're now getting with all these, these big tech companies that are working with us. I think we're onto something. And I'm sure there's many other technologies that are essential. And we just need to make sure we push this industry forward.

Now, where can people go to learn more about you and the work you're doing there at Lux XL?

Well, we have a website, and it's Lux excel.com. Surprisingly, of course, people through the website, you can actually get in touch with me and I will be happy to talk to you and to explain things that we do. We try to update the content all the time to make sure that it remains attractive. And though in the next few months, we'll be releasing a couple of new exciting, what we call technology demonstrators that will show off what we can do, and hopefully it will touch whatever challenges our customers have.

Fantastic. Good. Thanks so much this conversation.

Yes, and thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. in it. I speak with Jay Wright, the founder and CEO of campfire 3d, a company that is focused on holographic collaboration for design and engineering workflows. Previously Jason eight years at Qualcomm, where he helped establish and grow euphoria before become the president and gm of euphoria when it was sold to PTC. Now, Jay and the team at campfire a building on the foundation of the meta to AR headset. If you remember that from a few years ago, to create a very purpose built collaboration tool. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time.