The AR Show: David Bonelli (Pulsar) on Building AR Hardware that Actually Works

11:40PM Feb 28, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

David Bonelli

Keywords:

optics

ar

glasses

company

pulsar

brightness

design

good

put

device

image

hololens

display

experience

waveguide

consumer

technology

people

interesting

work

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 David Bonelli. David is the founder and CEO of Pulsar, a company of mechanical and optical experts dedicated to solving the hard problems of AR hardware. David is a US Army veteran who went on to spend several years at the once venerable Osterhout Design Group, ODG. After creating cutting edge AR glasses at ODG. He spent time at Rokid and KFs industries, his experience across these companies to design manage and bring to manufacture a range of products bending optical engineering and augmented reality hardware motivated the creation of Pulsar. There, he's worked with companies such as Red Six, Qwake, Microsoft and others, on AR hardware solutions to meet the needs of everyone from fighter pilots, to firefighters to space explorers. In this conversation, we chat about those projects, as well as his experience at odg building devices such as the AR eight, he still uses an ODG R8 to educate customers on what's been done. And what's possible.

I think people tend to overestimate how much FOV they need or want. I've had customers be like, oh, we need 100 degrees FOV. And then I'll show him a pair of our eights and they put it on like, This is amazing. This is exactly what I need. Like, how big is it like 38 degrees? You know, it really depends on how you're engaging, right? Yeah, humans have this huge FOV. But when we're actually focused, that gets a lot smaller, really fast.

We want to talk about the current state of AR hardware and his highlights from the recent SPIE AR VR conference at Photonics West. David also shares his opinions about which display an optics technologies have the best chance of winning over the long term. Let's dive in.

David, tell me about how it is you landed in the military at the age of 17.

So you know, growing up in Daytona Beach, I had a, let's just say an interesting childhood that some people can identify with 15 years old, I felt it was time for me to leave to go out on my own and make my own way. And so that's what I did. I ended up dropping out of school, I was working two jobs to make ends meet. I ended up getting emancipated sometime later. And then I got my GED. And you know, just to hungry. And I was like, you know, this is a path. And my original plan was to go counter Intel into the army. But because I was 17, I couldn't carry couldn't have a concealed permit in DC, it'd be 19. At least that's what the recruiters told me. They're good at this. So I end up going artillery. And it just so happens, I went in three weeks after I turned 17, which happened to be about a half hour for the towers fell is when I swore in Jacksonville. I look back and I think it's interesting. But when you're living through it in real time, it's just kind of like, well, this is life, this has happened and move forward.

Now we have to deal with it. Now it sounds like you had a lot of those moments in your early childhood. This is life, get it figured out and move forward.

And sometimes in my adulthood,

sometimes your adulthood. I remember 911 I was in the military. Also, at that time, I was a lieutenant in the Air Force, working on space stuff. As I often say space stuff does now the US Space Force. And it was a it was a super crazy interesting period. Some listeners, it's probably before their conscious time when they're paying attention to the outside world. But at that time, the whole world was paying attention to what was happening in the US. And and we're all rallying around this kind of tragic moment across the country, Pittsburgh in in DC in New York, and how was it that it affected your life, the towers going down? 911 You are now in the Army as a fresh 17 year old Have you given that 17 year to be 18 to be in the military?

Well, I was emancipated usually can get in at 17 with your parents signature, but since I was a legal consenting adult got it. I signed myself in which interestingly enough, when I got out of active duty, I was 21 and went to Embry Riddle for a little bit. But when I went to get a loan, they said I had to get parents signature because it's only 24. You can imagine I had a very colorful response to that.

Yeah, I can imagine had something to do with serving your country, being ready to die for your country and but not

invaded another country coming back and I can't get a loan.

Yeah, amazing. For you as that as a 17 year old spending those four, four and a half years, how many tours did you do?

So I did the pre up for Iraq and then the Iraqi invasion. So it depends how you want to call it tour, but two deployments, two deployments. Neither were fun.

Neither were fun. What were your takeaways as a as a young man, having gone through those two deployments, what did you take away regarding how you want to live your life after your military experience?

Well, honestly at the time, there wasn't really much time for thought about that. I was Field Artillery so frontlines everybody thinks you're in the back but when you have armor and no one else does. This was in the days where they didn't have apart we did up armory, right? We took take parts and put it on the Humvees, this is for that you had the armored Humvees and all these other things that nowadays they have an art, art, just as an example, the GPS was a eight digit grid thing called a plugger. And you just give me eight numbers. And that's your position. Right. It's amazing how much technology has jumped since then. It was interesting that there was some perspective. I do remember, I think that's more what you're getting to. Yeah, I just remember thinking back, like, never felt animosity towards any of the combatants just realize that they didn't want to be there either. Sorry. And, you know, it's, you find yourself in a position where life is happening, and you don't have a lot of control over it. You just doing the best you can. And, unfortunately, there's conflict and can't always resolve it the way you want. But you have to get it resolved. You have to move on. Yeah. Wow. Already got to the fields, man. Yeah,

grab some water. Take a moment to swatter. There you go. No, I'm

good. As you

stepped away from that military experience, and you prepared to move forward with your own life. How was it you charted a path ultimately, to kind of the area that you were in now, which is around this augmented reality, optical mechanical design, all the things that seem very removed from the sort of experiences that you had earlier in your life?

Path? AR is interesting. So I did some stuff before going to college, you know, doing contractor doing construction, cabling for the cable company ended up moving up north to Rhode Island from Florida, and I was going to do fiber optic install for Verizon. And that fell through hefty moved because life and ended up bartending at the New York Yacht Club for a year, doing million dollar weddings on Saturday and Sundays, you know, 14 hour days right after the military, like, that's fine. I could do that all day. I'm still 20 something. Not anymore. So it's doing that. And then I found out because I'm war veteran, I could go to school at the University of Connecticut for free. I went there, right? And funny anecdote about that is I remember where I dropped out of school. Well, in Florida, you you can't drop out for your 16. So they kept me on the books. And you know, I got a 31 on the ACD while I was in and deployed. And I apply and they reject me because they said at 0.6 GPA in high school. Evidently, they never disenrolled me,

they kept enrolling you and kept giving you zeros basically on all your report cards. Yeah.

So that's a that's a good system there. So I had to go to college for a while. But anyways, after college, I was doing machining in Georgia, I was doing design machining for custom gun parts and accessories for US special forces snipers out of bending. So I was in Atlanta. And you know, did that for about a year and a half, got tired of it, left that job to go find some other employment, doing something different, and spent eight months looking for work. And it's very demoralizing. And I think a lot of people now have that issue. Because of COVID. And all the stuff that's happening in the world. It is demoralizing. So after time, I realized it wasn't me. It was the area. So my wife at the time, which is still my wife and I got in a car with all that we fit moved out to the Bay Area, looking for work. I was driving Uber and staying Airbnb for about six weeks until I found a job through Craigslist at odg. And so that's how I got into AR,

you found a job at odg through Craigslist.

I wrote a really good resume. You're really good at that eight months. I got hired on as a mechanical engineer. But the first thing I started working on there was optics, manufacturing and assembly and helping bring up a production line which I don't think I could ask for a better introduction into augmented reality headsets.

Who was odg at that time?

Oh, I don't know. I think I was too preoccupied learning optics to tell you who they were. But this is circa 215 2015. And when I got there, it was I found it interesting. It wasn't until I was there for a little bit that I got to actually step out and understand exactly the impact odg was having. And even to this day, the fact that we're talking about it also speaks to that impact. I do think they odg at the time was an innovator. They were moving really fast innovating quickly putting new headsets out all the time, right. And I think that was a lot of branching points for a lot of the industry to either adopt or reject, right, like until we learn and a lot of adoption was occurring. It's interesting to see a lot of the optical technologies that I watched happen or participated in, be utilized by other companies.

It really was that that timeframe is 2015. That's pre HoloLens, the HoloLens one pre magically one, but post Google Glass, and so there's some masks The market ish concept of what AR could be at least the extent that Google Glass had permeated the conscious collective consciousness of the masses, but we didn't really have this notion of what enterprise AR could be. But OTG had this long history of working, if I recall, in military optics for decades, doing stuff for military, and really were optic specialists, and they had gotten into the, the AR glasses business. I'm not sure when it is before your time, before my time in this industry. And they are, as you noted, like 2000 BC or something, yeah, something more than a couple years ago. And they were as a company cranking out one, it felt like the pace of innovation was really great cranking out one update after another. And I remember my very first ewe experience was a keynote presentation by Ralph Osterhout, founder of odg, who was on stage talking about the future and the potential of augmented reality. And I think maybe at that time, this might have been 2015 2016, that you were showcasing, as a company, some new version of some glass we're talking about me was our seven at the time, or our six. And it was amazing. I remember thinking the time, gosh, this, this company is on it. They're on the path, they've kind of dialed in there, you can imagine with a couple of iterations, it'll be there, there, wherever there is, but that they are that enterprises and consumers ultimately want. And fast forward a few years and odg doesn't exist anymore. And there was at least one or two wrong trends in there.

I can't say they were necessarily wrong turns, I would say, given information at the time, right? Well, events had a big play in in that scenario there. But we can talk about that later.

What specifically was your role at odg?

Well, when I started, like I said, you know, it's doing optics, manufacturing, and then I became one of the EMI leads for the rates, and you know, helping out with our nines and stuff like that. And then, you know, being a senior mechanical engineer, I ended up finally doing, you know, future architecture, future r&d, all those different types of things for next level glasses that unfortunately, you guys didn't get to see. But they were awesome.

When you were working on the team, what do you recall some of the big challenges that you're facing and bringing, like the AR six to the market, in or the AR seven, or eight or nine kind of that that whole class products? What were the big challenges you were facing back then?

So when I came in our six had, you know, they made a couple 100. And I came in at the tail end of that, and I got to see what they were thinking as far as the manufacturing line, right. So just to get time and set up for the story that I have. So the our seven was really when I first came in and started doing it. And honestly, one of the biggest challenges that I've tackled, when I first came in is, how do you qualify this system? How do you know that this is good? You know, and this is we're talking about it, you know, stereoscopic by ocular system? And, you know, what is? What's the tolerancing? What's acceptable AR is more almost more about the brain than it is the hard optics. Right? It's about vision, not the CEO vision, but the human vision, and coming in and learning how to qualify and understand and what's an acceptable tolerance for mismatch and, you know, the vertical axis of between stereoscopic optics, you know, what IP DS can we accept what possible issues we're gonna look at long term, there's a whole slew of events that you have to qualify, using some metric that doesn't exist or doesn't exist in a way that is useful at the moment, or at least in this application? And yeah, it was a huge challenge. That took a lot of thought, and I didn't do it alone. Of course, you know, there's engineering is a team sport. So always have help, and always ask questions of your peers.

And so as you kind of work through the qualification challenges, and you're thinking about the design of the next iteration of the glass, what are some of the the design considerations that maybe are impacted by the qualification challenges, or, or this general notion that AR is more about the mind than even the hard objects? How do you think about some of the the optics of the display choices that the team is evaluating and ultimately makes with those sorts of devices?

So what I learned doing the AR seven manufacturing, so AR seven, the core thing that everything else was strapped onto was the optical chassis. However, each optical chassis would take like four to five hours to make. So if say, the processors not working right after you put it together, that's a lot of money that you're sitting on the shelf, they're a lot of time and investment, right? They could pump out maybe 10 a day. All right. So just because it goes down because of a PCB issue. That's not a good way to, you know, do mass production. So, when looking at the array, one of the primary things I set out from the very beginning was to separate the optics, the optics are actually the last piece installed on the RA, you can do everything else and do all the functionality and testing and testing you put on in the optics, and then you go to F ATP. And you're done. Right. And it was a conscious design choice. And Assembly was also planned from the very beginning, as were previous designs never had assembly in mind, they just kind of figured it out after the fact. And so, you know, bringing that forward and through definitely helped from a manufacturing standpoint. And then that's when we started to switch from making things internally and working with the CM,

the contract manufacturer was doing the full system assembly in this case. Yes, yes. Yeah. So you you actually design these glasses with manufacturability? in mind? Yes. Which was a change for the for the company in a very positive way.

Yeah, totally. And adopting that mindset, it formed other decisions that usually were just tribal knowledge carried forward. It was a big shift, I think, for the whole company to go from doing these rapid prototypes, and small run glasses, numbers, right, like you talked about earlier, to moving on to be a bigger entity in the market and try to get something out in volume.

Do you recall? Or can you share what the volume numbers were? For the sales of those devices?

I think our seven cents something like seven or 8000, which, you know, it's not an iPhone, but not a lot of companies, so many glass.

I looked at the music's data musics as a public company I can kind of back into based on the current sales price and the total revenue numbers of the company and kind of back in a guesstimate of how many glasses they're selling. And so in the pace that they are on in 2021, through the first three quarters was for around the same numbers around 8000. Ish for the year.

Yeah, musics is an interesting story. I think that if you could say someone did it, right, they must have because a lot of the industry just kind of imploded. And when you're the one of the last ones there, there's a lot of opportunity. And I think they played the game right? And got their technology out there. And then I just saw the music's shield the other day at photonics, and I think they're doing a good job.

What is it that you saw, so the shield is basically from an outsider's from my perspective, looking at it through the computer screen that looks like a modification on the music's blade. But now, in terms of the chassis design, the overall look of the thing based on the marketing photos. So what was the actual experience of device now using micro LED displays from Jade bird, they got some updated waveguide optics in there,

definitely updated waveguide optics, that's for sure how to look. It's, you know, monochromatic, it's green. But that's a product of the micro LED technology, not necessarily what they're doing. It looked good. It was clear, I better words than good. Like, I was surprised was for that way, I wasn't a big fan of the blade, largely, you know, it's kind of off to the side. And it's like a weird portrait kind of thing. And no, this was landscape in the middle. I mean, it's not the largest FOB, but I think as far as an informational AR device. This is great. Like, it's in this. I'm still surprised, like, I had doubts and they they killed it.

Yeah, that's great to hear.

That's really great to hear without getting super technical.

I looked at that concept on paper. And I it looked fantastic, was really fantastic on paper. So it's great to hear that it bears out.

It's lightweight. It worked is I think that's like the the end goal of if you're gonna make AR glasses, they need to work optics, right? So the way I look at it is, you know, people are gonna adjust the optics to where it works best for them or they feel like it does. And then the ergonomics just need to fit. I need to stay right there. That's, and I put those on it and it did. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges and they

did a really good job. Yeah, binocular monocular by

ocular that's that that was the killer right? So going from monocular to by oculars. It's a different game. You can't just put one on the right oh, that works and then you put one on the left and now it works together. And then it's there's a lot more that goes on with that. Yeah.

Awesome. I can't wait to try it in person myself. So I missed photonics West. Was there anything else really interesting that you saw photonics West besides the shield like an AR? So let an AR they've been doing the pinhole mirror approach to for combiner optic for a number of years now. What is their latest?

Well still pinhole mirror, but it's lighter. It's plastic. I think the idea was very complimentary. But it was still unique. And I always found let NAR and Carl disagree with this. But I always found them to be a lot more conversational than most glad. Yes, you you see the dots, but it's not as distracting as like a projected for an image. And so this is coming I've been following for a while just because there's a lot of a lot of people I've talked to that want to do custom bespoke glasses and have that large field of view. But don't have the funds to try to do something crazy like you know, custom bespoke waveguides and things like that. So I feel like they have a really really good part of the market that definitely has application. And, you know, that's not to say that other people aren't making strides because there are, are a lot of people making strides, and it's nice to see, I just wish people would stop getting bought up. Stop selling out, guys, I need you.

When snap comes knocking or Facebook comes knocking just say no. Yeah, that's your eyes totally.

And then come talk to me and I might get you some work maybe? Oh,

yeah. So let me Are you think they have a place in the market because they're relatively cheap, provide a wide field of view. And they can be they can conform and be shaped into a reasonably decent looking pair of glasses. Yeah,

they check a lot of boxes that a lot of people care about, and not the end all solution, but they are a good solution to people's use cases. Which is yeah, you know, my company policy. That's, that's what we do. Right? We try to help people understand the market and the technologies and pairing together.

So we had music shield that stood out to you let NAR making progress. What else was crow there? No. Anybody else? Interesting.

I didn't see the magically presentation. But I know some people got very excited about that. Some people may have wrote articles about that, that you could probably see, because they got published. Like yesterday. Beyond that there was an ambulance, I believe sname of it. Basically, they do a next level distortion correction and pixel mapping, you know, for the pre render. So that way, it gets corrected. You know, when it comes to the optics, it looks corrected, however, it uses eye tracking. So it's not just, you know, center, the iBox. It's wherever you are in iBox. And whatever your gaze vector, which I currently have some customers that could totally use that. And you know, right, they were largely focused on VR. But as immersive AR is starting to come to fruition with these larger fo v's and content. I think there's a real need for that. How critical Do

you think large FOB is to the sort of use cases that your customers are pursuing? Because it depends on the customer?

You answered all the questions yet. I think people tend to overestimate how much FOB they need or want. I've had customers be like, oh, we need 100 degrees FOB. And then I'll show a pair of our rates and they put it on like this is amazing. This is exactly what I need. Like, how big is it, like 38 degrees? You know, it really depends on how you're engaging, right? Yeah, humans have this huge FOB. But when we're actually focused, that gets a lot smaller, really fast.

We were together at AWB and you had that pair, you had a pair of our eights with you. And I had a chance to try them on again, it's been several years by a chance to try and those are eights again, with their 38 degree FOB. And I was again impressed. I was impressed in a couple of ways. One, they still look good. We all right, still look good, they deliver a pretty decent experience. And the other thing that surprised me is that we haven't as an industry made that much progress beyond what was accomplished with the AR eight. What does that fit you are correct. And I in some ways, you know that that odg team was super talented in went off and lots of different directions. We'll talk a bit about the directions that you took after that as well. But there's a number of the team that made it to Lenovo. And in some ways, you know, Lenovo with the think reality is remaking the AR eight, with some of the similar sort of design choices that were made at the time, because there are a lot of very good choices that were made at odg regarding the trade offs between the type of display and the optics and manufacturability and, and all these sorts of things. And anyway, your facial expressions are hilarious. So for the viewers at home who cannot see through the sound,

I'm just remembering stories, remembering events, and and things like that, that led us on these design paths and some that we chose not to progress further due to schedules. And I always laugh seeing these birdbath optics and thinking, Man I wish he took the extra step may be so much better. So

give me an example. What is the example of an extra step you didn't take because schedules didn't allow that would make these birdbath optic experiences better.

So we had a design to actually rotate the birdbath optics to make them not parallel, but still have a parallel image which would greatly impact the industrial design of these glasses. So instead of having them side by side, right, we we could put some kind of scopic tilt into the glasses.

So rather than the glasses having basically a flat front, you could actually bend them so each eyepiece would bend towards the look more like it's curving around the face, right

which is you know in in now we're gonna have to start talking about like, you know, your Caucasian versus Asian markets in ergonomics and form factors because you know, for Asian market that flat front is more acceptable but for Caucasians, which have more of an ovoid head. We want something a little tighter fitting to eliminate that gap in the temple.

Yeah, especially had like my head like a flounder. So in a lot of curvature in those glasses,

we make AR glasses for founders to see

you'd come up with this design that allowed for tilting the lens So you could create more curvature more angular off of that nose or angle off that nose to have more conforming to the face. But yet, we haven't really seen that in the market. Right? And not just from RTG time, but in a point sense.

Yeah. And the one thing that is nice about the current state of birdbath optics, they're relatively inexpensive, they use a very nice display, right, like rank or OLED, for the most part until micro LEDs get there. And they're well understood. And they give a really good image. Right? You're not, it's not like a waveguide or something like that. It's it's just a nice image, like out of you know, this, but our eights and our nines got THX certified. Like that's how good the image was. And this technology in that, in that architecture, just enable that and they're easy to put together. Right? You're not doing like a micro projector with 20 elements. It's just, you know, maybe lens got your combiner and the spherical lens on the front and your display, maybe some polarization scheme, if you want to have fun.

There's a lot going for these, these birdbaths match to an OLED, which I think is why we see so many companies pursuing it. Exactly. Yeah. And real. And we got Lenovo we have rocket rocket. I think if it was broken, they should be named broken. Actually, I can tell you about that work there. Yeah, that's

right after odg when the story I heard was the co founder, merged two words together, which were robot kid.

Yes, I remember hearing the story, which is why it should be named rocket rocket. Yeah. So kind of looking back at the OTG design, what have we evolved, what has actually gotten better over the last couple of years field of

view is increased right. One of the problems is when you start to increase the field of view that lens that usually sits on the OLED or right in front of the OLED tends to dip down into the field of view. So there's been some refinement, some optimizations, but overall, I think it's pretty much in the kind of the same place from a leaps, if you will, not magic leaps, but just leaps,

not magic leaps, just regular leaps. So there's not been there's been some nice refinement, but no major breakthroughs. Correct. But the the benefits that stood out for that sort of combo of birdbath puts OLED around great image quality, relatively straightforward to manufacture, relatively affordable to manufacture. All those sorts of things still shine.

It sounds like something a Lenovo would like to make, right? These companies aren't taking risk. Right? That's one thing that set OTG apart. Odd was just like, Ralph was nuts. He was like, That looks great. That's pitching, let's do it. All right, cool. Let's go spend money and do stuff and have fun. And it really, it really was a lot of fun. You know, we were enabled. And I and I feel like when engineers are enabled and are passionate about what they do, you can get some really interesting results. So people should enable their engineers,

more money for r&d, more permission to explore all of the crazy ideas. Yeah,

totally. And that's an interesting thing, you know, with COVID, right, a lot of you know, money, like investment funds kind of pulled back. And then, you know, things are starting to turn around again, but the industry kind of, you know, stalled for a little bit.

Yeah, particularly the r&d side, you know, while the Zooms of the world and you know, at home fitness, exploded, the people who are designing, you know, at a lab with other people wearing lab coats, or whatever the modern day equivalent is, really were impacted by by all of the COVID. And all of the mandates, and everything else, it felt for me, like not only the supply chain issues, were contributing massively to all sorts of problems, you didn't have the components you needed in order to evolve a design. But even the shoulder to shoulder work that was often necessary to evolve, the design was not possible

due to COVID. Right. And so, I mean, that's a double whammy there. So these companies can't get the orders that they have out. But now they're not getting new orders. And so their lean supply chain, that's, that's what they make their money on right there just in time. So like, they're not getting orders, and they can't fill their their system starts to break down. I do feel like we're still reeling in or feeling that effect,

is you kind of evaluate the alternatives to birdbaths. Back to the technology choice. What is your take? So we have all this there's two main camps that exist today. There are other smaller outlets, but there are two main camps. One is the birdbath matched with an OLED these days. And the other are the waveguide folks who are insistent, particularly the diffractive waveguide. Folks were insistent that that is the right path. If I was making them, I'd be insistent to Yes. Okay, but you're not making them. You are a third party, objective observer, who is only looking out to make the best choices on behalf of your customers. When you look at waveguides, what do you see as the pros and cons?

So, you know, it depends. We're going to start talking about people expansion, replication, stuff like that, largely with the pupil replication and things like that, you know, you get that large f of v, but it's a hit to overall brightness, right? You have to spread that light out over that area. And a lot of area in a very small people. So I have seen waveguides of recent that have picked up a lot of the things that waveguides had working against them such as for projection and things like that. Getting a projector still hard external people projector to get into these waveguides it's still very hard. The color some I've seen some colors get cleaned up didn't press. It's not an easy thing to do is the diffractive waveguide. But it's not 100% there, right? It's not the birdbath type quality, image quality, but what you do get is a smaller form factor. So it's still evolving. I think some bigger players have taken notice as such as your Samsung's and your Mitsubishis. And I'm not just talking about digital IDs, it's just the first thing that comes to mind when I'm talking about these things. And so I would say it's three to five years. before it's fully available. I think we're somewhat past the early adopter stage to where you could try to make a product with it a HoloLens. But there's still a lot to overcome to make it consumer.

So the trade off that designers are contemplating right now is basically trading, giving up image quality and choosing a waveguide in their gaining some they hope, overall, ergonomic system level form factor in they're also losing brightness, so giving up image quality and brightness in their getting form factor. Fundamentally,

essentially, yeah, the interesting part is certainly seat plastic diffractive waveguides. So glass in front of the eye, it's never fun. These are things we have to consider and think about. And these are actual choices that we have to make. So seeing plastic ones help alleviate some of the things like the weight and blue glass in front of the eye, plastic and for the eyes nicer than glass, especially for some of these non consumer applications such as Raven, right? Working with a company like tos, right where they have, you know, it's like four six millimeter thick PC, polycarbonate lens for ballistics glasses. That's not a bad choice, right? Can't put glass there. So, you know, there's definitely some interesting use cases for some of the technologies I think people look at and either I don't wanna say right off, but don't understand how this could be useful or beneficial, right?

What is TOS doing differently than the direct way of guide folks or the birdbath guys,

so TOS has basically all the optics and everything are in their polycarbonate lens. So composite, multiple layers that are for active index match glued together. But basically, it's like a two or three bounce T AR two for now, extraction here.

So they're they're putting different kinds of set of technologies in the lens. And so there's still some bouncing like a waveguide has, but the way that the light gets in and gets out is different, right? So here rather than the diffraction gratings for in coupling and uncoupling they're using,

you know, all you need is a display or a real image. And that's all the optics you need. So from if you're trying to make a low cost device, you know, you got one thing that's your optic it's it's pretty convenient.

And so Raven, which is focused on a warfighter pair of glasses, which is why ballistic protection, no glass super important.

Yes, because well the thing is they want to replace the shooting glasses. So instead of adding to the kit, they're modifying the kit.

It's now you have shooting glasses that are AR glasses, right? And using a plastic polycarbonate lens solves one of the hard problems that a diffractive wait that classical defective waveguide optics have because they're made out of glass glasses. We don't want flying glass shards that our eyeballs

right and you know a lot of people think oh, they protect you from bullets ballistic right now a lot of times they protect you either from things getting kicked around or move like a rock rocket hit pops up. So it doesn't have that full bullet projectile. So there's a lot of use there.

Yeah, so we have these various camps out there. There's also the reflective waveguides. Loomis, what's your take on Loomis and what they're doing with Loomis Maximus? And

it looks good. Looks really good. I was impressed. It's bright. It's really bright. Yeah. It's I tend to view the world through like, of course, I have opinions. But overall, it's it's more like, how can I use this technology? There's a home for it. So it's hard for me to answer. How do I feel?

From your opinion, there are some quality ingredients out there that can be assembled into a compelling product that solves a real problem for one of your customers.

Oh, yeah, totally in. The thing that I do like about Loomis is, you know, the overall brightness and just the quality of the image. Right? It's hard to to say that. I can't tell you that somebody had has a bad quality image these days. It's just degrees, right? It's how much do you care about that? And then we start bringing in things like price availability, things like that. Right?

Would you consider the whole lens to to have a bad visual experience? Because we know that Carl really does not like it at all. The HoloLens

two is not about the visual experience. What is it about? HoloLens two is about the interactive experience, right? So that's what the suite of sensors is for the The optics are an enabler for that experience. It's not about the optics experience itself, juxtapose something like Unreal. But that's purely about the optics experience. Right? There'll be more of your consumption glasses like the a three, right? And so those are for people are going to be watching media who care about that higher fidelity. HoloLens is more about the enablement.

And so there, they can trade off that visual experience, their optics are

not the best. If you wanted me to say that.

No, I don't want you to say anything other than leading. As you think forward, what is your level of enthusiasm for consumer grade AR glasses? Do you think that there's a giant market for that?

So I have a little thing I like to say when people ask me this question, and that's we already have the best augmented reality glasses form factor, optics, everything, right, and you see him every day. And it's your regular Optoma glasses, the use case you can see it, let's just start with that. That's amazing. Until we can find a better use case than that. I do not see consumer catching on in mass, like a phone in the season that because that's the analog people like to go to. However, I do think once it starts being integrated into work, and other parts of life, right. And, and I didn't come up with this idea. I mean, this has been other people have said this probably said it better, but people start getting used to it. I think it'll start to carry over into the consumer market. You know, you got to work you use it eight hours a day, you find convenience in it, you've learned to live with some of the drawbacks a little extra weight, a little bit of heat, but you find it useful now, and then we'll adopt it into the consumer market. That's kind of how I see consumer happening. In America, at least, Asia is a whole nother market, in different cultures.

Everything else the opportunity for media consumption might drive to consumer, the sooner there's

that just fashion. It's not in the US. We're very conservative, if you will, not everybody obviously, we're all different. But I would say the majority of your potential consumer market here will wait for a more discreet form factor.

If you had to place a bet today on an optics and or display technology that will end up in consumer glasses. Where would you place your money?

I'm glad you give me softballs. That's hard question. So I think at some point micro LED will, as far as display goes, however, that takes form. Yes. You know, you're very familiar with you know, you have these quantum photonic imagers where the RGB are in parallel in the same, what we'll call a diode, for lack of a better term right now. I think if you want to go small into glasses form factor, that's full color. That's something that that has an advantage in just like an L cos like type, you know, the color sequential l cost or something like that, because you have a tighter RGB pixel density that fits into a smaller form factor. But the brightness of a micro led just because of the sheer fact you're looking at the image. And it's emitting can have advantages in other places, too. But yeah, those those technologies, I think the emissive RGB technologies are definitely going to be where the display is. And then as far as the optics go, I hope I don't know the answer to that. I hope something comes out that's better than what I've seen today. But if I had to pick a runner in this, it'll be some form of plastic waveguide for a glasses form factor,

plastic waveguide reflective defective, not sure.

Not sure. Right now, I'm just leaning on diffractive. Because I've seen a lot of leaps, that his wear reflective. I personally don't know, how much more progress I can make. I mean, they kind of did it. They did, I did what you did. And that's why it beats the crap out of diffractive, but fractals catching

up. So going back to the past, rather than looking forward to the future, now we're all over the place. All over the place. Yeah. After odg, you did end up spending some time at at Brocade. And there were working on AR glasses. There was a US based team at that time for remember back then. And they were working on air glasses before shutting down at us base team, what was broken trying to accomplish? And what happened there? Hmm.

So rocket is a AI company in general. And then they use their, you know, they make silicon and they use their AI in applications. And so I think the greatest strategy was the glasses were more of a, you know, application enabler for their AI, just like they had the smart speaker that you could interact with, right? This was just another vehicle to utilize their hair. So that's the high level of it. They weren't really trying to do anything crazy, like odd, right? These are two very separate companies with very separate goals. So that you know they were interested in using a third party optics and integrated, they're more of an integrator less of a r&d house people

that make sense, they kind of disappear for a while, I thought that there I kind of counted them amongst the, the companies that had fallen odg. And the company that was named Mehta at that time doing glasses before metal platforms took that name, before campfire, 3d bought those assets. There was a company named wetter matter that went down and I counted rocket among them, but they seem to have come back over the last year or so with the reviving their portfolio,

kind of a loop on that I specifically don't know a lot of information about but the the game plan that is there, I can't imagine it deviated much. I think what they what had had occurred is they were doing a lot of software r&d. During the time I was there. And they they had a reduction in size, their Chinese based company. And that's a wildcard not because the company is in China, China could be a wildcard, as we've seen in the news. So, especially with tech industry. Yeah, I assume they're probably still on the same mission, I can only speculate.

After that experience, you decided it was time to set out on your own. And you started pulsar? What was the what was the motivation to kind of go on a different path?

Well, you know, it's interesting, because I kind of was struggling a little bit with trying to find a job. So it wasn't struggling to find a job like it was. Earlier in, in this conversation more was, I couldn't find somebody looking for somebody like me, and my skills and my experience, and then it hit me one day. That's because people don't think I exist, that someone with my skill sets, and things like that exist. I'm like, but there's these companies, the startups, the smaller companies, and even larger companies, who need somebody to help fill that role up to help them overcome barriers, right? I've seen millions of millions, like 10s of millions of dollars, and I probably spent some of them to go into just making a pair of glasses. And there's no way these startups can do that. But these startups have good AR ideas. And going back to like consumer adoption, right, that use case, these companies have good use cases, and but they don't have this experience. And it's a very high barrier to entry. And they're going to your HoloLens is into your Magic Leap saying, Hey, can we get these dev kits, so we can make an application for your thing, not realizing or realizing that this isn't the best way to get the user experience or trying to get out. But they live with it, because they don't have a different choice. And so one things we have to do is try to break down that barrier to entry.

You make the hardware accessible for all these startups to pursue their their grand ambitions around AR

Yep. And also some of the larger companies, they need someone outside to come in and innovate, you know, you get a team together, and they're working together, they're great. But there's a culture groupthink and just kind of tend to go down the same path sometimes. So sometimes we come in, and we'll help companies either with r&d projects, or give some insight into different ways to approach making a thing or folding optics differently or reviewing their optics, trying to help bring down costs, we kind of run a wide gamut over here.

Can you describe briefly kind of how exactly pulsar fits into the ecosystem? The interplay between the vendors and, you know, the startups themselves or the large companies you're working with? How exactly does pulsar fit?

Yeah. So first, we come in, understand the use case and try to guide and help them help clients to understand the market and options. And then as we move through the phases and start doing design, we start working on establishing supply chains, and working with different vendors to help set up an actual way to market for our clients. And you know, whether that's making introductions, or going straight to a cm or figuring out exactly what's necessary and right for that client at that time. And then if we need to take it all the way, we walk all the way with them, we interface with the CME with them, we walk them through the entire process. And we'll even for some clients, you know, we need to show roadmap and tell them where they're at, you know, how do you how do you get from prototype You mean your garage, I think it's cool to something that is actually certifiable that you can put out in the market. So we kind of help put the whole system there.

Some of these projects you've worked on have been super interesting. One of them was with another la based company, red six, and they're doing this AR enabled fighter pilot helmet. What was the goal when you're working with them? What was the goal of incorporating AR into a fighter pilot helmet?

So actually, interestingly enough, I met read six, largely, I saw an article a few years ago that was written and I didn't know who they were. So I reached out, I tried to get to know a lot of people in this space. So what they had told me and, you know, what we're working on now is to enable military assets to be less reliant and to save money basically and risk By having one physical asset in the air, and allowing them to train, in situations scenarios against a virtual opponent that is either being controlled on ground or is AI driven. So that way just has to be one plane in there. You know, there's a lot of costs associated, not just that, but pollution, planes burn a lot of fuel. And the risk because there are training accidents, which is unfortunately a bad joke that people tend to make, like, Oh, it's a training accidents fine, like an Ironman. Yeah, but the training accidents are real. And if we can help save pilots lives, not to mention assets, it's a good mission.

So they're out there creating virtual air to air combat training, or air to air, whether combat or something else refueling training, whatever it happens to be. And what was uniquely challenging about that particular project,

brightness for one, and field of view, and heat, and then G loads,

so as to be bright because you're flying up in the sky, high above the clouds.

And you need contrast on top of that. So let's just say 1.5. So at least 15,000 nits, the eye because the clouds about 10,000.

So it's very bright, either display that can be bright enough to create contrast against the very bright background, but

also a field of view that now our newest designs can be worn 140 degrees horizontal,

so 140 degree horizontal field of view, so you get this full, that's pretty darn wide, see a more realistic training experience as you kept something out of the corner of your eye?

Exactly. Well, actually, interestingly enough, and I didn't learn this until I was working with them, when they're under g load, they can barely move their head. So if they're pulling seven G's, they're actually tracking with their eyes. And they're trying to follow the plane with their eyes.

So being one of those carnival rides, where it's spinning around your body in your head is pinned against the back, it's this sort of experience that happens in a fighter pilot, as to a fighter pilot in a jet, when pulling G's. And so there really is an opportunity to move the head to turn as we would normally, you have to use your eyes in order to see what's going on. Right, you

have to rotate your eyes to track it when you're when you're in a dogfight or something like that.

So wider field of view is necessary. So this idea of pulling G's affects the drives that necessity increases the need for a larger field of view. Other other implications to having the high G load.

Yeah, wait, just torque moment of inertia. All those next are only so strong pilots have some thick necks, by the way, never noticed. It's the every little gram, right. And every distance that you get away, the further you get away from the head. Yeah, those are the big challenges there. But but the brightness comes here, right. So now we're doing the thing. So we eliminate a few things from the G load, we can't have this huge optic systems, Allah like a patchy helmets, you know, we'd have these big arms and things right has to be tight to the head. And then because of that, so compact, it's not a lot of places to sink, brightness. And when you're trying to illuminate that much field of view. You know, if you start with a small surface area, you run it really bright, it's gonna be really, really hot. Now you get localized heat and all that. So there's ways we can mitigate and do things. But we're also exploring some new technologies.

It's a complicated mix of constraints. Oh, and

the other one I didn't mention, we can't do a pass through system cannot do video pastor, right, or an MMR, if you will, because if it fails, you gotta be able to see. So it's restricted to classical AR.

So here just restates the failure mode for normal see through AR is that you just see through the lens, we still see the reality of Sofia transmissive, but in a mixed quote unquote, mixed reality device, which is a video pass through VR device, there the value mortage mode as your blind, your opaque Yeah, thank you for using the more scientific terms

I try. Now we're actually one of the interesting challenges because of the brightness. So because we live in a world where things aren't as advanced as other sectors, we get to start defining things. And so one day one of the operators is like, Oh, this is amazing, the image become opaque. It's so bright. And I've started thinking to myself, well, that's not good. It's opaque. That means we're dimming the rest of the world. So we actually have redefined our max brightness in terms of virtual image to real image contrast ratio. And so with pupil measurement and stuff like that, we can actually create a closed loop system, which I do not know of another headset right now, that does such a thing.

So here's the idea, just to paint the picture, maybe for folks is that to put it into perspective, you sit in the movie theater, just to get a sense of brightness, you sit in a movie theater, they define a bright enough good visual experience because the ambient light emission in the room is so low that this light coming off the screen does not actually need to be very bright, only 15 minutes or something super low. But it feels bright and very immersive. So they're in that sort environment, you only need 15 That difference between basically the background and this Green in order for you to get enough contrast, but that spread grows as it gets brighter, because the way that our eyes perceive light, it's very bug rhythmic. And, and so here, you're saying that as we get brighter still is there's this difference between the the light thing and the dark thing. As long as that gap is the right amount of gap, we perceive brightness, received contrast. So what is that contrast metric? What is that contrast measurement that you've just, you've come up with.

So the transmissive AR is not 100% transmissive, because it goes through the material. And usually there's a coating, right, and so we have about a 50% transmissivity. So what we use is the real world light, after that, transform through that combiner take that light, and then the reflected light that comes off from the virtual image. And that's the contrast ratio. So it's a measurement of the intensity of the light is hitting your eye from the virtual bench and from the rural affiliate, saying same thing twice, just trying to be thorough, I think it's just it's a simple thing.

How much contrast we need for it to be perceived as bright,

to be perceived as not noise, right. So it's, it's so that way, you can distinguish this asset, this virtual asset against like a cloud. And to understand that it's there. Otherwise, it's if you had the same brightness, it would just disappear on that cloud. So that contrast ratio is important. But the reason why we defined it as a contrast ratio, instead of, you know, 20,000 nits or something like that, is to not blind the pilots. Because what will start to happen is your photopic response and the way your eye works, you're trying to maintain a certain brightness. So you'll focus on that virtual image. And if it keeps getting brighter, your eye will your pupil will start to close in the real world will now become dim, even though the virtual image is same perceived brightness. And so that's dangerous in a plane.

Yeah, by making the display brighter and brighter, in effect, you are turning down the brightness of the real world while maintaining the level of brightness of the of the virtual image effect. Yeah.

Which is dangerous. Yeah,

is there a magic number and the ratio that you found that you can share?

Well, right now I just kind of put a line in the sand, we're still exploring. So 1.5 is more, I have to find it just conservatively, because I can't make a lot of mistakes in the air.

So if you have 10,000, Nit background image, you need a 15,000 virtual image, at least 10,000, it's to the high from the background, you need 15,000, it's to the AI from the virtual image to give you the right level of contrast, right? Or 1000 to 1500. Yes,

exact difference. And as we get lower, there should be some dynamicism in there, that's actually kind of been more of the interesting side now that we've gotten really bright is trying to get really dark, and talking about like five minute ambient light. And to get a display to dim that low is not necessarily the easiest, especially you know, what was, say 30 minutes, because then we start talking about color, and what does that gamut look like? And how do we it so that becomes a fun problem. And I'm even just weird.

We all each have our own unique fun hobbies, we really shift to another. Another use case, which is also in extreme environment. Here's one real working with AR enabled firefighters AR enabled firefighting helmets, I should say, with Quick, quick technologies. What's, what's the goal there? What are they trying to create? How does Air Fit?

The big use case for is for smoked out situations where you can't see, to allow for thermal imaging to map an image into an AR display to allow for either identification of objects, people, or things like that, or for navigation purposes, there's other tech built into that as well. But from an AR perspective, that's the primary case, also compass, things like that.

Here, you're not dealing with high G forces, what are you dealing with what's kind of the unique set of constraints here?

If we had high G forces in a fire, that'd be I'd be out fire NATO's, the constraint here is, you know, operating up to 105 degrees Celsius temperature for an hour. And as you know, like things melt, yeah, they melt, they stopped functioning, like Oh, cos, you know, 70 see, at best, you're lucky if you get someone to say that. Usually they want to say 60. And then you're like, what's the real number? And, you know, protecting this equipment in these optics and everything else, like, you know, a binary sitting in 105. getting that to work over that an hour duration is not easy. And it's interesting because, you know, coming into it coming from, you know, small form factor, AR headworn eyeglasses format, like, oh, yeah, I've done this before. And the like 105 Sr, like, oh, I have not done this before. Okay, this is interesting. And just the fact that like, you know, it's a corrosive environment is not a friendly place to be. That's why they come get you out. And it's challenging and it's rewarding to work on I have utmost respect for people who do that. I'm not going to do that. I would if I absolutely had to, I guess but I'm good. You're in the frontlines in Iraq, but I was hungry. I was a good reason.

So here, is the approach in solving some of these environmental challenges to isolate the components, or is it choosing different different materials, different components to go into this sort of system?

It? The short answer is yes. And the long answer is I can't get into too much detail. But I'm it there's only so many ways you can do a thing. So I'm sure we can be creative and figure it out. But it's not mine to talk about.

Sure. Can you share when firefighters going to be actually able to wear these things fighting a fire?

So? No. However, I can say it'll be within

two years. Okay, great. of the other projects, you've worked on what has kind of been the most futuristic projects you've had a chance to touch?

Well, I think you already saw it. Evidently, according to AWB last year, the rates were

the AR eights were the most futuristic product, because you built those years ago, and they're still relevant and good today.

Yeah, the people I showed at the bar were like, where's your booth, I didn't see, these are the best things I've seen at the show. And that kind of made me cry a little bit on the inside, because it's like, I wish I could still do crazy things like this. But moving on, you know, I've can have a bigger impact. PulseR has a bigger impact in in the community. But that aside, one of my clients driven technologies, their client is NASA and design the, you know, full size design, the lunar lander simulator, HUD to help train astronauts for when we go to land on the moon again, but we're gonna do it in style this time. New technologies over 433 processor, better looking spacesuits. Yeah, with the TBD spacesuits. As soon as it gets out of litigation, maybe we can go to the moon.

So you designing system for training, simulation training for landing on the moon? Will that be a system that ultimately is used in the lunar lander itself,

not this version of it right now, we went for adaptability and customization. And also, you know, at pulsar, we try to work with our customers and feel that their needs, one of the things that happens in these type of programs is when you know, a bespoke piece goes down. Well, now they're three months of astronauts that they had scheduled to train can't train, it's not like they can just hop back in later. So we, you know, went out of our way to use off the shelf components for this version, to allow for them to fix it themselves. So instead of being down three months, because they have to mail things back and forth, and all that, and we have to get the guy, the one guy who made it, come back and fix it. We designed it so that way, they can pretty much go to the hardware store, and come back and fix it. So it was intentionally designed that way. Right? Yeah. But when it comes time again, I would not be surprised if they said, Hey, can you come back? Have it another one? Well, let's see. So my mind X work was largely consulting, and just figuring out so my next is a brain computer interface device, right? For those who aren't aware, I think you had them on here not too long ago. And so it was figuring out a way for them to showcase their capability in their device, but also have it be a social experience. So they could wear air glasses, but still talk to somebody and engage but manipulate the system using their brain at the same time. So a lot of that was market analysis and pairing with a current technology because they didn't have certainly need to a bespoke optics such as like red six, or, you know, Quake, right? This is one of my clients that I do more of the helping them understand and choose the correct solution for them.

You noted that it's not just smaller companies that you have an opportunity to work with. But sometimes you get to work with some of the big guys as well. Yes. Can you talk about your work with Microsoft,

I worked with Microsoft.

What can you tell us about your work with Microsoft this helping them

do some r&d projects that we probably did it over five years prior,

revisiting the good old days revisiting the the oldies, but goodies, perhaps,

which is interesting, because you know, you work with all the same people again, and you get to go tackle a different problem just with something that you didn't design. And, you know, it's kind of making like an aftermarket, if you will, but it's purely for r&d. So I don't even know if it's gonna make it into whatever they're looking at next. Yeah. I don't know if you know, this. I don't know if you know, this, but I also helped Lenovo with the h3 for a little bit. I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. Small world. So because I knew so much about the design. And, you know, they asked me to come in and try to help manufacturing with that. I don't know if the changes and the stuff I helped with was implemented. At the end of the day. There's so many reasons to make decisions in these things. Right. So, but yeah, I got to

help work on that project, too. But you have not touched in real.

I may have sent an email to the CEO telling him that he can turn the optics and that he should Even if he doesn't bring in pulsar to do it, just because I want to see the world progress on this design.

And did he respond to the good to engage on this at all?

No, not yet.

But maybe he will. Now, we'll see, as you kind of look through kind of going back to this question like, where do you place your bets in terms of display or optics technology? What do you place your bets on this notion of being tethered or untethered? Right now, we have the unreal, we have new eyes, which is doing something notionally similar. Think reality, de novo a three, these are all tethered devices.

So when you say tethered, you mean physically tethered,

physically tethered with a wire. Okay, so you're right, that's right, we should separate those two concepts. There's this notion that all of the processing is done on the headset,

like an only one on one like the HoloLens or like an RA, or an

All right, there's a notion of tethering, where you have some complementary device like a smartphone, who is you're offloading the glasses are offloading a lot of that compute to the glasses, but you could tether wirelessly or wired. But we've seen a lot of Wired connected devices, we've seen snap debut a wirelessly connected device. Where do you think this lens is, is the only one or we're going to offload compute which which of those in your minds holds the greater weight over time as we think about consumer.

So in a consumer setting, one of the issues that I find tethered device having is they have a conflict of interest. One of the reasons is they make it tethered to offload weight, right. Like always put a battery in and know that the computing onboard and then they make the overall package lighter, but they're still attached to a cable, which exerts a force. So the lighter you get in the glasses, the more impact that cable is going to have. And so there's an optimized point, it's not going to be the end, all of that ergonomics plays a bigger factor. Now, even on the heavier ones like so the rates were all in one. And I keep coming back to that, but the future in there four and a half ounces. But people put them on and they don't feel like four ounces. It's because distribution, it's you know, the the way the ergonomics are the way the springs pull against the head, right, where it sits on the face, the amount of torque that's being generated because of the distance of the forehead, right, all these factors come into play. Personally, I prefer an all in one, largely due to the reasons I was just talking about buyers. I mean, who doesn't have wireless earbuds now? Well, I'm looking at you you don't but one of the biggest problems right? Like snagging your cable, especially if you're walking around. So for a consumer, I think they're gonna have to be wireless, I'll put a line in the sand there and put a lot of lines and sands today. But we'll put one there

until the wind comes through, we're gonna keep those lines,

I think the tether is a bridge. I think it's a solution. It's a safe solution for a lot of companies, because, you know, they don't have to invest too much they can leverage a phone, which that's what people have been doing for years. Right? Like, look at our POS is places right there, their tablets point of sales,

the wire needs to be cut. And the result is it either needs to be wirelessly connected to the smartphone, or it needs to be a standalone device. Yes. In your opinion,

I think wirelessly tethered to a smartphone is a good move. And in fact, I would probably almost prefer that over the only one. And the only reason I say that is because you can then upgrade your device, the computational part without changing out your optics. So do you wear glasses? I don't remember.

I do. I have I had eye surgery. But now I also again, need glasses have come back around. It's just

because you're you're living longer. But you know, you know, when you change glasses, it takes some time to get accustomed to that right and do those things. And the same thing is true with the optics, right? Like, even though we try to make them play No, for the most part, unless we intentionally put a prescription in there. The there there's imperfections, right, it's not gonna be perfect. It's plus or minus one, eight, the diopter. So there's still some variants in there and people can be sensitive to that. So being able to keep your custom optics, maybe like the frame, maybe got special color, and then switch out your hardware. I think that's really cool.

So micro led, inorganic LED. You're hoping for something different in regards to optics, but you like the progress you've seen from diffractive waveguides. And you are saying that you prefer this idea of a wirelessly connected pair of glasses to a smartphone so you can swap out the componentry separately as the upgrade cycles make sense. Alright, you've we've drawn those lines. I wasn't sure we'll come back to this when a sunrise this time to pull this out. I'm gonna hold you to it. Yeah.

Well, actually, if I could revise the answer on the optics Do you think it's going to be metamaterial felt like this is kind of a easy go to because it's not here today, right like it or it was too easy to say that

describe metamaterial describes this not yet here sort of technology around optics.

So basically, it's, you know, material that has the ability to control the light basically. So it's a multiple material type. thing that just has different chains and structures. And I'm not a chemist. But basically it's it's a material that that can act as an optic, but it's just has multiple properties that don't normally exist in the material.

That sort of technology is not practical yet, right? I mean,

you'll see some articles about like, looking at replacing cell phone lens that came out recently using a metamaterial. And when I say metamaterial, I'm talking about the category not the company. I don't want this stock to shoot up, right? Again, like when Facebook became meta, but yeah, it's the form factor, right? And the amount of control in a smaller package wants to see where it goes. And it's going to be trade offs, right? I don't know if it's going to be able to be introduced without serious backing, I guess it's an investment, it's going to need big money to get there.

So that is the the potential other category for optics is the the metal material based combat electric. As you look forward over some of the the big remaining hurdles and achieving this notion of everyday wearable consumer grade sort of glasses. Is it the optics? Is that still the biggest hurdle? Is it a display technology? Is it? Is it the ability to push data more efficiently between the glasses and a smartphone? What is the biggest remaining hurdle in your mind?

It's application 100%, finding the right use case. And going back to what I said earlier, you know, we already have the best use case ever, and people still don't wear their glasses.

By default. We would rather not. We'd rather suffer through eyes surgeries and wear glasses, at least some of us would,

or be blind. And so I think it's hard to using that as the straw man in the group right into use as a metric. I don't know what application would have people overcome that? I'm sure there's one or two. But that is the the critical path. Yeah. Because if you had something that could do that, people will put up with heat, they'll put up with weight, if it's worth it. Right. And so literally, it all just comes down to make it worth it. And they'll do it. So yeah, we're there. Now, we just need a reason to do it.

There's one reason that I put on glasses willingly every day, that's when I get in the car, and willingly put on a pair of glasses to protect my eyes from the sun. And I think that there are other scenarios I can imagine in my life where I'll be willingly put on a pair of glasses for a particular use case. Because it delivers real value in those moments. Like what, which is not, which are not all day wearable, there's not that need, you know, I'm driving the car, it's usually four minutes, or maybe an hour or two at a time driving down to San Diego a couple hours.

And so that's what I find a lot of pulsars customers have. Right, they have experiences of use cases like that. Right. And and that's what we're trying to enable. So I totally agree with what you said there. And I was speaking more to like the general one glasses to rule them all kind of thing.

Yeah. Let's wrap with a few lightning round questions. Oh, boy, I thought this has been the whole lightning round. The whole the whole thing has been enlightening for sure. What commonly held belief about spatial computing Do you disagree with

I don't think it's going to be as readily available as people want it to be

in terms of availability or adoption,

adoption. I think the availability is there. I mean, we have volumetric displays all around us, right? The thing that at least in a headworn, for In fact, let me qualify that, you know, we have these display, so you got a 1080 p display. Now, that's good resolution in a plane, right. But now if you're gonna use those pixels to stretch out over a third dimension, your resolution becomes very low. Because it's out of focus right at its for this pixel over here. Now, these little pixels are in focus. But now something that you would have rendered in a 1080 image is like a couple 100 pixel set it thrown at it. So I find that to be a hardware limiting factor in the form factor that we're looking at. That makes sense. Like, that's not what I wanted to hear.

No, I want to hear whatever you have to say, I love you. So here's what we've kind of been talking about already. But of the potential uses of AR, which one are you personally, most excited about?

So this is something I wish someone would do, and I hope somebody does, it is doing it. And I don't know about it. But I would love to see a first responder kind of set up with AI onboard, especially in the event of like an earthquake or, you know, a collapse building. And the reason why I'm saying these things, is if you you know, when you're looking around in these areas, looking for survivors or anything one, you need the logistics of someone's directing people in doing that. And that's easy to do, because it's kind of a open loop. You don't really need like, a strong acknowledgement or conversation to tell somebody to go over here and look over there, right. So there could be just a simple acknowledged, click got it cool. We're doing it. And then the second part is with the AI comes into play, is that AI can be looking for structural defects. Because if you're busy looking for people, you're not paying a lot attention to that. And if you are paying attention to that you could be missing somebody. And so is to help augment like oh look over here this this beam looks like it's gonna buckle soon or something like that right and I could see a big market play for that every country in the world want to use that especially countries that have poor infrastructure and in are tend to be prone to these type of things and then also just be helpful I don't know what more to say beyond that.

Yeah I love it first responder classes with a awesome what book have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

I don't read a lot of books.

what Karl Gutag article Have you read recently found to be deeply in fall as I call it a profound all

of them? The the majority media sometimes do is video games. What's What are you really enjoying right now, playing Halo kind of missed it because plays like Halo two now, which is really deep, and insightful and profound. However, this is interesting. So I don't know if you follow Halo at all or anything. So they've had this special event where it was based around cyberpunk or something. And the AR visor was off center, literally off center. Now this reminds me of one time at OTG where after about three months, we realized someone didn't lock the optics design in parametrically just kind of floating, it was off by point six millimeters. Now it just made me laugh because I was like, That happened to me. I know what happened. And that just went to production. No one caught it. And now we see it. So it was just an interesting parallel to to anecdote that I experienced right. Art does imitate life.

Art imitates life. Yep. If you could sit down have coffee with your 25 year old self. What advice would you share with 25 year old? David?

It's interesting. I've always my life is always been just kind of looking forward. And so, you know, contemplating that the glib answer is to get a guy such as Matt. Right? Because I'm going to make a point here, but it all comes back to like communicating and learning how to communicate. And while Matt's an expert in it, Matt's my communications officer. The growing up I was you know, headstrong. You know, I kind of made my way in the world. You know, I ended up finding myself in university at 24 had some trying times there has to do with military funding running out and learning how to talk to people and ask for help. That was something to learn. And it's not like I had too much pride. I just didn't know how. So communications, I think would probably be if I had to go back and say a thing.

Before that you had learned to survive by being headstrong, like that was necessary for your survival. It was in that you maybe didn't have the opportunities to ask for the help, that

he needed to train not to ask for help, too. So there's that.

Yeah. But you began to learn that by the time around 2524 25 timeframe, that that was a good thing was not a detriment to your well being, it was actually a benefit to your well being,

it was necessary to achieve the goals that I wanted to achieve. I had to learn to be more societal a fuel.

Yeah. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

You know, doing what I do and become part of pulsar and everything, I do get a lot of perspective into a lot of what people are doing. I do see the industry starting to take off, especially when we're, you know, everybody's a lot of people looking at the big players, right, because they have stock or something. But I'm really interested in the smaller players, and the ones that can really innovate on this area. They're not necessarily reporting to a board, right? They don't have shareholders, well, a lot of shareholders, a lot of them get investment, but it's a different animal. And I'm hopeful and excited about what they can bring to the table. And of course, the second they do something great something company, buy them up and, and, and claim their idea. But if that helps everybody in this industry get further along and eventually helps in a meaningful way. Let's do it. I'm excited for that.

And also, please don't sell yourself to the large players. That was also the wish

Oh, no, but they can license me that's okay.

We need diversity of innovation to continue.

Exactly. And you know, that's literally what I want to do in industry and in where I want to play my role for everybody. So that way, we're all diverse, the same person. This has been fun.

Yeah, good. Where can people go to learn more about you and what you're doing there, pulsar?

People can check us out on LinkedIn pulsar, Inc, Twitter at pulsar solutions, and online at pulsar dot solutions.

Awesome. David, thank you very much for the conversation.

Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it. It's been fun.

Before you go, I want to tell you about the next episode. In it. I speak with Jon Gray and So Hee Wo. Jon is the co founder and CEO and So Hee is the head of XR at Encore, a company building a live streaming interactive AR infused Music Performance app. Jon and So Hee talked about how they empower musicians to create engaging AR art to complement their live musical performances and how they're establishing a middle class of performance artists. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time