The AR Show: Nathan Pettyjohn & Mike Lohse (Lenovo) on the Think Reality A3 and Providing an End-to-End Solution to Enterprise

6:46PM Jan 25, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Nathan Pettyjohn

Mike Lohse

Keywords:

lenovo

device

customers

ar

hardware

spatial computing

glasses

people

roi

software

vr

mike

deliver

technology

pc

nathan

cases

enterprise

create

headset

Welcome to the AR show right dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology and uses of smart glasses and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall.

Today's conversation is with Nathan Pettyjohn and Mike Lohse. At Lenovo, Nathan is the commercial AR VR lead at Lenovo. He is also the founder and president of the VR AR Association, and the annual VR AR Global Summit. Previously, Nathan was also the founder and CEO of venture backed aisle411, a mobile indoor navigation and 3d product cloud platform. Mike is the hardware product manager for commercial AR VR at Lenovo. Previously, Mike spent nine years at ODG, which for a long time was the premier creator of AR glasses. As the VP of advanced products there, Mike was behind the impressive R7 R8 and R9 glasses.

In this conversation, Nathan Mike and I chat about the key use cases that Lenovo has customers want to solve with spatial computing and where AR or VR fit in the mix. We talk about the challenges of moving projects beyond initial pilots, as well as Lenovo has role in delivering holistic end to end AR and VR solutions to companies. This includes software services and hardware. We talk about Lenovo think reality as its headset, and the lessons learned in the last two years since its release. We also discussed the new think reality a three, this new device tethered to a smartphone or PC to satisfy industrial or work from home productivity needs. We discuss how this new product fits with offerings from Microsoft and real where and the device agnostic approach Lenovo is taking to meet the needs of their customers. As reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. Let's dive in.

Nathan, you've been the founder and CEO of a tech startup focused on spatial computing. And you're the founder and president of the VR AR Association. Where did this entrepreneurial drive start for you?

I've been an entrepreneur at heart since I was probably four or five years old. So I've got kind of this funny little storyline of, you know, when I was four years old, I started drawing some artwork, my parents liked it, I thought, Hey, I could make some money doing this and make some people happy. And without my parents knowing it, I started walking around the neighborhood, just some neighbors I knew and I'd write on the little piece of artwork, like you pay $1. And for some reason, people agreed to do it. And I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. It kind of like it juiced me for the rest of my life. And, you know, then I went on to junior high and I, I was you know, buying bulk Jolly Ranchers and selling them in small packs. A school told me I couldn't do that anymore. So there went that business, then I started doing lawn mowing kind of built a business there learn how to do books, you know, when I was an early teenager and later ran, you know, I had this kind of small vending machine route that I ran, I've started a venture backed software company, you know, when I got into my professional career, and now Lenovo, it's kind of cool, because we're, we're kind of building this new business unit within Lenovo. And it's it's the best of both worlds, you have the ability to move kind of quick and make decisions and create something new, but you have the resources of a big powerhouse global fortune 100 companies. So it's kind of you know, just just built into my, my DNA. Yeah. Like, I can only imagine this five, four or five year old wandering around to the neighbors, you know, trying to sell anything, you could have been selling your own toys or selling something, you created this thing, the value that you would actually create it, which is definitely the sign of a of an entrepreneur. Yeah. felt sorry for me, but I never shared it was hard. You know, three quarters of it was it was so cute that the small child is out there selling.

That's right.

Yeah, that's that's so cool. Yeah, you talked about Lenovo. And this different space, you're at this different place you're at now and in your own career as an entrepreneur, you know, you have this opportunity to be an intrapreneur inside the larger company creating some new, new space. But maybe before we talk about what Lenovo is doing in our favorite areas around AR VR, you can describe who is Lenovo? Can you give a kind of a broader perspective of the company beyond the maker of laptops.

Sure. Yeah, I think I could talk to that a little bit. As you mentioned, Lenovo is known primarily for, for being one of the the Top Producing PC makers with the Lenovo ThinkPad. And, and Lenovo owns the Motorola phone business. But really, you know, Lenovo is focused on being a global leader of intelligent transformation. So we use that term a lot. that focus on intelligent transformation is really around delivering what we call smart devices and infrastructure that it's powered by like AI, data computing power algorithms. And, you know, it's all around this, this kind of motto of improving the way we we live the way we work the way we play. And so within Lenovo, there's enterprise you know, business units and there's also consumer enterprise units.

But this intelligent transformation is really at the core of everything that we're doing to, to help communities like, you know, have better opportunities to create better connectivity. And just, I think it's a, it's an incredibly innovative company and kind of built into the culture. You know, when you come into Lenovo, they, they have, you know, basically the culture is like, you need to be thinking like an entrepreneur and, and don't just kind of settle for what we're delivering today. It's what's next? How do we help our customers? And so there's this customer centric innovation, that it's more than just hardware, it's like software and intelligent transformation. So and then that kind of plays into the augmented reality and virtual reality experience, which is, you know, at the forefront of innovation and integrating AI and IoT, and all these other business units.

Yeah, absolutely. Mike, how did you find your way to the novo What attracted you to the company?

It was really the solution based approach to this industry? That really kind of was was the main attraction, right? You know, out there and startup space, it's hard to kind of do it all. But you know, Lenovo really has the the ability resources and, and customer base right to go work these initiatives. Is it for the company for Lenovo is really just about being at the front lines kind of being at the at the edge? Is there something about in terms of its interest in in AR and VR? Or is there something specific about the technology about what augmented reality? Or what virtual reality can do? that really fits well, with Lenovo and its existing customers and what they're trying to accomplish? Yeah, so look, we know it takes a very much of a customer first approach. And, you know, we value their feedback, we value what they have to say, and what they want to do. As, as you know, you know, many of these fortune 100, fortune 500 companies, they want to be more innovative, they want to lean forward, right. But it's, it's a little bit still a little bit scary out there, right, trying to find the right solution, trying to find the right path, and to commit to one of those paths, right, I think that's the hardest thing is these big companies to commit to a solution. And so, you know, I think we've been able to provide them with that whole solution, you know, parts pieces, the whole solution. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. But yeah, just a little bit of hand holding of the, of these customers into, you know, this little bit very new and different space, right into this intelligent transformation, as as Nathan said, Yeah. What is it that these companies want to accomplish? That AR and VR enable better than what they have had before in terms of tooling? What sorts of kind of use cases that stand out as you as you survey these customers around AR and VR? Yeah, so that, you know, the, the base cases are really these, you know, remote expert, remote assistance, you know, especially in in pandemic times when people travel have been hugely curtailed. You know, suddenly, people who used to travel as part of their their work or go to factories or fabs or whatever, right? They can't do that anymore. So, you know, having somebody on the ground with a camera on their head effectively, in streaming that back to an expert to resolve problems, or to go through a work list or checklist of items, right is super helpful. And that, unfortunately, spans across lots of different verticals and industries. You know, we've seen some inductor medical, we've seen automotive, you know, it's really across the board manufacturing, maintenance logistics. And then just the bottom line is the is the ROI that comes from that, you know, how much faster is the worker? How much more efficient? Are they, you know, how quickly did they solve or resolve an issue that they had, but you know, that that's kind of where the rubber hits the road. Really, people are seeing the ability to solve these problems in in real time, across time zones. Yeah. And as you've kind of engaged with these customers, and you've studied what they have been doing and what they're doing now, with the available technologies today, due to AR and VR, do they fit together? Or are they used as an either or depending on what the company is trying to accomplish? Have you seen those kind of come together or get used? Yeah, there's starting to be and will be more crossover very shortly. Still there. They're pretty separate, you know, years being used a lot in the soft skills, training, space, HR, onboarding, things like that, right? Bringing people learning a new skill, learning how to interact with people potentially or customer issues that they may or may not have experience with. Whereas AR is still really much about you know, fixing a specific problem on the floor or addressing a need that can't be done can be

done remotely, I guess are fully remotely. So I'd say the still separate, but they're they're coming together. And I think we'll see more of that when you know, you see more of these kind of Mr. devices come out later this year and other immersive AR devices coming out

microcenter very well. But if you look at like the the customers that we deal with, a lot of times in their digital innovation teams, for example, they have some of the key stakeholders are making decisions on what they call all immersive technologies. So sometimes that gets kind of bucketed into the same decision making process and and then the same IT managers are looking at like, how do I manage all these devices? How do I manage the apps? How do I manage the users, and Lenovo has perspective, we have a unique kind of ability one to scale technologies, because we've delivered like 100 million connected devices a year now. But two, we can go in and deliver on an AR solution set and a VR solution set. And sometimes like the the MDM, you know that mobile device management technology will be the same that's managing all those devices. And you know, a lot of the employees are the same that are maybe going through a training module in a virtual reality experience. But then when they go on the factory floor, they're using a, you know, an AR device that's kind of tied to some of that learning that they've already done in in VR. So I think we we try to look at it in a while. Well, Mike, you know, set it really well, you know, the the technologies are definitely unique, the experiences are unique, you know, it's all after the same type of goal in the end, to train and kind of enhance human decision making.

Both you have now mentioned these these underlying themes that a lot of enterprises face that I think often startups that so much they don't appreciate it. But it's often very hard for a startup to really solve for, which is that these large companies in trying to improve the decision making the quality decision making, as you're describing, is they have lots of users, lots of devices, lots of apps, potentially, they got security concerns a lot that goes into being able to deliver ultimate complete solution. It's not just about being able to deliver this moment of value around remote expertise, or whatever the thing is they're trying to create. Right. And I think that especially especially as technologies are early in their lifecycle as AR and VR, AR, they're just more holes that ultimately need to be filled in, I think, in some ways AR and VR benefits from all the work that smartphones had, right? You've talked about mobile device management, a set of technologies around managing the type of devices that are mobile compute connected computing devices. And we've kind of gotten better at it. And so we get to leverage some existing technologies, some existing methodologies. But even even with that, there are some nuances, I think, to what we're doing with AR and VR. What is the approach that Lenovo was taking ultimately, to satisfy this broad set of needs that enterprises have?

Yeah, so I can, I can touch a little bit on the strategy. And Mike, maybe if you want to go into detail on some of the, like the hardware specifically, but so we we've taken this approach of offering our customers a total solution, and that includes software that's needed to deliver, it includes hardware, and it includes services, and even some systems integration. So you know, from from hardware perspective, we're focused on filling gaps in the marketplace and saying, hey, if there's not something already out there on the market that's filling this need, let's try to solve it. But in many cases, too, we've partnered with third parties to deliver and kind of pull their third party hardware into our software ecosystem. Because we know that we can't do everything. And the same goes for software, you know, we've worked with application partners. And instead of kind of creating an app store, we've taken the approach of like, let's, let's really focus in on some of the best of breed software applications, let's integrate them into our think reality software so that a user can have a single sign on and authentication, they can access these applications. The MDM, whether it's, it's, it's a Lenovo based MDM, or it's a third party MDM that they're already using, let's make sure that this all connects and works together. And so that way, our customers don't have to be AR and VR experts, they can focus on their business. And we can streamline kind of the scalability of literally, you know, dozens moving into the hundreds of minute little software tools and API's and security parameters. And you know, all the hardware components and accessories that go along with it. I mean, it gets mind boggling for a lot of people. So we try to make it easy for our customers to scale.

And it sounds like you don't really have religion around whether it's internally created or a third party best of breed solution. Is that the case?

Yeah, that's that's a really good point. And it kind of goes back to like, what what Mike was saying earlier about this customer focus, you know, our customers have told us, you know, as we've, we've interviewed them and talk to them, they're like, we need flexibility. We need flexibility on our cloud infrastructure that we're going to leverage and that can mean like one customer Summer who's using AWS in one part of the world, they're using Azure and another part of the world. And maybe it's like, hey, we'll take your Lenovo hardware, it fits perfectly in this use case, and one part of the world or one use case, but we need a third party hardware device to really meet our needs somewhere else. So it's, it comes back to kind of just delivering for the customer. And, and, and flexibility is, is one of those that we've heard consistently from them.

Yeah, I'm gonna come to the hardware here in just a second. But we've heard in this industry for a little while now about, about innovation groups in these large companies being very excited about the potential ROI of these sorts of devices. And they'll go through that sort of pilot and experiment. And they'll experience that ROI. It's it's real, and it's there. And sometimes the barrier from that initial pilot to this broader rollout is exactly the sort of things you've been describing. Like we need a complete solution that actually all works together. We've talked a lot as an industry about this notion of pilot purgatory. How is it that companies will make that move from these experimentations into these broader rollouts? Is it just about having the existing pieces fit better together? Or is it about improving the state of the technology itself, improving the software, improving the hardware, so they themselves can deliver more value?

Well, from from my perspective, it's, there's really impressive software and hardware out there that can deliver ROI. And especially in a pilot scenario. And in a lot of the scalability comes around to like supporting these teams from distribution and fulfillment of the devices at massive scale. That takes on a whole new world of challenges that most people don't think about, like the certification process on a country by country basis around the world. That includes like, overall hardware certification includes battery certification includes making sure that you have like language support, that you have customer call centers in place that you have developer supports in place, right, that you can deliver, and then all the different security levels that need to be accounted for all around the world. It's something that Lenovo does really well, and, you know, serving I think we're, we serve over 160 markets worldwide. And there's, like, literally dozens of languages that are supported. And so, so all that kind of comes into play. And and so we've kind of taken this approach to of, hey, well, we'll pull in kind of under our wing, some really phenomenal technology that might be early, it might be delivered from even what would be considered a startup, we can pull that into our infrastructure and our our solution set and give our customers competence that that can be supported by Lenovo at a global scale.

Yeah, I would just add that, you know, I think you, I think you hit it right, right on the head is that you really have to build confidence throughout the company, right, that this is something that can be deployed, either worldwide at their global facilities, you know, with the distribution with the tie ins to their back end systems, you know, with a support system in place that, you know, they can successfully deploy this and, you know, we'll be around in three years or, or five years to, you know, continue to support the system or move them to the next system. Right. So, you know, I think when you talk about kind of this pilot purgatory, yeah, I think that's what happens, right? You have these teams, and often the innovation teams are, you know, part of a CTO office, right. And so, sometimes they're connected to the folks on the floor, and sometimes they're not, right, so part of it's finding the right people, and the right leadership to kind of drive those, you know, to the folks that that needed the most, and where they'll see the most value. But really, I think that the scale distribution back end, ties the the security, I mean, we go through, you know, we take some of these third party devices, and we even put them through our own security review process, right, which is pretty stringent. And so we basically provide a very wide level of comfort and security to to these big, large customers, right.

comfort and security are, as you noted, the key grease, I guess that necessary in order for these things to gain the broader acceptance in his organization. That's the bet anyway, that's the gamble. That's perhaps what you're beginning to see as you bring these devices and the corresponding services and software along with it. But one of the things you're doing, and I think Nathan, you'd mentioned you're part of the strategy is to fill the gaps. You're very open to leveraging third party hardware and software. But in some cases, there are still gaps based on the conversations you're having with your customers. Now, the hardware side, we know that building new AR glasses is a massive, massive challenge fraught with all sorts of peril. And Mike, you can appreciate this more than almost anybody, right companies like odg Magic Leap and others can attest to how hard this really is to build something that is both good and useful and accepted. Why build your own? What is it that a real where or Microsoft aren't bringing to your customers?

So some of that security, some of that is scalability, distribution support, right? All of those pieces of the puzzle, right? realwear is a great device for, you know, certain applications, but it's not going to be the big screen experience that you you want to have, right? It's, it's great for high noise, very rugged environments. But that's not all the use cases. So what we've basically found is that there's a, there's, there's the right tool for the right job, right and, similar, there's the right device for the right job. And so, you know, building our own is, you know, both, it's part of our flexibility program, it's part of our way to be kind of agnostic, right, we're happy that you use our device, we're happy if you want to use a different device and bring your own. But if we don't have our own device, we can't understand as well the user's needs and what they want. And so part of that is just, you know, being closer to the users and being closer to the problem. And also being, you know, we need to be in this business in order to succeed in this business, right. So if we're completely outside and looking in, we really don't have a vote. And so this gives us an opportunity to be in the game and, and to have a vote and to, to really push these initiatives,

some gaining a deeper appreciation for the actual customer problem by by trying to solve it for them gives you that deeper intimacy, better understanding. And as a company released AR device called the asix. is back in spring of 2019. What's the job that it solves? How has it been used over the last couple of years? Yeah, so

So the asex is it leverages some water clear, you know, it's a it's a visor like device, similar to some of the other ones out there, you know, very water clear, this waveguide displays, it's great for these basic remote expert use cases workflow, you know, very standard use cases, we took the compute and the battery power off of the headset, and we put it into a compute pack. So you know, we've provided a solution that is a little bit lighter on your head, and a little more flexible, right. And then behind that, you know, of course, we've built all the software solution, our mobile device management, our cloud, we've built software, we've added third party software, to make that device, a highly successful device for remote expert or for users who want to do this, you know, any kind of AR work. And it's, it's, you know, it's more of a higher end device, it has a time of flight sensor, it as you know, six stuff cameras, it has these, these waveguides. And so it's a it's a little bit of a higher end device, which addresses you know, again, it addresses a part of the, you know, the market, but you know, may not address all of the market, right? But it's it's allowed us to get feedback from the customer on what they like, what they don't like, you know, how they want to use it, what they want to use it for, and allows us to really adapt to, to what the users are looking for. And, you know, and that helps us guide our subsequent devices.

So what is the feedback you've been receiving about the a six, what are the things they like or dislike, what are the ways they want to use it or not want to use it, the kind of the lessons that you're carrying forward?

Yeah, so you know, having the compute and power off of the head is a big highlight of this device, it becomes much lighter than some of the competitive devices out there, while at the same time, you know, providing a good slam experience and a good, you know, see through experience. So everybody's really appreciated that we are cleanroom compliance, so we can work in, you know, fabs and some of these facilities. Again, hardware is a is a very small piece of it. And a lot of it comes from the software that it's connected to the cloud, right? And so we've been very agnostic on both both the hardware and the software side, as Nathan said, right? Where, if, you know, we don't necessarily require a user to use our software with the basics, a lot of people actually have their own applications from these, these pilot purgatory is right, they built a 2d application from there, the the time that they did it a pilot and they and it worked pretty well. And they're looking for a device to take this and scale with, right. And so they need to just use that application on a real device that they can scale with, right? And so that's where we kind of that that's where the to kind of meet and we put their 2d app onto our device, and we put that into 3d Face often, then they're able to continue on the the pilot or or you know, move from that pilot to a, you know, a full deployment stage. So that that's where we've found it to be pretty successful as being less, again, just being very agnostic about, you know, lots of pieces of the puzzle, right? Because people already have some things that they brought, and VMs applications, whatever. And, you know, we don't want to force a square peg into a round hole.

Yeah. Where is it a bit too square? What are the areas that you identified where it could still use some improvement based on the feedback you're getting?

Something consistently we always hear is one is our think reality a six is it's pretty lightweight, compared to other fully featured headsets on the market. But we're always hearing, you know, how can I get this lighter, lighter, lighter, to where eventually we're all headed to, you know, just normal pair of sunglasses type of weight. And, and so then, but trying to keep the same level of compute power is always a challenge. So I think, you know, as we start to look at offloading some of the processing power on to the, into the cloud, on the edge, kind of starting to leverage over time, like 5g networks, even if these are private 5g networks inside of a manufacturing facility, you start to kind of offload compute power. And then you can get to where these headsets are lighter weight, they don't put off as much heat, just better wearability. Because you know, a lot of a lot of what we find in enterprise is, a lot of the ROI is tied simply to this hands free environment. And when you're performing tasks in a facility, and you have to stop, pull out a notebook or a paper, look through a manual and try to find something, you know that that's valuable, valuable time when you're repairing, you know, a piece of equipment that could be producing $100,000 worth of production an hour. And so every five minutes that you take out of those processes, is, is money in our customers pockets. So, you know, having hands free is is a plus versus kind of even pulling out a tablet or pulling out a mobile device, you know, but somebody's gonna wear it for a full hour 12 hour shifts, probably not, you know, but the longer they can wear it, and kind of having voice interactivity, using like head gaze or eye gaze control, to do things, even hand gestures, I mean, these things all kind of, there's all these little nuances that go into improving kind of usability. And so that's what we're, we're focused on to as we go into, like our next generation of product offerings.

So let's talk about this next generation of product offerings. Here, January 2021, you're announcing a new device? The a three, what's, what is this device? How is it different?

Yeah, so we're really excited about this. And maybe, maybe I can talk at a high level, and Mike can talk a little more in depth as our hardware Product Manager, but we are, you know, we're really excited about the the a three it's, it's one of the most versatile smart glasses for enterprise ever designed. And, you know, we took this kind of feedback from customers about being lighter weight, and all these things I just discussed, flexibility, we are, you know, with the think reality, a three, much lighter weight glasses. And it's tethered to a smartphone. And we'll be discussing more details about this later. But specifically, you know, we were very fortunate at Lenovo to, to also own Motorola. And so we have a very strong relationship with the Motorola team. And so there, there will be Motorola flagship mobile devices, initially, that'll be able to power the the a three. And with that, we get to also leverage, you know, the great global distribution of Motorola and all of the carrier networks and certifications that are set up. So we're really excited about this also having, you know, kind of global cellular coverage. And that just enhances kind of the value to our customers. And as we start to move more and more into 5g networks, and, and like I said, even private 5g, right, we're ready for that for those customers. And it's, it's really unique. But then, you know, in addition to this industrial addition that we have with the Motorola phone, we also have a PC edition, that kind of expands the value of PCs. And we'll be announcing very soon some of the the the special compatible PC devices that allow you to create incredible, immersive virtual monitors. So instead of like in virtual reality, where you might, you know, go off into a closed world, wearing AR glasses, you can still see your keyboard, you can still see your mouse, you can still see the room you're sitting in. But you also get to see like these massive virtual monitors that you can interact with. And it's proven that people can be much more productive with multiple larger monitors to work on. And that's going to evolve over time and to kind of powering the office worker powering architecture and engineering and new ways in interacting AR devices with PCs. It's really versatile. And Mike and the team have done an incredible job of kind of building this and refining it for our customers. So Mike, maybe you can talk a little more in depth to the details of it. Yeah, so

so on the PC side, right this basically use your as a virtual monitors. So this is super helpful for the previously for the business travelers in their cramped travel seats. And currently for the the work at home folks, right who, you know, have to set up in the spare bedroom or the dining room table, right, where they may not have space to put, you know, two, three monitors that they're used to work. And then just unique on the hardware, right. So we have what the some in the industry is called a smart viewer. And so what this means is we are actually doing the the 60 off pose in the headset, and then we can send that down to any number of hosts. And in this case, we're, you know, we're talking about sending it down to the PC to be rendered and pushed back to the glasses, or down to a phone where it's rendered and pushed back to the glasses. But that allows us to have a very consistent experience. These are very similar to some of the other consumer glasses that are on are coming, you know, just coming to the market now. 1080 p displays. These are very similar to some glasses that I worked on in my past. But yeah, and then it's just a USBC connection, and provides a really nice full color, deep, immersive but not isolating experience, right. And this is where I say like, you know, you asked about VR and AR crossover, this is where I see actually some crossover between AR and VR, because I think people will start doing using these for some of the training experiences where VR might be a little bit claustrophobic for some people. And it might be used for some of these tech sales folks who need to you know, instead of lugging around a 300 pound pump or or you know, piece of equipment, they can now visualize that and provide that to their customers in three dimensional space right in in a six stop walk around kind of space with a with a mobile phone, right? either from a 300 pound piece of device to a three millimeter stent or something right. Both of those can be you know, now visualized in more of a text sales fashion.

Yeah, that see, before you buy try before you buy in an industrial setting makes a ton of sense for glasses like this. Do you talk about this, this notion that you're moving what was in the compute pack into an existing compute, whether it's your PC, or whether it's the right type of smartphone here, so that's going to be the computing and that's gonna be the radio connection. And the glasses themselves have some additional compute it using Qualcomm, xR one chip and this is that right? Correct. Yes, yeah. Susan Qualcomm extra one. So there you can do sixth pose, you can do some other on device processing to to make it better to make a better experience overall, for the user. to geek out for a second here, Mike with me, what are you actually using for display? What's the optics technology approach that you've you've chosen to use here?

Yeah, so these are these are what? What is now traditional birdbath optics, you know, we've got some nice, very high vibrant 1080 DPI displays, micro LEDs, you know, fairly standard in the business. This this xR one, though, is what gives us the ability to produce the the sixth pose in the headset, right and send that at a very low power budget and send that down to any number of hosts, which gives us you know, that that versatility. And then, you know, when you said how, how are these different, you know, these were designed for enterprise, right, we have an industrial MC front frame, for the use case, when you're working on a factory floor or in an industrial setting. We'll pass drop tests, we have ip 54 rating on these. So these were really designed for enterprise by enterprise inside and out. We don't have a consumer play with these glasses. And so just from a pure hardware side of things, right, these are really geared with enterprise in mind.

That's great. I think, Nathan, you'd noted that the ROI for these types of devices are really tied very much towards the notion that they are hands free, their ability to be hands free, allowing that that were to be focused on the problem at hand to get that sort of that time to insight reducing that as much as possible without resolving a problem or understanding kind of the situations in front of you. And where ability is really key. Have you made improvements to the wearability of the device as well as part of this iteration?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's maybe a little better question for Mike to answer, but comfort weight has really been considered and then Being kind of adaptable to different user scenarios, whether, you know, there's like an industrial kit that's offered with it as well. You know, there's various scenarios that you'll be using these devices. So we've tried to account for many of the versatile types of interfaces that people interact. And, you know, I would, I would add one thing before I forget, that I think is incredibly valuable and, and people are gonna love is right, right now, when you look at an AR headset, it's, you know, how do you interact with it, like little things that people take for granted, like signing into Wi Fi network, or signing it using your password, right now you kind of have to use, you know, some some of us offer a controller to do that with. But now taking kind of like the the mobile device, you now have a second input method. So little things like just using the keyboard on a touchpad of a mobile device, just to enter your Wi Fi password, or your user password, like little things like that you You now have like complete versatility to interact, how you want to interact. And then you can put the mobile device in your pocket or on a clip so that it's out of the way. And it's hands free for some of the like the guided workflow scenarios,

I was just going to add to what you were saying about, you know, having the on screen keyboard on the phone, you know that that same scenario actually extends to our PC edition, right, where we're not asking people to learn a new trick around the the PC, right, these are really just virtual displays that give you more screen real estate, you're still using your keyboard and trackpad to interact with the device and mouse. And so we're not, you don't have to learn anything new. It's it's really just like an external monitor, it just takes up less space, and it's portable, and you can take it anywhere. And then obviously, fitting lots of different heads is a challenge. So we provide a fit kit for, you know, different size shaped heads and noses. And so you know, we we have a very talented UX team, which has studied ergonomics, and all these, these fit and comfort thoroughly. And so we really, really have a great team to pull from, to design these.

Yeah, I think this is one of the underappreciated challenges in delivering on the promise of AR smart glasses is that there's a lot of variety to the human physiology. And making something working one single skew, making one single device work for everybody is a challenge, you need some sort of a variability adjustment factor somehow somewhere in the process. So it's good to you guys are thinking through what that means in practice here.

And I would say, Do I have a lot of respect for Mike and his team? Like, I mean, just the little nuances around like, hinges on like a foldable, foldable frame. You know, how do you make these so they're durable, and they can fold easily, but how do you create them to be flexible enough, so they can fit many types of shapes of head sizes? It is very underappreciated, I think, what goes into, like literally just figuring out an enterprise smart glass hinge on on a smart glass.

Yeah. That's great. I think that attention details what's necessary, right now You're sure? Mike? What, what is the weight? What would you guys get the weight down to on this one,

these are coming in about 130 grams, which is fairly industry standard. At this point, you know, we take a few gram hits for having a changeable front frame. So you know, between a very lightweight frame for our PC edition to a more industrial rugged frame for our industrial edition, you know, and then your mileage may vary once you have, you know, different air horns and noses and correctives and things like that. So, sure,

that makes sense. Yeah, you've been doing this type of work for a long time building, taking the best of what's available in terms of technology, and making them work in a head worn device. What's different now about your efforts to build a successful AR glasses here at Lenovo?

Yeah, that's a good, good question. So, you know, certainly the resources available at Lenovo, you know, we we have massive teams for both the you know, as I mentioned that the UX team, we have a large team in China that supports this, we have a full logistics team, we have a sales, you know, global sales team, right, which is out working with the customers on a daily basis. You know, we have a whole security team, you know, so so just the level of resources is is orders of magnitude larger than previous startup, which we talked about earlier. And then, you know, I think the big thing that we've kind of touched on a little bit here is, you know, we own the entire ecosystem for these a 3d glasses, right? We own end to end glasses to host so that's glasses to PC, or glasses to phone, in which case, it's a Motorola phone, which is, as Nathan said, is, you know, now a subsidiary of Lenovo. So being able to own that you go system is extremely valuable for controlling and managing the experience that you get on those hosts devices. And you really kind of control your your destiny, a lot more when you control the end to end ecosystem. That's been a big one versus you know, in previous startup, we made a device we pointed, you know, at 16 other people who could go help you, you know, with your MDM, your software, your deployment, your scalability, right? And, you know, enterprise customers don't really want to hear that. So, really, we offer kind of the total solution, in addition to owning the ecosystem, you know, we can also offer the the total solution, and still be flexible about it. Yeah.

Where do you take it from here? Is the hardware effort, just a means to get the software and services going? We've kind of seen this a few times, I think, over the last 10 years or so? Or is custom Lenovo hardware part of the long term strategy?

Yeah, I mean, it's really part of our long term strategy, right? These these three glasses are not just a, you know, it's not just the next in line for the a six hardware, right. But it's also, you know, it's also doing that, right, it's doing the romatic, remote expert workflow, 3d visualization, and things like that. But it's also, you know, doing this PC experiences, virtual monitor experience. And we think we know where each of those is headed. But we also think that similar to the smartphone when it really came out, you know, it started out as a phone, and it became lots of new different things. So we really see this kind of blossoming a little bit from where it starts to, you know, really doing some tighter integrations with some partners on the PC side, to do better 3d visualizations, doing some more tighter integrations on the mobile phone side, potentially with, you know, operators and things like that, who want to take this to their customers. And then, you know, as as I said, you know, initially a year ago, you know, we were targeting business travelers and people who were working co working together and open office environments, all of those have, you know, all but you know, disappeared, right, with our whole pandemic situation. But the work from home situation is, is very real, and people who are used to having multiple monitors, they still need them, but they can't put six monitors on their on their dining room tables anymore, right? So they are looking for solutions. But you know, at the end of the day, you know, we are agnostic on lots of fronts. Ironically, we are the most flexible AR company out there right now, I would say, right, we're hardware agnostic, or software agnostic, or cloud agnostic, we have a service offering if you need to, you know, tie this to your back end system, or do some custom development or workflow development, like creating models and things like that. Right. So I wouldn't say it's just a means to an end. But you know, I think, as I said, before, you know, we need to make hardware in order to be relevant in this space. And we will continue to be, you know, agnostic, and, and flexible in this space as well. That's great.

I know, we're time limited here. So let me ask you, this one in lightning round question. What commonly held belief about spatial computing? Do you disagree with

maybe have seen it's gonna get here? Explain that?

How soon will it get here?

Yeah, you know, a lot of so a lot of things still have to have to change, right? I think, I think for the enterprise, it's, it's there. You know, I think companies are comfortable with it, it costs a lot right now. And they're okay with that, as long as they can handle the ROI, or as long as there is an ROI on it. I think for consumers, it's still, you know, several years out, just because of the infrastructure involved. There's hardware costs, you know, you got to sell it to consumers, they have to adopt it, etc, etc. So, I just think that there's, there's, there's a lot to be done until it's kind of a household name.

Nathan, anything you want to add to that one? Or do you have your own belief that you disagree with? Well, I

think in general, there's so much excitement, and a little bit of hype around, you know, what you've called spatial computing. And I think in many cases, companies tried to overshoot in terms of getting like full, you know, slim technology capabilities, when in actuality, most of the strong ROI use cases are much more simple type of guided workflow, use cases where you're, you're saving valuable hands free time, accessing data very fast with kind of instructions and compliance. So it's not quite as sexy is some of the spatial computing stuff that we like to look at in the future. It's a little bit simpler type of use cases that we're seeing really strong ROI so that's maybe maybe one of the The beliefs that I might disagree with a little bit but doesn't mean to say we're not pushing forward on spatial computing and full immersion and everything too. So it's definitely will enhance things over time. But it's not absolute requirement in most use cases.

Yeah, there's value today based on the capability today, we don't need full immersion, we don't need to fully create an alternative reality in order for these things to take off certainly an enterprise. Yep.

Yeah. And, and certainly, with even the base hit of like, remote expert, right, and, and remote assistance, it doesn't necessarily need spatial computing, right. It's nice to have, it adds some nice features. But it by itself is pretty powerful to connect the dots around the world.

Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

I would just say, you know, I've really been impressed by Lenovo's flexibility, right, you wouldn't think of a big company as being so flexible. But we've really have tried to fill the gaps and, you know, provide that comfort and, and security that customers are looking for, you know, to take the next step out of that pilot purgatory, as you said,

My final saying would just be you know, if you're, if you think you have something unique, you know, and you're interested in being a partner, part of a solution partnership with Lenovo, feel free to reach out to our team, we have a, you know, a Partner Manager that's constantly evaluating, you know, hundreds of different types of software tools or hardware tools. And, and we're very open to that we were very calculated. So we don't just kind of open up, you know, the sandbox for everybody to kind of play in and we think that could overwhelm us. But we're, we're very interested in talking and exploring and kind of adding to the toolset on the spirit of, you know, delivering the customer with what they need and what's going to drive their business forward. So,

yeah, that's great. Where can people go to learn more about you and your efforts here at Lenovo,

Lenovo comm forward slash think reality. Awesome.

Nathan, Mike, thanks very much for the conversation.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. in it. I speak with Hannah and Matthew Arevalo, two of the co founders of infinity, an augmented reality collectible pin platform, enabling interactive experiences around our favorite brands. AR is seeping into many corners of our daily lives. And now it's coming to collectible pins, a category of collectibles popularized by Disney in the late 1990s. Hannah and Matthew described their prior experience growing a subscription box business to more than 100 million in annual revenue and how they are applying those lessons learned to AR enhanced collectibles. Please subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time.