The AR Show: Jay Wright (Campfire 3D) on Innovating Ahead of the Curve and the Future of Workplace Collaboration

5:36PM Oct 31, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Jay Wright

Keywords:

campfire

device

building

qualcomm

people

ar

early

apple

software

ptc

3d

applications

hardware

developers

newton

app

idea

company

euphoria

hololens

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 Jay Wright. Jay is the founder and CEO of Campfire 3d, a company that is focused on holographic collaboration for design and engineering workflows. Prior to Campfire Jay spent 10 years building Vuforia from inception to becoming the leading augmented reality platform for developing handheld and headworn applications before he is currently part of enterprise software and services company PTC but Jay originally created Vuforia while at Qualcomm. There he was responsible for global commercialization of non-radio technologies, ranging from computer vision to neuromorphic hardware.

Previously, Jay had created two software companies focused on the cutting edge of mobile computing, dating back to the mid 1990s. On the hole, he has been a technology entrepreneur building his vision for the future of computing platforms for more than 25 years.

In this conversation, Jay shares stories from the early days of mobile software, starting with his work on Apple's Newton and his subsequent efforts to create the first app store. We discussed the impetus for building Vuforia at Qualcomm, the lessons he learned about the AR market from that experience, and how that led to campfire 3d, we'll get into the problem he's trying to solve with campfire and the specific strategy he's pursuing. We go on to discuss his perspective on the AR hardware efforts at Facebook and Apple, and the historical clues about how quickly we can expect general purpose consumer smart glasses to arrive. Jay shares a lot of wisdom about entrepreneurship and AR.

It's worth noting, when we recorded this interview, Facebook was still named Facebook and meta referred to an early entrant building productivity focused headworn AR, they shut down a few years back. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website.thearshow.com. Let's dive in.

Jay, you're building software for Apple's mobile computing devices almost 15 years before the iPhone? Do you ever get a chance to glimpse the future while you were working with them? Maybe? Maybe over Steve Jobs, his shoulder?

Yeah, I was my first company called right strategies that I pretty much started. Right, right out of school. We were doing software for apples, Newton, which as you know, originally was a consumer focused device. And we were using it for something a little different with an enterprise focus. And anyway, we've been pretty successful at it for a number of years, I think we were responsible for moving more Newton hardware than all of Apple's retail channels, which I'm not sure was, was a really high bar, but an accomplishment nonetheless. And then a really wonderful thing happen. Steve Jobs came back to Apple. And the question was, Oh, my God, like what's gonna happen to Newton. And we kind of bet the business built this business on Newton. And so I called the folks that we knew and worked with up at Apple, and I said, Hey, you know, we built a business on this. And Apple got a lot of mileage out of what we were doing too, because we one of the developers that have been sort of most successful in the space. So they invited me up for a sit down. And the meeting was with Sina tomato. Sina had come over from next with Steve Jobs. I think his initial role at Apple is he was responsible for like all of our applications. And he'd also been charged with figure out what to do with noon. So So anyway, I show up and, and I get to, you know, one infinite loop at the, at the now old campus, and lead up to the executive suite, and we go sit down and seen his office. And, you know, he starts out by letting me tell me tell the story and sort of express my concern. And then he goes on to thank me profusely, for what we've done as a developer moving this forward, and kind of all the things that you would expect I'm very respectful, very kind. And then he turns over to his his whiteboard, where he and and Steve Jobs had just finished mapping out this whole mobile space, like in an effort to kind of figure out what to do with with Newton. And it was pretty wild. You know, here's so here's this, and it's just, you know, whiteboard circles, lines, text and and there's a bunch of names and things on there that you didn't even recognize today. Because the players that were wearing mobile were very different like it was these people doing these pocket organizers, pocket address books, you know, folks like cyan and Casio and things so anyway, that was that was the closest I would ever get to Steve Jobs who I hold somewhere in my hero category was a whiteboard of him mapping out the space that ultimately that led to the decision to kill the hardware platform that didn't immediately end the business but it sure put a shoe put a nail a nail in the coffin. And so is there a brush with greatness? Of course everyone knows Steve Jobs. So I I like to tell this story, Jason, but it also was like Lesson One of something that I learned other times In my career, which is like, look, it's not, it's not just about the idea. Timing is so, so critical. And so his timing is critical. And, and I think there's another lesson that came out of it, which is, man, you really have to worry about single points of failure. And if you're going to be a developer, kind of on a new platform like that, it's a big bet. You know, it is really, really a big a big bat.

When you think back on the origins of the decision to build enterprise software for the Apple Newton, yeah, what was that decision making process at that time coming out of college.

So I'd done some entrepreneurial endeavors in college, like custom software development projects, like during summers and things and, and one of them actually came to me, by way of my dad, he worked at Disney, he actually spent almost his entire career at Disney, and, and his primary function was in the attractions group. And he's responsible for forecasting attendance, like how many people are gonna show up, which, you know, it's demand planning, figure out the operating calendar, and you know, all manner of things based based on that forecast. So he used a bunch of different inputs, some of those be historical data, a little bit of crystal ball mixed in and and the other was a lot of guests survey data that was captured by guys run around the park asking people questions you might have experienced, these people have been to Disneyland, they hit you up. And the way that Disney did this back in the day, is they had a bunch of pieces of paper clip work, and fill these things out and answer all the questions the end of the day somebody enters into a computer, it's really time intensive. And there's a lot of errors. So one summer, my dad said, Hey, why don't you come up the office when I show you something, and he shows me that Scantron machine. And you remember Scantron back in the days to take tests fill in the bubble kind of thing. And the idea was, I can't wait to get rid of all this paper forms, and we're gonna move to Scantron. And there is this brand new box because software came in boxes, those days, there's brand new box of like Turbo Pascal. And I get a developer guide for the Scantron machine and said, hey, you know, figure how to make this work. And so three months later, you know, Disney had a whole new system for processing all these surveys Scantron. So I had this as context for somebody didn't school and and I think it was August of 93 when I was reading my newest copy of Macworld, because that's how we used to get our news. And I see this Newton thing. And I'm like, huh, wow, like the Scantron thing was neat. But couldn't we just get rid of that whole paper forms and clipboard? If if we were to do this on something low cost and, and programmable. And that was really the the genesis of that whole company, that whole approach? The rest? Rest is history. But that's that was this this spark of the idea? For using Newton, not for consumer, but for an enterprise application?

Yeah, some born from a real need a real use case, ultimately, so so important, so important. When you were in that office, when Steve Jobs had just previously left, and you're sitting there chatting with Siena, and you look at that whiteboard. Was there, Martin that whiteboard? Kilonewton? Was that clearly written on the whiteboard? What was the remember any of the details there?

No, no, there was there was nothing. There was nothing directionally about what they were going to do that that I could discern, it was more about trying to understand the space. And I think who the players were and what the applications were. And my guess was, you know, did did they see an opportunity to follow the formula and tried meaningfully improve on what had been done with where they were on Newton. And and my guess is either concluded concluded No, or it was just too much. And, you know, given the magnitude of problems that that Apple had at the time.

Yeah. There's this consistent thread throughout your career. Were you are way ahead of the curve. Yeah, you've kind of talked about this, this challenge of timing, and as an entrepreneur catching the wave at the right moment. So you're not left behind, or not crushed under the wave. After you're done the the Apple Newton enterprise software business, you saw the future of app distribution. Yeah. And you went on to create your vision for what is now known as the App Store. To be

I was introduced to an engineer that showed me a an app that he'd built on the pump seven. Do you remember the the pump seven?

I do? Yeah. The sleek looking guys. Yeah,

it was awesome. A pre it was predated the BlackBerry for a lot of the same things BlackBerry was great at and so first palm device with wireless communications, but really slow, high latency low bandwidth wireless. Anyway, this guy's name is Mark Weiss showed me this demo of downloading an app over the air, wireless and pumps out And it was, of course, painfully slow, but it was downloading an app over the air. And and I don't know if you recall the time, Jason, but like for us to install software on these mobile devices was like three pains in the ass. You had to go find like the right app, like on some download site on your computer. And then you had to download the right installer package and then install it with a cable and any number of things would go go wrong in that process. POM was actually pretty good Windows CE II was much more of a nightmare, because you might recall there were three different chipsets for Windows CE II. And you might even find like the right binary for the right chipset guidance. People even know what chipsets in their in their device, it's just a mess. And so I looked at that, like, Oh, my God, this solves so many problems, like, the way this ought to work is, you know, there should be a catalog of apps on your phone or on your device, you ought to be able to browse that catalog, you ought to be able to download something and try it for free. And then you have to be able to buy it. And so I saw this, I saw this demo, I ended up investing in what was a small pump consulting business at that time, and came on as a CEO and and we built the single tap mobile catalog. It basically had all the components that you know of in an app store today, there's a catalog that was on the device and we did for palm we did it also for Pocket PC. We went and signed up developers and put agreements in place, put all the infrastructure together so that you could actually download the apps and try them and then use a credit card and buy them online. And all the pieces were there and and it works. But early a little early, early. Two turns out turns out Yeah, the the palm seven clearly was it wasn't enough and and the whole windows, which at that time was the Pocket PC World. I mean, it wasn't even wireless. Yeah, right. Like one of our first customers was at&t Wireless that actually put it in their first wireless service for enterprise. And, and even to get that service which was GPRS. At the time, you had to have like one of those type two PC MCA cards that you put into a backpack yet another accessory on the on the back of your PDA. So you know, we got that thing shipping with with all Compaq Ipex. It powered a portion of at&t Wireless is sort of enterprise data offering. But yeah, right idea. Built a thing, too, too early,

a little too early, right idea a little too early. I remember those PCMA boards in that compact, early days, they Oh, man, those are fun times. That was definitely when it was easy to imagine the future, I was in the same position starting a mobile software company in the early 2000s years before birth for the iPhone, trying to imagine a world that came to be 510 years later. And it's easy to imagine, as you have already spent all this time living in the future. And you see these components coming together. And you know, this is that next point of friction. Let me let me solve that. Because it's timely. What was the rate? You were charging your developers? What was that revenue split?

I think it was 15% that we were taking?

Yeah, a lot of what we live with today with the app store, right? The apple, the 30% that they're taking, a lot of that precedent was set around that time, in the very early days of the carrier decks, as they called them back. You know, it's the carrier started hosting their own catalogs. And in these early sort of app experiments, there were some 15 somewhere 20 somewhere 30 or 40. I think the early days of Qualcomm, which wasn't like 40% on the brew App Store with something high.

I think it was high. I don't I don't remember the numbers. Exactly. But But yeah, it was high. Yeah.

Anyway. So you after having now lived through the Apple Newton, the early days of palm seven in the beginning of truly wireless data access and wireless application access? Why was Qualcomm the right spot for you next?

Well, I had, I concluded that I seem to have a knack for figuring out what was going to come next and building it. I just needed to find a place where where I could do it early, and where there was plenty of resources. And it turns out that's exactly what what Qualcomm does. Right? Qualcomm gets in early figures out new technologies makes tremendous investments on behalf of the of the industry to figure those out, and then makes them available. So it was ideal, and not only that, but I I entered Qualcomm at a time when and this is hard to believe now, but the thought was, hey, you know, we're getting diminishing returns from the cellular stuff. And this is still pre 3g, right and, and we got to figure out some like new new and different things for outside of the core to do. And so I came in to a brand new group inside at the time, which is Qualcomm Qualcomm research, just sort of figure out what these new things could be and and figure out, you know how you can we can come up with something new that can turn into a billion dollar business.

That was the milestone that was the threshold, they're looking to create a new billion dollar business

course you want to go bigger, bigger than a billion. But yeah, when you're when you're at that scale, right, you have to, you're looking for things that can become very, very big. And it's definitely challenged. And there's there's guys in every big company that have roles, like, like I did, but yeah, you know, just just figure out something that's good. 2 billion plus and five years, and let's do that.

Yeah, no problem. So what were they? What were the list of ideas? You do you recall what some of the things you explored back that time?

Yeah. So there were, there were a few projects that were that were underway. There was some stuff in peer to peer connectivity. There was some really early stuff in machine learning that we now call AI and actually neuromorphic hardware like chips with the same morphology of the brain. And there was another project that was in the portfolio that we would actually turn into what is now before you, but all in a very early stage. When I got there, you know, three or four people on a project team in r&d, kind of kind of with an idea.

Yeah. You ended up running with the Vuforia. Ideal became before Yeah. What was it? What was the thinking around the potential there? What was it you're trying to create ultimately, at the outset?

Well, I'll tell you, originally, the project that became before he was born in the last Metaverse, Crace. At that time, we all thought that the metaverse was was going to be like Second Life. And it was kind of like today, it's like, Hey, we're all going to be in here and work in here and play in here, do everything. And so the the concept, Jason, it was kind of like a mash up of Second Life and Google Maps. But the idea is, you'd have this thing on your phone, and you could hold it up and pointed at a building, and you'd see a 3d version of that building and content overlaid on it, you know, point of interest data, or what have you things that you might see in Maps. And that's how, that's how it started and, and actually prototype some of that stuff, and did it on tablet PCs and such and concluded, hey, this experience isn't all that compelling. And it was pretty clear to at that point, like God, if I, if I hold something up, and point it really kind of would just like to look through the camera and see it live, right. So. So we started looking at technologies that were were peripheral. And AR, you know, of course, was in a very early state. So I jumped on a plane and headed to Ismar conference, it was in Cambridge here. And Ismar is kind of where the whole tech and academic community got together to talk about AR and I got a sense of the state of what was going on. And, and it was pretty clear, like, Okay, this is early, there's a huge amount of technology headroom room to innovate. And, and not only not only that, there was a tremendous opportunity to drive a huge amount of compute, and, and more specifically, from a Qualcomm perspective, heterogeneous compute, right? Like, this AR stuff was gonna need image processing your graphics and rendering and conductivity and sensors and all this stuff. So I think that was like in October, November 2008, and came back and we pivoted that that project, sort of from that original Metaverse II thing to, to ar

2008, you began building the foundation for AR for this idea of overlaying the digital on top of the physical world in a compelling way. And before we know today is no longer at Qualcomm, it's now part of PTC another entity. What was kind of the journey of euphoria inside of the company? And how did the sale ends up happening to PTC?

Yeah, I think I think to understand that it might be helpful to sort of understand the strategy and and sort of why why we did euphoria, which, you know, fundamentally was software at a at a chip company. You know, one of the challenges I found out in this role is we're trying to build new stuff that takes advantage of the chip become a billion dollar business is any new functionality that that you add to the chip is only as good as the applications that are built on top of it. And a Qualcomm we're not doing that the applications, right, the applications are done by developers or Google themselves. And for functionality in the chip to be realized. You know, Google's got to create an API for it. So it can be taken advantage of. And it turns out, you know, Google's not all that wild about, hey, Qualcomm, you got this brand new feature, we're gonna open up a new API that just works with your chip and promote it with developers, because that's going to tie them to a particular particular chip. And so we really have this sort of conundrum with with a lot of new tech, which is, hey, anything we're going to do is sort of gated by Google, or more generically, the layer on top of us the operating system and applications And so my big takeaway strategically was, hey, the only way we're gonna be able to do this is if we can control some developer facing API that developers are using directly. And Google doesn't need to be a part of that. And that's what we did with with euphoria, right? So if euphoria was, let's create a developer facing software, platform and API, we got to get everybody using it. And once we have everybody using this, now we can, we can differentiate under the hood in our chip. And we're going to have some some leverage with other folks because developers have built on top of it. So before it was was not just about AR, actually, before, he was about a new software strategy for Qualcomm to sort of move up the stack and beyond beyond chips. So we were very successful in driving before with developers and I'd say, we enabled a huge long tail of of applications, largely marketing oriented kind of applications 10s of 1000s of apps, and I think we hit a couple 100,000 developers before before we we sold, but we didn't hit our magical or magical moment of sort of Pokemon GO and and sort of consumer pull through. So the other thing that was going on with with Qualcomm at the time, it kind of led to the the sale was we had a change in in CEO. And so before he was born under Paul Jacobs, who was a huge fan of software, right, he's huge proponent of brew and drove brew, and really understood that well, and, and Steve, Steve Mollenkopf, great, great guy, but he covered the chip side of the business. And and there's a no there's kind of a mentality on that side of the business that if you know, if there's no atoms, there's no value, right bit bits, bits are labor. They're not they're not sort of first class product. And so there was kind of that mentality that was there was a challenge. And then the other thing is there was a actually an activist shareholder at the time, that was saying, Hey, you guys get out get out of everything. That's that's not core, because performance wasn't what they thought it should have been. So for all those for all those reasons Qualcomm sought, sought sell. And that's what led to it

kind of in that transaction took place in what year 2018?

Yeah, I think it closed November 2018. Yeah.

In that kind of stretch, especially near maybe the end of of your involvement with the euphoria there, Qualcomm, what was your kind of your take of the appetite or the state of the AR market? And what kind of some of the lessons you were learning from all of the 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of, of apps and developers that were leveraging and making based on Qualcomm and before you,

I think, the most important sort of takeaway prior to the sale was like, Look, the the opportunity here consumer wise was in marketing applications. And those were pretty hard to monetize. But that enterprises were where all the action was, was going to be. I think the other the other takeaway was, hey, as, as awesome as it is to do ar on on phones and tablets and things, this holding devices up in front of you for extended periods of time. This is not awesome. This is not awesome. And and that ultimately, we've got to get something on your head. And it's gonna take a long time. Right? It's gonna take a long time just to solve the technology problems that you talked a lot about on your show and know about those. But this is this is not happening tomorrow. And so I think I think that's why that's why the PTC sale made so much sense because the the enterprise market was right. And that was really an opportunity to go and exploit that.

Yeah. So it's a good fit for PTC was beforehand, given what the market was, where the feedback was in the market. No question. And for you personally, you saw that the device was a necessary component. But there's still a ways to go in order to deliver something that was good on the headworn device side.

Absolutely.

How did that lead to campfire?

So you know, one of the, the core capabilities that we see, continue to see with a lot of the marketing materials even from the earliest days of HoloLens, and Magic Leap is this use case where you've got a bunch of people either together in different locations, and and they're all collaboratively looking at some really high fidelity 3d content together. And it's shown so often, and it's actually really, really compelling use case for a lot of reasons and a lot of different workflows. But it turns out that it's actually very, very difficult or impossible to do with with existing devices. And in fact, it's one of the things we sought to do with euphoria and concluded pay. I can't make this go with with existing hardware. And I think it was, it was a few aspects of it, Jason, there's the visual experience of current devices was not great. And the big one there is just field of view and image quality on AR, there's way too much friction and setting these things up and learning how to use them. And then is just really far too hard to just make people's workflow, get their existing data into these things. So, you know, my take was, hey, if we want to solve all these problems, and get rid of all these barriers to adoption, we clean sheet we need, we need all the hardware we need on the software. And, and we saw, we saw it out to build it with Kepler,

that's a tall order. We thought we just saw we have been witnessing Magic Leap, also want to take on the full stack, the hardware, and the software, the whole, there's might have been a bit more ambitious also with the content and some entertainment oriented things as well. But But that's a very tall order to do both the hardware well, and the software. Well, why did you feel that you were that the timing was right for the team was right in order to to tackle both of those.

So it is a tall order. But what we're doing is very, very focused, right, we're not, we're not trying to create a platform that replaces the PC replaces the phone, or SDKs that are going to enable a whole third party developer community. We're building some very specific devices and some very specific applications that work together. So I think the the overall scope while yes, it's hardware and software, it's nowhere it's nowhere close to the scope of effort that magically undertook or Microsoft's undertaken with with HoloLens. This is this is much more akin to something like a drop cam, or maybe even a peloton where you have a very specific device with specific software that works with it. And yeah, it's it's a tall order. But it's absolutely achievable with the right people and the right tech. Right. It's all about knowing what to do. And what do you use, who can do it

with you evaluated what was going on in the market that time, you saw an opportunity that that had emerged based on what was happening at meta with their meta to device, which has formed, the basis for what you're doing today, at some level is there's a lot of ingredients in what you're doing today, they kind of were born there. Why did that feel like the right fit for this very specific piece of hardware and software experience?

So the biggest problem, I think the biggest barrier to delivering this collaborative experience has been the visual part. And, and field of view, and image quality, just overall image quality. And so the the meta two, for all its shortcomings, I think, had the best display system that I've ever seen, form factor aside, right, let's just look at an image quality. And so I had actually been contacted by VCs that had bought the IP from from that former metal company. And, you know, my first reaction was, hey, you know, crazy. And, and I went and took a look at what was there. And there was a generation beyond of what had been done for the amount of two, I think it probably would have been what would have been called a meta three. Needless to say it was better. And I said, Well, this is a key ingredient of what's required to solve the rest of this puzzle. And that was something we build from. So today, you know, campfire has got some new devices, got some new applications, and the visor that we have on the headset, originally was developed by the former medic company.

That's super interesting. As you were evaluating the types of opportunities out there, you'd noted that this use case that keeps getting represented by all of these major companies is this one around collaboration, that we all need to seem to see the same sort of high quality rendering representation of a model. Yeah, let's talk through this particular use case a little bit more and understand why AR makes it better. How are companies? How are teams executing the sort of 3d design use case today? And where are these points of friction that some sort of headworn system is going to make better?

So generally, when you're in a design and development process, and you're building a physical thing, you start out doing it digitally? And you do it, you do it in CAD, and I don't know how much time you've spent with with CAD Jason I've come to appreciate and spend spent a lot of time since the days at ptc but you've got folks that are very used to be in CAD and and spend a lot of time and and can sort of visualize three dimensional things on a 2d screen pretty well. But you get to a you get to a point and the design process is continuous through the design process where you need to have conversations with others about what you're what you're building. And, you know, in the world of of 2d collaboration and traditional documents, we have wonderful things like Google Docs and Miro, where we can all jump in there and have our insertion points in there together and pointed things and have a discussion. There's no such thing for 3d data. And so what what people do is any, any number of things, all of which are cumbersome, and, and frustrating. But, you know, a lot of times what people will do before they they prepare for a design review is they'll actually go into CAD. And they'll find all the different views in CAD that they want to share. They'll take screenshots of those, they'll go put it in like a PowerPoint, and then go share the PowerPoint during the meeting. And so people aren't actually looking at the 3d thing or looking at one particular view for one particular angle. And, and that's how it's done. But imagine if that's what we were doing with like Word documents. I mean, the implication would be, man, we can't actually have a discussion about this document until I go take a screenshot of a sentence or paragraph and then we go discuss, and it's crazy inefficient, right, but it all comes down to there's not an ability for somebody to just point at something in 3d space, and have other people know what they're talking about. Like, even if you try and share CAD, or something or 3d in zoom, you know, you've got people on the phone going no, turn it the other way. No, that way, no, I'm talking about the other edge. There's not even a vocabulary for a lot of what these things are. And in the design process. So what AR is making better is we're taking 3d off a 2d medium and putting it in real space. That's actually what it was designed to do. AR is fundamentally a visualization technology for 3d in 3d space. To me, what we're doing is one of the most basic primary fundamental things that the technology can do well, we're not trying to take the total desktop and all of your existing 2d apps and put them in the headset. No, technology's not there to do that. Let's do what it does. Well, let's help people take 3d and understand it. And in 3d space. Makes sense?

Makes sense. So what are all the bits that you need? In order to do that? Well,

well, we had to, we had to address the visual experience, right. So so we kind of had to do this thing that went on your head. And so that's, that's the campfire. That's the campfire headset. And I think the other the other thing that that we we sort of innovated on with the headset is the ability to switch between AR and and kind of this limited form of VR, where you switch the switch divisors. And I think that's, that's important, because it turns out in some of these applications, you actually want to change the background behind what you're looking at. And, and VR is sort of a great way to do that. And, of course, we we've done in such a way where, because we have that visor, you maintain your peripheral vision, and it goes a long way to addressing a lot of the issues of sort of people getting getting sick and being uncomfortable. So, so number one we had, we had to do the headset, and we had to do the headset in such a way that it could render really high fidelity content, right, like I can't go through this decimation process of decimating all this content and losing fidelity and so on. So so the thing has got to be driven by a GPU that you plug into the wall and, and not one that takes batteries. Right. And, and so that's, you know, started with a with a device that's got a cable and plugs in. And so I think that that was one of the bits on on the hardware side. I think the the other big challenge is Matt, how do we make this stuff robust, when it's multiuse? You know, so few people have really even experienced multiuser AR, because it's really hard to do, I think robustly where you got sort of multiple people in the same in the same space. And so we came up with with a device that we call, we call the console that basically solves that problem with a little bit different type of tracking system. But what it does is deliver the same robustness you get from your monitor on your desk, but for shared AR, and, and then the other. The other thing that that we came out was all the friction around ease of use and learning how to use this thing. Because we needed to have something that you know, executive or stakeholder, somebody can just sort of get into really quickly and be productive with as fast as they can be productive with Zoom. And that led to, hey, let's use the device everybody already has for interaction and control. And that's the phone. And so we came up with a little accessory goes on on the phone to make it all work together. And then of course a series of applications that deliver kind of something between a Google Docs and Amuro. So that you can take all the content that you've got put it in there and sure it really really easily.

So truly a complete solution you're solving the entire stack for and then there's this other bit on the workflow side, which is how do you get that data the content itself into the glasses. And you kind of also innovated a little bit on that side as well, if I recall, had to,

yeah, had to. And that's, that's what we call it's got campfire scenes, and yet allows you to bring in the cat or 3d that you already have, whether it's cat or even a 3d scan, like, you know, Apple's new object capture will bring all that stuff in there together and share it and work on it and see it together. Yeah, we had to do the whole thing had to do the whole thing, Jason to make it make it work. I mean, the idea here is somebody, somebody can take campfire, you can you can order this thing you can get it, you can plug it in as easily as you can plug in a new monitor. And you can download these apps and go, right. So it's, there's, there's no there's no developers no SDK, it is devices that are purpose built for a very specific function and easy to use software that drives it.

That's awesome. You've talked a lot about the importance of the visual experience here. Can you talk a little bit? Are you ready to talk a little bit about some of those specs in terms of field of view or angular resolution, brightness, that sort of thing?

Yeah, so some, some things were in flux. So we were holding off until announcing availability date on on some of them. So I'll probably reveal more at AWB during a talk there. But we have we have talked about the field of view. So the field of view is 92 degrees diagonally. And I think the the operating principles also are relatively straightforward. And we're there's a, there's a couple of, essentially, there's display panels that are in the device they're facing down, and the same kind of display panels you find in a VR headset. And those are reflecting off the inside of the visor to provide the image, same operating principles you saw with the meta too. So you know, there's there's no Hocus Pocus, there's no alchemy, it is a tried and true approach that delivers a great visual experience. And, of course, the cost of, of form factor, right? Like, it's large, as to as to go over your glasses. And that's what's required to deliver this visual experience. You know, this is not a consumer, not a consumer thing. It is

a work tool, it is a work tool, as a work tool to improve the collaboration around product design. And you tied it in also, I think, to zoom in teams, right? Because the goal is to plug into the existing workflow as much as possible.

Yes, when we talk about workflow, integration, one aspect is you got to get your existing 3d in there. And the other is you've got to work with the communication tools that people already have. So CalFire works with Zoom and teams, just like Google Docs works with Zoom and teams, you use it alongside simultaneously. And, and so I think that model is pretty well understood and straightforward. And it's also enable us to really simplify the product, for example, we don't know we don't even deal with with audio. And in the campfire world, right? It is it is simply 3d data and display interaction,

the audio captured by the device on the tabletop, as the microphones there, or you rely on some other microphone in the room

rely on whatever you're using for zoom teams, because the zoom in teams calls happening at the same time.

Sure. Yeah. Makes sense. And so as you kind of think through what's needed in what kind of reduces the friction in the right way, you've bundled this specialized focused hardware software solution together. How do you think about the pricing strategy here and in trying to make the overall experience easy, well understood and purchasable by these enterprises?

Well, I think we want to create a starting point that people can people can try freely, right. So well, we have the campfire headset, and it delivers what we believe is a breakthrough experience. The the iPad is is a big part of the story, too. And so people will be able to try this and get started just by downloading something and using it on an iPad. And then we want them to graduate to a subscription and a subscription that's going to include both hardware and software together. But we want to make this very compelling and easy to get into without, you know, a big capital investment and something companies can treat as is Avex.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so here, they're basically as a service buying the whole suite, the hardware, the software, everything that goes together. Yeah, right, is you've pulled from the library of innovation that occurred at meta. You're pulling from all of your past experience of euphoria and before about where the AI market is and how markets like this evolve. What's the right sort of Team makeup to make a company like this successful today? That's a great question.

I think I think the most important thing is finding multi talented people that can cover multiple bases, multiple technology and business domains. On one human, right, that's what you want an early, early stage. And then I think the other one is we want to find people that really understood the use case and the tech stack. And then we're passionate about this. So you know, one, one of the folks that has been involved since day one, as founding advisors, Avi bars app, I tried to hire Avi Qualcomm for the better part of a decade. And as you know, he's been in this space for for a long time. And I think a lot of people know he's co inventor of HoloLens and, and spend time elsewhere driving some pretty large projects. But obvious dream is this collaborative, this collaborative use case, right and, and obvious, spent a lot of time at a lot of companies sort of sort of trying sort of different things and experimenting with different things. And look, knowing what not to do is super, super important. So you know, obviously one of those folks that understands the use case understands the tech stack, and, and super important. Another co founder, Roy, Ashok Roy built before he with me, the Qualcomm, he didn't, he didn't go to ptc, he ended up going to daiquiri and, you know, he he ran daiquiri for a number of years. So he got, you know, he got a real quick lesson, I think in in hardware and, and enterprise. And, you know, learn some things to do and some things not to do. I think one of the things that struck him most was this is a use case that they really wanted to deliver. And you sort of couldn't do with that, that class of device. But again, you know, someone that's passionate about it knows the stack knows the business side knows the technology side. So you know, when you've got folks with with aligned vision, and deep expertise, then you can make the magic happen even even with small teams,

even with small teams, you're going to be releasing this fall, we're going to share more AWB here later this fall also on the details of what you're doing. Where does this go over the next couple of years? Where do you want to take campfire, as a product as a company?

I don't want to get too, ahead of, of our of our skis on on this one. But I think the the campfire opportunity, and this whole collaboration opportunity is is enormous. The thing that gets me excited and an AVI and others is the long term telepresence scenario where, you know, we're having this conversation and I'm sitting in my living room, you're sitting in our living room, and we feel like we're talking to each other right across from each other where like Ray Bans, that's a long way away. But I view campfire as a step on that journey. Right? I look at this as the form of telepresence, that can be done with today's Tech. And actually, that solves a problem in a way that people can actually actually use. So look, the vision, the vision is vague. We're starting from a from an enterprise, an enterprise use case, but the roadmap of just the ideas we've had and where we want to take this is super, super exciting. You know, I don't I don't think I'd be doing this with this kind of time and energy in my life if it was not so freaking exciting right now. But I'll leave it at

that. Very good. As you kind of think back right now, you've been through the very early days of handheld computing with the Newton, the early days of you know, mobile computing, when we started to have data, wireless data and the evolution there the early days of augmented reality. Are there patterns that you see that are repeating outside of this notion that that enterprise in a very specific focused use case is kind of where it makes sense early on? Are there other sorts of patterns that you have kind of plucked from the past that you think apply today,

I think that the important thing to realize is it takes a long time for new platforms to develop to consumer scale, like long, long time. And the first the first forms of those new platforms are not like the ultimate general purpose thing. You know, you end up with really specialized forms early on, even with you know, mobiles and PDAs. And even when you get to the general purpose form, it takes it takes a long time to hit consumer scale. Like look at iPhone, right like first iPhone 2007 First Newton 19 9314 years. And so, you know, if you look back and maybe draw the same comparison with HoloLens first 120 16 I mean, just rough and tough 1414 years on that 2020 30 Like, look, this is gonna take it's gonna take some time. And and so the, the consumer dream here is not around the corner. The the game is going to be iterating on products to solve problems. And I think that's gonna that's going to evolve into a broad set of categories and devices and till we get to this, this general purpose thing that may we all put on our heads, and it makes us we don't need any, any screens on any device in our lives just because we've got them right in front of our eyes. But time,

time, time, what is your read on the efforts from Facebook? Or the rumors from an apple, about creating a consumer device? And in the near term? Is it realistic,

I think Facebook and Alex sadhika nailed it with what they did with with Ray Ban stories, I have two takeaways and the things I think that are most important to be successful. And that's really focusing on on the purpose of the device and what it's for, I would sort of describe that as a camera glasses. I think that's the right way to describe it. I don't think it's an AR device. But hey, this is for taking pictures and videos, when when you can't, you can't use your hands. So they had the clarity of purpose. And then on the consumer side, they actually made it fashionable. And I don't care what anyone says, glasses are a fashion thing. Like we go buy glasses, there's all these frames to choose from and all kinds of stuff and and I don't think that's changing anytime soon. So I think that's great. You know, on on the Apple stuff, I read all the the rumors and speculation that we all see all the time and and I think we can probably trust the average of those rumors. But the other the other thing I'd say is look, Apple, Apple is made up of humans and and real people, not not alchemists, you know, they're, they're playing with the same and using the same tech the rest of us are. So I think we all need to temper temper expectations that lead is going to be turned into gold or rabbits going to come out of a hat and we're all going to see something that just blows us away is so far advanced beyond anything we've seen before. Because it it's it's gonna it's going to take time for all this tech to evolve and deliver the the experiences we want.

I think it's a great reminder that Apple does not employ a group of alchemists or magicians or anybody else. And in fact, in close close, they can make some magic happen, but with the same set of ingredients that everybody else is working with. And the innovations of the past from Apple is any non Apple, you know, fanboy, if you're a super fan of Samsung, for example, you can constantly cite that other companies have better tech better individual pieces of technology often before Apple does. And so it's really Apple's magic is not in, often not in pushing the individual component further ahead than others, although they certainly have done some nice work on integrating on the chip side here recently. It's really about their ability to pull all of the pieces the disparate pieces together into a great overall experience, following a similar sort of model that you're following there a campfire, how to pull all these pieces together, do something that is just easy, and works and does the thing it's meant to do really well.

Yeah, it's actually really hard. It's really hard to do, especially with AR, I tell people, the biggest challenge is just focusing is you can easily get diverted to try and do a lot of things. But at the end of the day, you really have to stay true to the the use case or the purpose and and look at all the friction points that are in it and just knock them down systematically. It's not always fun. It's always sexy. There's difficult parts of it. But that's what makes a great product.

Let's wrap up with a few lightning round questions here. Sure. What commonly held belief about spatial computing Do you disagree with you can read spatial computing as a are generally this random recent introduction of the concept of the metaverse rebranding of other earlier concepts, whatever it is,

you know, I think I think there's a tendency to think that it's just about getting the devices, right. And, and the hardware, right, like, let's get the displays where we need light enough and fashionable enough. I think there's another part that's that's not really talked about, which is the challenge in bringing along a developer ecosystem to be able to build applications and content for these things. And I think the people that have have built software for AR can can appreciate what what I'm talking about, but, you know, building 3d content that interacts with the real world, and by the way, you don't know what the real world is going to look at. So you've got to be able to kind of respond and react whatever whatever's there is that it's freaking hard. And we've got a world that's been writing software for rectangular screens for like 50 years, man, it is just as different different model. So I think, you know, again, back back to my theme like this is going to take time. It's not it's not just about solving the tech and devices on your head. It's about the diversity of applications and content and bringing along all the people that build software that are going to help realize it make it happen. And I think the other thing that that means is that a lot of these early devices have got to have some really good first party apps and content? Because it's gonna it's gonna take time for that diversity to show up.

Yep. Very nice. Besides the one that you're building, what tool or service do you wish existed in the AR market?

You know, this. This one's kind of immediate and tactical. But I would love to see Apple do a first party object scanning app that uses the amazing sensors they put into iPhone and iPad. We love it.

Yeah, I've seen some attempts, third party apps trying to leverage that Lidar scanner to do that. But it'd be super interesting to see Apple do first party given that they really understand how a sensor data is coming together coming into the device.

Yeah, I think just a basic form would be awesome.

What book have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

You know, it's probably been years, since I've sat through a book. I'm a learner. I like to learn new stuff. So I spend a lot of time going through tutorials of new stuff to learn. So I've done a lot of SolidWorks tutorials, and I have become a huge fan of Blender guru for blender. As I've been on this 3d journey, I think those are my most recent side sort of learning projects, all relevant, of course, to what we're doing a campfire, but stuff I just find tremendously interesting. I love tools.

Blender Guru is an add on to blender, or it's a source of content to learn about it. Blender Guru

is is a guy, and he has a channel on YouTube. And He's tremendously entertaining. extremely smart, and, and has a bunch of content and, and tutorials. And so yeah, I've learned a lot from Mr. Blender guru,

very nice. There was a period, I think, early in COVID, where I sat down and tried to learn the basics of Blender also, but I did not discover that right? Yeah, you gotta check him out. I will check him out. Yeah, he's great. If you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Jay?

Stop and smell the flowers, buddy? I've been so hard driving, you know, for for a long time. And even when I hit an accomplishment, I feel it for about a nanosecond, and then I can focus on is is the hurdles moving forward. And it's coming to cost, you know, I would have liked to think that I would have had a family for example, before I got my AARP card. But yeah, stop stuff and smell the flowers,

for you was the achievement, the milestone, the thing that was driving you early on, you just just about collecting those, those milestones, those achievements,

you know, I think the the excitement for me is realizing the idea, building the vision, right. So is, as soon as those ideas pop in my, my head, I'm just kind of driven to an instant instantaneous, but we're really, as a team, you just get driven to build them. And really, when I when I talk about the accomplishments, it's it's a series of realizing sort of a whole series of, of ideas, you know, gradually and sometimes that's, you know, single feature shows up sometimes entire product release or, or winning every customer even in some cases. But if you

were talking to with your 25 year old self today, would you reframe that, that desire for seeing the idea being realized over time taking shape over time? reframe it, would you reframe kind of how you were chasing kind of the evolution of the idea? Or is it just simply need to take a break? From time to time? And look outside of this pursuit?

I think it would be, I think it would be the latter. Like you have to you have to make time for stopping to smell the flowers. And it might it might be in the form of of exercise or taking a short trip. Because, you know, I think when you don't do those things, and I've had these experiences in my career, we just get to these these points where, you know, you're, you're maybe on the verge of, of burnout and no question like your brains not as sharp and your productivity is not as high as well, no, in fact, you take a step back and, and rest and get some exercise and things get better. I could have benefited from somebody kind of hammering that into me at an earlier age and tapped me on the shoulder and said, Yeah, this is the time. You know, go go, go take a break. It's okay. And, and know that it's actually going to make performance better. Right, it's actually to make performance better.

Any closing thoughts you'd like to share? You know,

I think that's it. Jason. I appreciate the opportunity to share the story. And I will thank you for doing what what you do. I really enjoy your show. And I love the fact that you get into the people and and sort of not not just the tech and I think that's I It's great. We're huge fan.

Thank you pretty much appreciate that. Where can people go to learn more about you and the work you're doing there at campfire

website? Campfire 3d comm. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Jay, thanks

very much for the time this morning.

Thank you, Jason. Take care.

Before you go, I want to tell you about the next episode, and I speak with Alon Grinshpoon. Alon is the co founder and CEO of echo3d, a 3d-ready cloud platform that helps manage and deliver 3d AR and VR content to apps and devices everywhere. Echo3d recently closed a $4 million round of funding to feed continued growth after seeing a tremendous amount of momentum over the last year. Alon is a passionate entrepreneur with great advice for early stage startups. I think you really enjoyed the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time....