The AR Show: Paul Travers (Vuzix) on on Prioritizing Wearability Over Immersion

2:37PM Jun 7, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Paul Travers

Keywords:

glasses

markets

waveguide

shield

wearability

optics

display

view

technology

companies

enterprise

device

broader

blade

started

field

piece

big

people

kinds

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 Paul Travers. Paul 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 policy and spatial computing technology evolved from the early days of VR and the mid 1990s. To the highly capable AR smartglasses of today. In this conversation, Paul describes the views its 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 micro LED display and emphasizes wearability over maximizing the field of view and functionality.

Because it's a big stretch to get to the panacea of what you know, AR glasses could be when spatial computing is there, and you've got the dinosaurs running around. Between that extreme and where we are now, there's designs that can be made that I think people would wear. Wearability is number one.

Wearability's number one.

Yeah, the minute you failed on that you don't have a product.

We go on to discuss how much field of view is big enough to satisfy a large number of use cases. We also discuss the importance of micro LED 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 views its will invest the 100 million plus dollars they have recently raised. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. Let's dive in. Paul, how did your time at Eastman Kodak lead to your early entrepreneurial endeavors.

I used to work at Eastman Kodak in their research labs making multi megapixel digital cameras and the likes. And I left and started a business in my basement for various reasons. Kodak wasn't really pushing the digital side of their business much. And that's where I was. So I built in, moved into my basement business. We lived in town and you weren't supposed to run businesses out of your house I found out later. But there are ways I built a sound card business and sold it to ultimately to Advanced Micro Devices. And then I made a universal service connectivity company and sold it to Belkin. And that was all like, you know, maybe three years after I left Eastman Kodak and so all of my friends at Kodak were like, Are you out of your mind, you're leaving the mothership and, and, you know, it actually seemed pretty easy. And then I started a virtual reality head mounted display company. In my mind, I mentioned this on the last interview, but it's been a very difficult industry since then, I bought back that the VR headset company and started Vuzix. And the interesting bit to kind of fast forward to get us to where we are today. We did a lot of work with the US Defense markets. We made a product called Tap die. And they came to us and said look, you know these bigger things we don't want to wear in the field all the time. Can you make Oakley style sunglasses, and as a result of starting as a VR, giant football helmet shaped thing and then rolling that into Vuzix here we are today trying to make the sexiest smallest trimless glasses on the planet primarily because not just the special forces but they wanted Oakley style sunglasses. And it appears that if you're going to be in this business and you want to wear something all day long, you need that super lightweight kind of stuff. And so a bit of a history, uniqueness on how we got here, starting with a defense and actually starting with Eastman Kodak.

Yeah. From Kodak. It was just listening to some one of the retellings of Kodak and how they owned the patents. They created digital cameras and they own the patents on digital cameras. Yeah, and did so little with it,

in fact that I worked in the research labs, and we were making multi megapixel digital cameras. This was GES back in 85, or six, something like that. And you know, had semiconductor fabs and everything doing all that stuff. It was fun. But you know, it's a difficult business to be in, frankly, when you're trying to replace film that makes so much money. I mean, back in the day, you bought the camera, you bought the film, you process that film, you paid for that. And Eastman Kodak was touching, touching, touching off of every one of those and to replace that with a digital camera that maybe there's as many as five of them on every phone on the planet today and there's no recurring revenue. It's a tough road to hoe as they say.

The company chose the cash cow over the disruptive innovation and ultimately paid the price.

Yes, but let me say they were not that this is all about Kodak great company, and they had a lot of industries that they invented amazing stuff. The old lens today came out of Eastman Kodak Company as an example. You know, there's so many other businesses that they built into multibillion dollar things that they sold, to try to salvage film in the end,

to try to salvage film. Amazing, amazing engineering, amazing history as a company for sure over the over the many decades. And you've noted that in the course of creating Vuzix, you'd started with this focus, initial focus on virtual reality. And it was in responding to the feedback you're getting from the Department of Defense, that you realize that there really is an emphasis on wearability. How do you make these things truly small. And one of the most exciting things that I've heard in AR this year about AR glasses was the announcement that you'd made of the Vuzix's field, which I think you'd have officially unveiled back at CES earlier in January. Can you describe how that shield is different from the previous product, which was the Vuzix Blade?

Yeah, the blade itself was a pretty revolutionary device. For those that don't know, the blade looks like sort of a regular pair of glasses, they're still on a chunky side be the first guy to say it, but the display is only on one eye. And it's this thing that's the size of of Wrigley's Spearmint, pack of gum, you know, it's an inch tall by two and a half plus inches long. And that sits in the right temple of the glasses, taken up all that space. And it does define a lot of the industrial design of the classes. And that injects the light into this thing called a waveguide. In the front, which is something Vuzix is really good at manufacturing, and high volume, low cost. So that blade was the first pair of glasses that Vuzix has built that AR AR see through you put them on, you see the real world and there's the imagery out in front of you old processor, you know, not a lot of memory on it, old version of an operating system. So the shield, the newest pair that we have come out with, you'll notice first that the optics in them are significantly upgraded from what's in the blade. When you look through these guys, the focus is not an infinity, the focus of the virtual image that you see is about a metre and a half away. And there's two displays in this guy, left and a right. So when you look at the imagery, literally, it floats out in front of you feels like you could reach out and touch it, it's it's very impressive. And where the convergence is, is very close to where the focus is. And so you don't have any of the disparity issues with convergence and focus. They're, they're the same they met. And so it's very, very comfortable. It feels like the imagery belongs there. And the displays on this thing are the size of a pencil eraser and a comparison to what's in the blade. Now, it's designed for enterprise. It's got a much faster processor, it's got an eight core processor, and it's got strong all kinds of extra memory in it. It's just a, it's a beast that's really designed to go to work. And because of that we started with monochrome displays, micro LEDs, it's really difficult to get full color today, that's going to happen by the way, I'm very sure of that that full color is coming. But like I said, the display is so small, it's smaller than my finger, my pinky finger here, and you know the tip of it up like that. So it's this little tiny things disappears in the front temples. And in fact, you know, as I'm showing them here, you can see how thin these guys are in the front and the look and feel of them. They're absolutely crystal clear. And the front end of this design is strikingly like a pair of Oakleys there's a little space in the temples, but the temples, you know, the very right behind the front end. As you can see, there's a cutout so they they stick back this way. So there's peripheral visions, no problem, when you put these guys on, you can still see left and right, you don't feel like you're kind of blocked off. And there's enough space in the back to put the working bits which is really important. These guys have a pair of batteries. They got a fast processor. And I'm like I said they got Wi Fi Bluetooth connectivity. It's just a big step forward, the optics and the technology that's inside the box.

That looks really impressive. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to see them put them on at photonics West. I'd heard David banally interviewed here a handful of weeks back and he had a chance to put those on and was really impressed also in what you'd created there with the shield. And I really look forward to putting my own eyes on them. But looking at the industrial design of it, it's definitely a significant step forward. So congratulations on the whole engineering team on pulling off this next iteration that's pretty, pretty impressive.

Yeah, thanks Jason. It is an amazing piece of kit and as I say, you know, seeing is believing it, it looks beautiful. You put them on they're incredibly comfortable and the imagery inside of them because everything matches the focus in the in the depth of where the imagery is. It looks like you're looking at something that's real your mind aim believes it's there.

That's awesome. I'd like to dig in maybe more into the shield. But taking it from the perspective of the devices that have been really successful for Vuzix over the last many years, which is the M series devices, the M 400. M 4000. Can you describe what's different about these devices relative to the blade or the shield? And what's kind of special about them relative to maybe some of the other players in the market? Yeah,

I mean, first of all, they only weigh like 2.8 ounces, the M 400, is a tiny, lightweight thing. It's designed to go to work in areas where occlusion is not something that's appreciated. But it's not designed to always have that imagery right in front of you. It's like the speedometer on your car. Right, so you got this lightweight stair that slides on a bunch of different mounts that we have. And typically people put it a little bit low in their vision or high in their vision based upon what they're doing. And they look into the device when they need it. But otherwise, they're working in the real world. And what's nice about it is it's really easy to use, with all of the ergonomic things that are needed for users from the plant floor to a construction site, to a warehousing room to a doctor doing operations, there's so many ways it can be easily configured. And with the fork, a camera, it streams amazing video. So it's really this beautiful little lightweight computer stick. That gives you what you need. And a lot of applications that you just don't need to have a fully head geared sort of HoloLens the kind of thing where, you know, it's for spatial computing, this is about information access for mobile workers that need to work with their hands. So that super lightweight format, that ability to put it where you want it out of the way to work with pupils, prescription glasses, to work with a heart, it doesn't have to. It just answers the call for a lot of enterprise based applications.

And so they're the it sounds like one of the key attributes is this idea that it can be mounted anywhere gives you the digital information that you need when you need it, but it's more or less out of the way. The rest of the time. Yep, yep. And as you note, it's not it's not a pair of glasses, it is a head mounted computing stick, head mounted display on the computing stick. And what's the distinction between them 400 And then 4000. Your 4000

has an optical see through display. So the the 400 is a man think it's a 20 degree OLED, but it's in an eyepiece, like a viewfinder on a camcorder kind of a thing. That M 4000 is the same kind of optics that are in the blade or the shield. So you can put that in front of you and the imagery loadout and what you see the real world through the optics.

Got it. So you got one as a see through and one is an opaque or an opaque sort of image. Yep. And in with these, you've noted a couple of great scenarios here. Manufacturing, warehouse medical operations. These are the sorts of scenarios where you've these devices have found a home

yeah, in fact, we just last week donated a pile of em for hundreds to Ukraine hospitals, so that that between the US and Ohana one, the whole idea is you have a doctor got a blunt trauma injury he's dealing with he needs help, because you've never done it before. Take the guy's leg off or get the expert help. These Ohana one doctors are experts in their field. And they can just dial in and help the doctor in the hospital save lives effectively. And I get I guess if you if you look at it right now, there's probably not an hour in the day that goes by where our glasses aren't being used in a hospital someplace.

That's pretty amazing. Is it usually this sort of scenario where the the expert who is not present is able to provide an extra pair of eyes and advice on his situation? Through the glasses, are there other sorts of scenarios that they're being used for in that operating environment?

It can be probably a bunch of different applications, but one of them is this. I'm doing it for the first time and I need help. So it's the mentoring side of it. Another one is you're an expert doctor doing the operation and you're trying to teach others how to do it. So you might have 500 students, all joining a HIPAA compliant zoom call, watching open heart surgery through the eyes of the doctor effectively. So it's training, it's for med techs to be able to during that critical part of an operation where you know, using a piece of equipment, and should they use the number six or the number eight screw at that time, and they want to get the advice from the med tech support that way it's teaching the person who's doing the work and or it's for the person that's doing the operation to teach others.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's great. The expert could be on either side of that device. Ultimately,

we're still we work with companies like rods and cones, and they even have the ability to have other pieces of equipment in the operating room join in the call with their remote software that they've built. So I'm a doctor who's helping or the med tech and I'm getting heart rate information. and blood pressure information, the view from the doctor's point of view, and maybe the live ultrasound that you're doing, all of that is coming in to my portal. So I can help support the operation. So it's a lot more than just, in some cases, it's a lot more than just the view of the glasses.

Yeah. Wow, that's awesome. I really love this sort of operating room or medical set of use cases around having a head mounted display a head mounted camera as well. But here now as you've, you're evolving here with the Vuzix Shield, you're foregoing this mount anywhere sort of device that can be out of the way ish, or just enough in the, you know, in the way to a glass to sort of form factor. How do you imagine that that sort of glasses form factor will affect the way that customers use the devices? Is that expand or change the use cases there?

Yeah, there's a lot of use cases where you can't look odd wearing a pair of glasses that, you know, you hate to say it, but you just stepped off the Starship Enterprise. And the M 400. is cool as it is, it's really designed to work in environments where it doesn't matter. The hospital is a great example. I mean, you see these doctors, they're just all rigged up with flashlights and all kinds of stuff mounted to their heads. So it's not a problem for them. Or if you're in a warehouse, wearing the M 400 is not a problem. But there's plenty of applications where you can have that look, that sort of thing. An example might be a police officer, or maybe you're you're at a border crossing sort of things. There are other places that just their employees prefer that form factor of a regular conventional pair of glasses. This is the beginnings of the broader markets, frankly, I mean, even though enterprise is touted to be upwards of 30 million smart glasses a year when it's finally cranking the broad markets, they'll never accept an M 400 form factor. And what I mean by broader markets, it's that it's the snap customers, it's the Mehta customers, it's it's average Joe's, you know, an M 400 is just not in the game. And so you need to make glasses that solve that Oakley gate. And that shield is our first admittedly second step. I guess if you count the blade first, about it's a real step forward towards getting to that form factor. And the wave guides that are in the shield are amazing. The displays that are in the shield are amazing. And we're announcing at display week, I think the press release is going out tomorrow. So by the time this thing rolls, so I can talk about it here. Yeah, we're, we're going to display week next week. And we are making a formal outreach now on the OEM and white labeling side of our business. These optics are amazing. You had just mentioned, you know, one of your previous guests, had worn them and said that the experience was phenomenal. And everybody that puts them on says that and so we are for the broader markets, now starting to make those optics available for companies to deploy and put within their finished systems. And the nice thing about the shield is it is a good example of a great step forward in technology that starts to be much more appealing to the broader markets. And Vuzix a setup, there's a bunch of things, but waveguides, in particular, are very hard to manufacture. To do them in volume. I don't think there's hardly anybody that can do it in volume, they're difficult. The performance levels that are required are on the wavelength of light across a two inch, three inch surface. Very, very difficult to hold, and views excess developed equipment that allows us to do that literally. We're shortly upgrading our facility, it'll support millions of units annually. Once we get all that done. So we can do the high volume side of this. We're starting at display week, next week, a formal push forward to be offering our OEM pieces and parts to the broader market.

And so this the key offering is the waveguide plus the display or just the waveguide on its own, or whatever they want. Yes, yeah,

that's correct. You can buy waveguides, you know, pair of them right here. And the display engines, and these are all built by vusers. And or with manufacturing partners that do high volume kinds of stuff. But you can see that's a really tiny display engine. It's quite amazing, frankly. So these pieces and parts we use has never planned on being in the mass market. You know, trying to compete with an apple, let's say it's always been our strategy to develop the technology that's needed and then to partner in the broader markets and own the enterprise space, which we're doing a pretty good job on so far.

Yeah, so only enterprise support but work with the OEMs on the broader consumer market to part plant here. The the waveguides themselves, you know that one of the big challenges is the ability to manufacture at scale. And at reasonable costs. It's kind of the other side of that. Can you describe what's unique about your manufacturing approach or the design itself that enables you to be able to manufacture these things at scale? No.

I mean, I certainly could. But there's a lot of stuff on our plant floor that's proprietary, we don't let people get on the plant floor, I will say, we can do a very large number of waveguides in a period of like 10 minutes, whereas most folks, they take literally a long time to get 25 parts out. And of those 25 parts, the yield is often not very high. And so we're talking 100 200 bucks a waveguide kinds of costs, whereas ours will be a fraction of that.

That's very impressive. In these are glass, are they plastic,

they are glass. The monochrome designs that we have right now, though, they could be in a polymer of some type,

for sure could be an opponent, because it's a single wavelength that you

get things get a lot easier when you're not having to worry about separation as a function of wavelength within the waveguide. So,

yeah, and they're flat, like all waveguides, ultimately, correct. Yep. Yeah. And one of the things you noted last, but it could be plastic, one of the things that is described around the Vuzix shield is this concept of a smart safety glass. Yes. And so we're basically idea is to replace the existing safety glasses with an NC certified z 87.1. What does that certification is certified safety glass. How important is this idea of it being a certified safety glass? And how do you get there with truly glass waveguides inside the overall device,

it's part of a stack, the wave guides. So it's not just here's a piece of glass there, I will say that even the waveguide itself is a special glass, not high index only, it's got special treatment to the surface of it, they're very rigid, tough, they're, they're built to take a bit of a beating. But that said, it's also part of the stack. There's other pieces in the stack that allow this thing to be able to survive the BB drops and all the other things that are part of that the Zb 7.1 specification. So it's not just a waveguide.

Yep. And, and for our listeners, these things are ballistic rated. But that does not mean that they stop a bullet, it means that there's some like protection against flying objects, like a BB or a piece of metal or, you know, whenever there's just

satisfied, clear side components you can put on, if you need that for the plus, I think they call it GT 7.1 plus whatever. So anyway, we have side shields at the same time

for got it. And so here with this enterprise focus, you're able to offer ancy certified pair of safety glasses. One of the other aspects that I'm curious about is when you think about the context of consumer wearables, there's this ongoing debate and experimentation around how acceptable is a camera, from a technology perspective, it's amazing to have a camera because we can do slam, we can do some of these other advanced experiences about how you engage and experience the content. And of course, the social media companies are out there using the cameras as a primary driver of purchase that this is a head mounted camera that you can capture the moments of your lives. But there's always also at the same time this concern around privacy. Yeah. How important is the camera in the enterprise setting? And what are the concerns there around privacy?

I mean, you can't stream video of an open heart surgery without a camera turned on, right. But in these cases, this content is all HIPAA compliant, encrypted and whatever. Many applications and enterprise require that camera. And I think it's less of a problem. The security protocols and the certificates and the ability to run securely within the network of these companies is important to get right because you're shoveling around pictures of what's going on inside people's companies. Part of the issue associated with deployment right now, it takes so much time to get through the IT departments and their requirements. And they keep shifting, so we keep having to make sure that the software is there. And it's just this ongoing thing which drags out deployments, unfortunately. But all that is starting to come around frankly, it's it's getting better and better. In the broader markets, though, it's kind of interesting, because people have no problem having five cameras on their phone and they're drag them around everywhere. And you know, quite frankly, there's been a bunch of products of late coming out that are head warm, and have cameras in them that are making meaning with great success. I think Facebook's newest glasses. When you it's not branded with meta, right? It's branded ribbon. Thank you very much. That's right. From what I understand it's doing very very well and its function in life is to be used as a camera and of course for communicate chins and talking with Alexa, whatever it might be, but it's doing well. And it's not met with this whole aversion of privacy, for some reason, maybe it's because of the brand that it's being sold under. So I think it also has a look and feel, unlike Google Glass, where it looked like you almost need a crank on the side of it. So you could take videos with it. And that was in your face, obviously. And people had an aversion for that. But the Ray Bans seem to be doing very, very well. So far, at least, what my folks are on the know, on the inside of metta. They're pretty happy with that so far.

And so perhaps it is certainly an enterprise, you know, you talked about this notion of HIPAA compliance in the context of an enterprise setting, you can treat the data in a privacy compliant way. Yes. And at work, there's much less of a concern. And it's very possible here, even within the consumer environments that meta with the help of the Ray Ban brand. And snap it same thing with their spectacles products are demonstrating that maybe at least the younger generations who are buying these glasses are less concerned about the privacy implications.

I think that's right. And barring that, you're within a secure network, that's got it protocols. And finally, we also have a relationship with signifie, who makes lie fi based networks. And so shortly, you'll be able to get from them some accessories that work with our glasses, that even defense organizations that will not use Bluetooth or Wi Fi ever, like on ship and that sort of stuff, because it can be sniffed. Even if it's secure. They worry about security breaches. But with that lie fi connection, camera feeds and everything. Nobody, nobody can know because it's not being transmitted with an RF sense. It's it's secure optical line of sight.

Yeah. So here, the idea is that you basically using the light that's in the room, maybe it's visible light, maybe it's not visible light, but it's all line of sight only using light itself to transmit the data from the device to some mountain. Yeah, yes, that's really quite interesting.

Now it requires to be line of sight, you're right. I mean, you need to have an accessory with enough sensors on it that you don't lose communications with the network. And I set them up so that nobody else can sniff the light, because it is very, very directional when they do it. But the guys that signify have done a great job at enabling that and our glasses.

Now that's pretty cool. You notice a lot of extra bits on the glasses themselves, make them really powerful one of them processor, but but also it's got cameras and speakers, and touchpad and IMU, all these extra things. As you've developed the blade, or you've dropped the M series, what have been the most effective ways that users have been interacting with the glasses? How do you how do you imagine they'll be doing that with a shield going forward,

there's a touchpad on the temple. And it works reasonably well. We've gotten really good with the voice, even entering passcodes and stuff like that can be done with voice now quite well. I think you'll see down the road some UIs associated with I know you will for views X UIs that use sensor fusion and stuff. I don't know if you've played with some of the VR headsets that allow you to just turn and look to type and that sort of stuff. And some of that stuff works pretty well also. And then of course for for network access and stuff like that, where it's much more complex stuff that's made long passwords and things like that. The QR code kinds of stuff using the camera for that information entry works reasonably well. This is the hardest part, I think, I mean, it's one of the hard parts, because it's really not the hardest one, there's all kinds of hard stuff and making glasses work that people really want to wear. But the UI is a is a big piece to work on getting right. And part of the reason why enterprise is a little easier, because you're you're doing very dedicated kinds of things. It's not a general purpose interface that you build. When you're picking and packing in a warehouse. It's doing very, very stringent things that you have to solve. And then you're not turning around and making it so you got to zoom in and out to look at things and that sort of stuff because it's dedicated. Basically, it's a replacement for a barcode scanner. Right. So it's, it's an easier set of problems to solve in the broader markets. These got to be a general purpose device that allows you to do the kinds of things you do today. So the UI is the UI and the whole OS even I think is a bit more complicated to get right for the broader markets. Yeah, there's

tremendous advantage to having a very dedicated, very specific use case. And people who are paid to do it. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to people trying to find some sort of generic use case and they're the ones paying to have the privilege to do utilize the device. And I think that adds extra thresholds of quality and add value. I think that exists for the for the consumer market. Not to say there isn't tremendous amount of value that comes out of utilizing these devices in enterprise In Absolutely yes. Which is why they're picking it up and using it today. One of the things you described also is that there's a significant improvement in the processor here in the shield. I think you're using the Qualcomm XR one this time around. Yes, that's right. See that some real computing capability, updated modern Android operating systems running on that. So this thing can run on its own. But it also pairs with a smartphone. As you kind of think about this, this notion of the relationship with a dependency between the glasses and the smartphone, where, what you have kind of thought process and how these two things work together,

I forgot information on some of the newest silicon that some folks are working on. And it only makes sense to me that ultimately, the whole idea of having a phone, super fast wireless connection to the glasses, the glasses, having a trimmer, lower power subset of stuff that's needed in the phone can do a lot of the compute and or the cloud will allow form factors to get super trim. And yeah, you'll, I'm confident that you're going to see the silicon to make those things happen, all coming together here over the next year and a half, two years. And hear

this specifically around the ability to push data wirelessly with lower power and high bandwidth, that part of the silicon.

It's not just that it's even doing the slam slash spatial compute aspect of things. HoloLens is as big as it is, because all that processing power is required to manipulate and manage very fast motion to photon latency issues. And that is all power consuming stuff. And it's big and bulky by today's standards, because the processors are 25 millimeter square things, right. So they're an inch square thing is big for a pair of glasses to try to fit someplace that's been kind of rethought. So that the partitioning of who does what and where it gets done, to enable glasses that people will really want to wear. That's, that's all coming through some nice evolution.

It's fantastic to hear, it's really about being able to leverage the phone as the local compute, even if the two devices are not wired together. And yeah, offloading as much as possible off the glasses to make sure the glasses themselves stay as trim as small as possible.

Yes, enough in the glasses to perform well, but just enough to perform well. If you know what I mean.

Yeah, because ultimately, the glasses, the success, the underlying implication here is that the success of the glasses is in large part determined by its wear ability, like how do we make these things truly lightweight, comfortable all day, look and work like normal glasses, but also have this additional capability of being able to capture in view digital information back to back to the glasses. Yep. So I'd like to kind of maybe circle back to some of the underlying bits of the technology talked about some of the core technologies of Vuzix is the waveguide itself. It is the the access to the display technology manufacturing partner there and you're putting them together into into a visual engine that together can enable a normal looking pair of glasses with a relatively small form factor.

Right. And that's the optics and display engines that views X is I mean, we're an optics company that that's our focus, right?

Yeah, that is the core and I've had an opportunity, the pleasure to engage with a number of other companies that work in the optics side of this the different waveguide side refractive waveguide or even reflective waveguide with Loomis. How do you set yourself apart from the Loomis the wave optics with the digital lenses of the world? Yeah, I

mean, they all have unique offerings. I mean, I think Loomis is optics are beautiful, they, when they're right there, they produce a really nice image. But producing in volume at scale, is another piece of the puzzle here. And what I mean by scale, making 100,000 pieces annually is nothing. Right? We're talking about replacing the phone. So you got to be able to make something cost effective. In as many as a billion units or more on an annual basis kinds of numbers and views X has been working really hard on that side of the equation, we make really good waveguides. Now we can manipulate the optics well enough to even put focus inside the waveguides we can minimize the forward light inside the waveguide. So we're good at the the Nano imprinting patterns that need to be put on the waveguide itself. And we've developed processes and equipment that allow us to do it in volume at scale at price points that I think are significantly less than what the competition can do it today.

you'd notice that there's this was a significant update improvement in the shield versus the blade. What changed

a bunch of stuff from the diffraction grating pattern design itself. The fact that we put these focused elements inside it the polymers that we're using now are upgraded from previous polymer Here's the thickness of the materials that are on the Nano input Did you know substrate has all changed, just been a lot of stuff when you when you start making something, you're this good at it. And then when you get better at it, you kind of go up. And we're just getting better and better at it. And we have, again, some process equipment and those kinds of things that have also been upgraded, that we're getting ready to move into full scale on.

That's very impressive. Ultimately, one of the things that the M series accommodates that Holden's accommodates, is this idea that you can wear your normal glasses, and then also have this access to digital information. There's lots of trade offs, of course with the HoloLens device. But that's one of the benefits of that sort of device form factor. How do you plan to incorporate vision correction into the glasses?

Yeah, I mean, it's great that folks have built their glasses with a knob, I really could you can jam it up in front of your regular glasses. But that is not comfortable to go to work. I mean, there's a reality to this, it's one thing, it's great to hand a pair to somebody, and they test it. And if they have glasses on, they can test it. Okay. But you hand a pair of glasses like that to a guy that's working in a warehouse and have him enjoy his day. And eight hours you have to wear in that there's the short term, how do you demo it and how you use it. And then there's the realities of deployment. That said, you do have to deal with glasses. And I think for them 400 it's so lightweight, and the mounts are designed to work with folks glasses. So you can use your own prescriptions, it's not a problem. The shield on the other hand, it's it's glasses. And what we didn't want to do was make it a great big thing that looked like you know, who's the guy that the artist, he's an older guy, you know, he's got the great bingo, he always wears crazy, funky glasses,

Andy Warhol.

Sure. But the point is, you buy these glasses from Vuzix and you get them with your script. So they become your glasses. The whole intention are not to put these over the top of existing glasses, this is your kit, this is you put them on and you go to work. So we have an entire process that allows folks to just get on the website, place an order for the glasses include their script, and it comes with your prescription built in.

I love that. And so that prescription is built in is that it ends up being like an extra printed layer that kind of gets inserted into the stack you've described as kind of as a stack of stuff.

Yeah, and, you know, there are some companies like Lux XL that are printing lenses, and we've talked with them, and they certainly could be a source of supply for this for views x, we have developed our own, I think it's probably a little lower cost right now, the normal glasses prescriptions have to base curves and outside and an inside curve. And those curves being different. If they were the same curve, right, it wouldn't have a script, and it would just be a curved windowpane you're looking through. But as the material changes thickness based upon what those two base curves are, you you are modifying the script for the glasses, we have developed our own process that the front piece is flat, and all of the script correction is done with the back portion of the Base Curve, that allows you to put these things right up snug into the glasses. So they're touching, effectively touching the waveguide itself. So it's a really tight stack.

That's great. It feels like it is you think about this notion of, of scale, delivering at scale, being able to produce millions of units. And then at the same time, we have this notion of prescription be kind of added to the mix, we're on a per user basis, we need ultimately a large number of us ultimately to handle all of the types of different scripts that are out there. How do those two things match up this idea of delivering a personalized script as well as being less manufacturable?

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's just the way it's gonna have to be in the end, Jason. And that's why we've developed this process and procedures that you go through, and you could one by one, go to our website and order glasses with scripts all day long, just like you were going to any one of the you know, there's any articles or whoever. And, you know, these guys, they make them by the millions and millions of units.

The other side of this, this evolution that you described, especially going from the M series, and even the blade as well to this shield design is that you have this brand new display engine. And this is a new display engine, the notice is micro LED based. Yeah. Why micro LED? Why is that the right display technology going forward for you?

So if you think about what's going on, right, a regular display front, let's say, DLP, or L costs really work is here happens to be one. You can see how big it is. This is the one that's in our blade. It's a big thing. And the way this thing works is there's a display down here and this The whole back end of this thing is LEDs. Three of them are red, blue and green one and you turn the green Amman on, and that becomes a flashlight with all these optics to flash down onto the surface of the DLP, then the DLP will modulate the mirrors, taking the light and throwing everything away that you don't need. And reflecting out of the lens assembly, everything that you do need. Well, if you think about what that means is, every single pixel is always on all the time, red, blue, green, flashing, great, throwing away a bunch of light, inefficient power consumption through the roof. Whereas if you have a display that each one of the pixels is its own led, right? If I got an arrow to the right, with 50 pixels on, all the other pixels are off, power consumption goes through the floor, and you've got this arrow painted out in front of you. And if you look at video and the likes, it's significantly less than 100% on all the time. And so if you want to make it efficient, you need to have something that is self emitting now, you need it bright too. And so alternatives to micro led could be like an OLED, organic light emitting diodes. The problem with organic light emitting diodes is they don't get bright enough waveguides in most optical systems require a lot of light. And so you need like an order of magnitude plus more light than what an OLED can do. So enter micro led again, because you can make micro LEDs that are couple microns and sizes that put out a couple 3 million nits a light. So they're small, they're self emitting, they don't draw a lot of power, they only use it when you need it. And you get rid of all the rest of the stuff that's in the back end of a frontlit style display, allowing you to make displays, like I said, Man the size of a pencil eraser.

So here we're going from something that's an inch by two or three inches by a centimeter or so kind of thickness wise, that's what was on the blade with the DLP to something that is basically like the end of a pencil.

Yeah, the just the very end of a pencil the eraser component on a pencil. Yeah, it is a fraction of the volume. It's a fraction of the power consumption. Now it's monochrome only today, without doubt, it's going to be full color on a single panel that looks just like the thing I just showed you. When that happens, you can imagine what happens to the state of the art around glasses that people can wear. And if you want super high field view, the focal lengths shrink, right, the bigger the field of view, the shorter the focal length for the optics, which means it even gets better. From a volume perspective. The other thing that you can do with our wave guides is have multiple inputs. So you could bury a few displays to get much much higher resolution systems down the road with like 100 Plus fields, degree field of view, those kinds of things. But that stuff is coming over the next several years should be a very exciting field.

Can you talk about that just a touch more this idea of putting multiple displays to expand the field of view?

Yeah, in fact, we have a defense program that we're working on right now that has two displays. There's two inputs on the waveguide. And you tile the displays inside. And the things got like an 80 degree field of view, horizontal field of view, it's just begun. It's beautiful.

Yeah, that's brilliant. Fantastic. One of the things we talked you talked about this, the ability for the inorganic LEDs to be bright enough in work well with the diffractive waveguides. What is then the resulting brightness we're able to achieve with a shield to the eyes

depends upon which waveguide we use. It has between 2004 1000 nits right now.

Okay, which is substantially brighter than the HoloLens for example that's out there, which I think is just a couple of 100. Yeah, so we're talking order of magnitude plus brighter than HoloLens.

Yeah, they get bright, you can stare out a fluorescent light, and this thing is no problem to see it.

Yeah. You know, with defense program you're working on you can get field of view 80 degrees, what we're talking about for the commercial, or the enterprise version of the shield here for in terms of field of view,

it's only 30. And it's 30 for a reason. I mean, people work, the defense applications, right? Like I've asked, they want stuff that's all the way out here so that they can warn and put information up that peripherally. The person who was wearing the glasses will notice when you're when you're picking parts or when you're getting work instructions, you're looking at something that's you know, out in front of you. And if you put too big of a vast amount of information, it just clutters the space compared to I want it here. And I want it over here, you know, up and out of the way so I can still work and it's not in the way and so the 30 degree field of view works pretty well for that. It's not difficult for us make this bigger, I mean, it makes the engine smaller. But in the studies that we've done, that smaller field of view worked pretty well, for a work environment.

Do you imagine the same thing applying in the consumer space. And then we talk a lot about, especially those that are very excited about creating very immersive experience, talk about this the necessity of the benefit of a much larger field of view. But you've noted the setting in which the goal is to be productive to find utility in the glasses, the 30 degree field of view is big enough.

I think this is where some companies are missing the mark, there is a market. And I think it's a massive market for something with a more modest field of view. Not everybody needs to look at dinosaurs running around in front of them. Right? There's so many applications, directions, augmented directions. Now, you'll never take the map out of your pocket information on you know, where did this thing get built. There's just so much stuff, watching movies, there's so many things that a more modest field of view, which allows for a much trimmer design opens up I think, much quicker opportunities than that giant, massive field of view that's trying to solve for spatial computing with dinosaurs, or whales jumping out of floors.

And I think you're going to see the world, the bigger brands all thinking that way. Because it's a big stretch to get to the panacea of what you know, AR glasses could be when spatial computing is there, and you've got the dinosaurs running around between that extreme and where we are now. There's designs that can be made, that I think people would wear. wearability is number one, we're abilities. Number one, yeah, the minute you failed on that you don't have a product, I personally fully subscribe to this, this idea that wearability is number one that we have to solve for, that I was chatting with was Kai shooter, who is the CEO of TOS recently. Yep. And we've kind of had similar sort of line of discussion, which is that if you can't solve variability, then you don't have mass market product, the Hatfield software ability in order to achieve mass, and the opportunity is really to add functionality while maintaining the wearability threshold. And you as the technologies get better, right? You describe this, the since insight into forthcoming, and forthcoming semi vectors into forthcoming silicon that allows more offloading of the capabilities of the processing needs of the glasses onto the device, the smartphone is already in your pocket, allowing us to continue to increase the overall felt set of features felt set of functionality within the glasses while reducing the complexity of the glasses. And while maintaining the size, the wearability of the glasses. And that for me feels like the right sort of evolution of the glasses over time is that we hold wearability set to a standard. Yeah, and then we increase the functionality over time. It's the whole idea

of what's the minimum viable device. Right? And it's not about, it's got to have all this fancy sort of spatial compute stuff in it even the minimum viable device is a pair of Ray Bans that have a camera on it. Like nowhere near the dream, though. So what's the next step, there's a much bigger market with a display, if those ray-ban Tie the display in them right now. And the phone to talk to the display, they would have probably 100 times the market appeal. And so I think you're gonna see more and more people going down that path, or, you know, there's, there's other steps along the way, besides the Holy Grail,

meant to ask what, what is the weight of the shield right now?

I don't know. Because I apologize, I can't remember, it's 120 grams, maybe I think what's important to note, though, is the balance, you know, you when you put them on the weight on the bridge of your nose, it's almost zero, not quite, there's a little bit of forward weight on it. But it's designed because the batteries are on the backside of it right. And your ear is here, it's really designed to take the weight off the bridge of your nose. So incredibly comfortable. And a comparison to even sunglasses that have you know, a modest amount of weight with them all that weight. After a while people get like their little marks in the bridge of their nose and stuff. This guy doesn't do that.

I think the ergonomic design is so important where the weight is, matters as as much as how much weight there is altogether. That's right. So one of the challenges slash benefits that you have is that you are running physics as a public company you have for more than a decade now. But one of the things that I get as a as an industry observer is that I get to see how many relatively approximately how many devices you're selling each year. And so as an industry leader in the enterprise space industry stalwart, how do we how do you push past you know the the 1000s, the 10s of 1000s units a year into this next level of growth. What And what are those key levers of the growth? Do you think? Yeah,

first of all, it's a crazy world right now. Right between COVID and war and Europe and supply chain issues. You know, it's challenging enough that we're in a new industry to at the same time, right. And so there's this whole kind of bumpy ride here, as this industry kind of gets moving. A lot of the reasons why we make our standard products is so that we can understand how to make the rest of the tech that underlies it work? Well. I mean, you're, I think you'll see us, again, be quite successful in enterprise. But again, a big part of our push in the long run as to in the broader markets, be a supplier of key components. It's got the potential for orders of magnitude more business than in the enterprise space, not that the enterprise is bad. It's, it's takes time. IT departments come up to speed, we're finally getting there. Yes, things are growing and 2022 is going to be bigger than 2020 2021. Was, etcetera, right. But you'll be seeing it here. Even just tomorrow, when this next press release comes out our push towards the broader markets through these relationships with other companies, we already have five defense companies that are buying from Vuzix that are buying engines and waveguides that are going in custom solutions for them. That will be reasonable volume, I'm sure of it. Some of them. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the AI VAs program is struggling just a little bit. And the military, they really liked this wearable display space, they think it's important for the future. And so there's a lot of companies now that are trying to solve for a piece of what Microsoft was solving for an eyeglass. Again, it's this whole holy grail versus what do you really need to be effective for the warfighter. So we that part of our business is although not showing a lot of revenue just yet. Over the next few years, it's going to be a nice piece of growth reviews, it's again part of our OEM strategy. We've got some of the commercial players out there that are buying from us right now and building into systems that they're telling us 2324, they're going to be rolling out in volume. And since we've announced the shield and shown it, there seems to be an unending flow of people knocking on our door to understand how Vuzix might be able to help. And so yes, we're opening up the kitchen cabinets, as it were, and bringing it to market through third party partnerships. Now,

are those going to be the imagine that the key sources of revenue over time as the direct sales into the enterprise space, the OEM supporting DoD opportunities, as well as broader bigger consumer sort of opportunities, those are the two major buckets, there's one other

piece and we're already starting to do that as software as a service component where nobody buys our glasses, and just uses the glasses, there's always some piece of software that they're running on it. And we have a team of our own internally that are working on solutions around our glasses, in very select areas, not not like we're trying to solve for everything here. They're verticals, and they're smaller, frankly, but they allow us to be in this recurring revenue side of the model. And we're also we've talked about this before looking at certain acquisitions that would allow us to leverage that faster. Got it. I mean, we make a great enterprise platform, we no software is required to run on it. So we're reselling some of our partners. And you'll see us selling some of our own here, as that part of our business unfolds a

little bit. As we look at the evolution, we talked about this notion of wearability. And this notion that over time, we can push more and more of the responsibility to the smartphone, allowing the glasses to stay trim. How does this the ecosystem of the smartphone manufacturers themselves, iOS and Android? How does that affect the opportunity to take advantage of SAS revenue? Does it increase the opportunity there? Or does it make it more challenging because now you have to fight on the App Store and give up part of that revenue to these App Store providers?

That's a good question. I haven't thought that far. Honestly. I mean, for the enterprise portion of what we do, these guys don't. A lot of it doesn't need the phone at all. And they're more than happy just tying into their Wi Fi networks and doing everything without even necessarily using an app store. Although we have an app store and we do sell software over our app store. A lot of that model now is working where we would pre install the software on our glasses. And it would come in as a warehouse picking kit guy does is turn it on, tie it onto the network and he's picking because that particular piece of software is designed to working with the network the solution on the given customer in the broader markets, there's definitely going to be an impact. There's no doubt about it. But the guys that are making the silicon, they know those customers, the connectivity components of it will all come together. And I just think it's a fait accompli, that the app stores will deliver the solutions in the glasses. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just going to end up being the underlying connectivity between the glasses and the phone that's just required and the brands that are making the glasses will ensure that that happens for Vuzix in that broader market. You know, our mission is the bits that actually make the glasses look cool. Yeah,

I meant to ask, When are we gonna be able to buy a pair of Vuzix Shield?

Mid summer, barring any more supply chain issues. This has been part of the problem. I mean, we, we sourced some stuff out of China, and China, they're like, shut down cities complete cities are like, on quarantine. And it's, it's made from mid q1 today. And I think it's going to continue a bit, unfortunately. I mean, some of the cities that we get parts from, nobody can go to work, you just, if they can't on the street, I don't know where that what happens to them. Everything's shut down. So that's been some talent. That said, I think we're still in pretty good shape for midsummer.

I can't wait for that. So jumping back to this, this notion of physics as a public company, you've been running physics as a public company for more than a decade now. What would have been for you the keys to being a successful public company CEO,

we went public in 2009, on the Toronto Stock Venture Exchange, and it was December 24, when we finished everything. And so we close that Christmas Eve, of all things. And 2009 was a rough year for the markets. So we were there. And you know, Vuzix is one of those companies that has incredible earnings potential coming up and incredible technology behind it, that private companies are getting almost Well, an example of Did you lens just raise 50 million bucks at a $500 million valuation kinds of numbers, right. So when you're public, and you're still telling the story, kind of a thing, it takes a lot of effort to get people to understand the value proposition. That said, it's also a great place to tell your story, it's a great place to raise the dollars that you need to be able to compete. I mean, there's been so many companies go out of business, in the space that we're in, because this business, it's just taking time to get there. So we went from the Toronto Stock Exchange, the OTC just happened to list us somebody did that Intel invested in us, shortly after that, we moved up to the NASDAQ. Through all of that process, there's all kinds of when you raise money, there's, it's it's an interesting sort of journey to be on. And along the way, you will sometimes issue warrants we have in the past, and it ends up being challenging, even more so because the folks that you are invested in you, and rightly so I mean, they, they can use some of those instruments to leverage the company in their position. And but it's taken a long time. And you know, views x now has a urine $120 million in the bank, which we're up against giants here, which is, so it's great to have access to that kind of capital without being public, this would probably not be the case, we got one heck of a story. And it's unfolding really well for views. It's right now. And so even though the markets are a mess at the moment, I'm sure everybody's sort of looking at that and seeing that. I think it's been very advantageous for views x to be there.

How have you, as the CEO found the the groove in kind of maintaining all of these different interests and in the fact that you have to share so much and tell the story in a certain way to the public markets?

It's it's a difficult thing, Jason, I mean, it's probably one of the hardest jobs on the planet, frankly, to be the CEO of a public company, especially where view six is that right now, because it requires a fair amount of effort to make sure that folks are understanding where you're going. And they appreciate the value proposition. I mean, we have 200 and some patents. We've got this waveguide technology that's gotta be worth at least 500 million based upon others in the space. But you got to tell the story. You got to be able to communicate that and you got to be able to show the success and it takes it just takes a lot of work. A lot of time, energy and effort, frankly, but it's worth it because it's helping Vuzix to get the job done.

You know that one of the benefits is you have access to the public markets in order to raise money. And right now you've got 240 million dollars of cash in the accounts. What is the plan for growth without money?

Yeah, I mean, this is even part of the reason why we're opening up the OEM side of our business. That few things, we're, we're putting it to work, we've got these next generation products that we're coming out with that, like this yield as an example. There's some acquisitions that shouldn't be happening here coming up at Vuzix. And to deliver to what this volume we see come in the number of companies that are coming to us to buy pieces and parts, you'll see some expansion on our plant floor here coming up. We're not just sitting on the cash, we're putting it to work.

And so here, it's about expand that manufacturing capability about leaning into the opportunities on the OEM side of things. You notice Mac potential acquisitions here, forthcoming. So a lot of plant growth here in the near term. And when you package all this up, and you're telling the story about Vuzix How do you articulate the long term vision for the company,

just like we're doing here, every conference call when I'm on the road, I, you know, I host investor presentations at times, often times, honestly, part of my job of using is to be the cheerleader is probably not the greatest choice of words, but to be the visionary and be the guy that tells the story to make sure people understand it. And if you look at some of our past conference calls, I think we pretty do a pretty good job of, of making the point about where we're going, we can always do better, and we're working on that. But it's about making sure you're consistent. You're telling everybody where you're going, you're showing everybody what else is happening in the industry, and how you're stacking up against it. Yeah, and I like to think that you know, Vuzix, although I think we're significantly undervalued right now, I think we do a pretty darn good job of getting the message out.

Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting for an industry like augmented reality, which is still nascent, from from where it's going to be a handful of years from now. That's what we believe in, there's so much growth potential in front of it. But some of the challenges, some of the barriers to unlocking that larger market are really technical, in a way like that we understand this, this general notion, we believe you. And I believe that wearability is a key attribute that must be achieved in order to, and unable, the sort of broader consumer adoption of these sorts of things. But the ways that you drive wearability are in the weeds of the technology in the uniqueness of your waveguide technology, for example, or in some advancement in micro LED technology. And I think that in the public markets, it's challenging to articulate the nuances of the technology itself. Because it's not just oh, you know, we run the clocks faster on our on our CPUs, or, you know, whatever these numbers that people have come to associate with, with goodness of whatever the type class of technology device that we're more familiar with. And so I think that there is a very real challenge, I feel this challenge also, in being able to articulate the bigger story and the differentiation, when the details of the technology really matter.

And they're complex problems. Yeah. Difficult to describe, difficult to explain why there's an advantage in something. And in some cases, for views, it's proprietary. So we don't want to necessarily share with everybody, because it's part of the secret talks, as it were. But that said, it's clear that waveguides are going to be a cornerstone piece of technology in smart glasses. And it's clear that making them in volume is a problem. And that's an area where Vuzix stands out compared to any of the other waveguide suppliers. And I don't think Vuzix gets enough credit for that. But I think the markets are pretty bizarre right now. So, you know, that's part of the challenge of all of that. I mean, sometimes it just doesn't matter, when the whole world is a nervous wreck about where it's gonna end up next week.

Very true. Right. But on the plus side, you got 120 million in cash in the bank? Yes. See, okay, in the short term, but you didn't know that there was some challenges in the supply side of things. Are there any other headwinds that are kind of slowing things down are potential risks that are out there over the next 1218 months,

I think there's more wind at our back than our head winds. But there are these areas of hiccups when you when you can't get the new Flex flexes that you need with the you know, the advanced connectors on them that you needed to switch to or whatever it might be because your sourcing supplier shut down or it's going to take an extra two months before they can deliver it and you know, those kinds of things. Those are those are difficult challenges because there's a lot of uniqueness in some of the stuff that we're doing especially with our newer products. But outside of the coin, some of the momentum that we have in the medical side as an example is it's great to see and that's winds that are back and every time we turn around there's another hospital that using our glasses and and I think on that technol The front, we got a lot of wins that are back because we've sold a lot of the problems. So it's the yin and the yang of all of that and tell him that's part of the story is also part of the challenge. Because, you know, as a public company, there's expectations, and it's just the way it is.

Yeah. Let's wrap with a few in lightning round questions here. What commonly held belief about AR or spatial computing Do you disagree with,

you need to have glasses that will support whales jumping out of floors, and, you know, these massive fields of view. And I think there is an obvious subset of technology that will win the day. It's just like, when the iPhone first came out, you know, when it started as an iPod, then it turned into an iPhone, it didn't jump to the iPhone immediately. And it only had six applications on it when it started. And, and I think that there's a, there's a lot of effort going into the Holy Grail, and not enough effort going into that smaller subset that could drive the broader market.

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

From a technology perspective? If I'm thinking and understanding the question, right, micro LEDs really need to take a few more steps forward than where they're at right now. It's difficult from all of the vendors we're working with on yields. Getting full color on a single panel is really got to be the answer in the end. And there's not a lot of companies that are able to pull that off. The guys that can do that are going to be game changers. And, yeah, we would love to see more progress on that front,

next to a bit more of left fields. But what books have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

And that's an interesting one. I read mostly technical papers and stuff.

And a great technical

summary of the last book, I've been doing a lot of stuff on the an optics, and of course, micro led space, and micro LEDs. There's some interesting stuff in the world today. So but I really don't can't get into the details.

Sure. If you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Paul?

Yeah. Yeah, by Tesla, by Amazon. You know, from the perspective of me talking to myself about helping my career, we were way ahead of the curve, when we started the VR headset side of the business, and not that I wouldn't be here. But there's a lot of other stuff that could have been done along the way, and then jumped into this a little bit later in the game than we did. But we don't quit at Vuzix, we get it done. And I think you know, to be in this industry for the number of years that we have been is a statement and about that. And I'm still really happy that we're at where we're at right now. So I might have given myself a bit of a warning about how long the ride is going to be. But this industry is about ready to go through the roof. And I would have told myself, you're not wrong. When you decide you want to get in this industry, just brace yourself for it, because it's going to take some time

really does require commitment. Yeah, there's no doubt Yeah. Which views actually shown over the years. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

No, Jason, it was a great discussion. I really appreciate you taking the time with with Vuzix the shields COMM And people should keep an eye out for that should be fun. And there's another version of the blade coming. Bunch of things look forward,

anything you can share about updated blade, why a new blade, if you've got the shield,

there are certain certain things about the blade, and certain customers that we have that they like, and it needs to have needed to have some changes which are well underway at this point. In fact, it's right around the corner to I can't share more than that, though. Jason, there'll be something formal coming out here shortly.

Look forward to that one, too. Where can people go to learn more about you? And you know, find out what you know, the sign up for the shield notification about the shield and everything else you're doing their Vuzix?

Yeah, I mean, I would recommend you if you go to our website, view six.com. We use the i x.com. You can get on our mailing list and stuff just with a simple form. At the same time, there's all kinds of information on that website about enterprise and smart glasses and enterprise. There's white papers. There's a bunch of webinars that we've done. There's going to be a webinar later this week with the volca on speech recognition, one of the UI kinds of things that we use in our glasses and how great it can be. We just announced I think 28 languages worth of support and those glasses are with Volca. So yeah, our website is got a wealth of information on how the enterprise world is using our glasses. And there's an OEM section in there all So just get online and schedule a meeting if you want to see the latest stuff. Paul, thank

you very much for the conversation.

Yeah, no problem. Jason was my pleasure. Thank you.

Before we go on to let you know that I'll be taking a brief summer break from recording new episodes. In the meantime, I'll reshare and highlight a couple of popular episodes from the past and resume sharing fresh new interviews later this summer. Please follow us subscribe the podcast you don't miss this upcoming lineup of great episodes. Until next time,