The AR Show: 2022 Kickoff: The Quest for Wearability in AR Glasses to Meet Consumer Acceptance

8:52AM Jan 4, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Keywords:

ar

device

glasses

vr

wearability

year

hardware

hololens

optics

display

metaverse

company

snap

market

smartphone

solution

enterprise

technology

early

focus

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

Today I'm kicking off 2021 with another annual monologue. Hope you and your family are able to have a safe and relaxing holiday even in the face of another wave of COVID.

This is the fifth such annual kickoff episode and when looking back at my notes from last year, the big surprise from 2021 was Facebook's parent company changing its name to Meta Platforms, and popularizing the term metaverse. But while the hype spread like wildfire, the progress and adoption of AR hardware crept along at a much slower pace.

I'm going to share my take on some of the highlights of 2021 and what we might see in 2022 as it relates to augmented reality. For those that are newer to the show, let me reintroduce myself in for those that are already familiar. Please skip ahead at least 90 seconds.

I studied electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon, where I earned a BS and MS. I also studied business at UCLA Anderson where I received my MBA. Following my time at CMU, I spent four years as an active duty officer in the US Air Force and a part that is now the US Space Force. Working on the development and deployment of large scale computer and communication systems in support of satellites flown by the Department of Defense and other agencies. I got to travel the world and work on some really fun projects. After my service in the Air Force. I began my entrepreneurial journey through the early days of the smartphone revolution. And by early I mean very early, well before the iPhone before Facebook even and in that time before the iPhone I was the co founder and CEO of two startups before joining the mobile product management team@salesforce.com. Four years later, I was drawn back to entrepreneurship and co founded a mobile focused enterprise software startup that was acquired by another CRM company. Then more than five years ago, I took a step back and reassess how I want to spend the back half of my career. Since my days at CMU, I've been enamored with the idea of having a computer in our pocket connected to the internet. And so much of my career has been around making that device contextually aware and supportive, helping the user become more informed, more effective or more entertained. When I looked ahead, the next frontier that embodied the same principles was AR glasses. Knowing my proclivity to jump into things way too early, I joined a very promising hardware technology company that is solving one of the biggest hurdles for AR glasses, delivering a high quality visual experience within a truly wearable device. That company is a Ostendo, which I anticipate you hear a lot more about in 2022. On the side, I'm also an angel investor and a venture partner at WXR fund, a female founder focused early stage VC investing in AR VR and AI. And of course, I also get to do this podcast. I feel so fortunate to engage and learn from the world. In this way. I'm grateful you take the time to listen.

Rather than an interview. Today I'm going to share my flawed, incomplete and biased perspective on what happened in 2021. And what to expect in 2022. With that, let's dive in.

Let's start with the term metaverse. After hearing that term used and abused so much over the last several months, I developed a rather complicated perspective on it. On the one hand, Mark Zuckerberg hype of the metaverse has brought widespread attention to our corner of the tech ecosystem. Mass media outlets, investors and other outsiders are aware that something exciting is brewing in the general area of something. 3d virtual worlds tied to NF TS running on virtual reality devices we're going to call a mixed reality device. It's also an AR device that's going to completely replace our perceived reality with a fully immersive alternative of our choosing. The term has become this ever expanding mass that founders and marketers are eager to jump onto if it's 3d and digital. It's the metaverse heck of it's just visual and digital is now part of the metaverse. The term is applied. So broadly, it means nothing. And I personally don't find the term helpful when talking inside the AR industry. Forgive me if you catch me at a conference and I stare at you blankly when you tell me you're working on the metaverse speaking of meta, and the metaverse let's talk about the current reality of VR for a moment, Facebook is doing a great job of building the VR ecosystem. The quest two showed strong sales throughout the year and they are on track to hit in installed base of 10 million users in 2022, probably in the first half of the year. At that point, the software development ecosystem has a chance to become more robust. That's not to say Facebook won't continue to throw giant piles of cash to acquire content and studios, they likely will. But the market is maturing and becoming more financially meaningful and self sustaining. And the things that VR does well is enhanced the entertainment and educational experience. A tailwind pushing VR along is the continued growth in the overall gaming market across digital platforms. And COVID was a boon for education technology, including companies leveraging VR in the classroom or workplace to improve the quality of training. I see this growth and I wonder what is the right comparable for the potential size of VR hardware unit sales. gaming consoles sell about 40 million units a year. PCs sell about 275 to 300 million units a year. And PC monitors sell about half that around 135 million units a year. You can compare those two smartphone ships rates of about 1.3 to 1.4 billion units a year. I think the absolute best case is VR sells at the levels of PCs in that 300 million units a year range. I can imagine a world in which a future version of a VR rig with the right comfort and input mechanisms. Along with the right edge compute capabilities in the cloud could replace PC usage for some users. But the more likely case feels closer to gaming consoles. To me in that 40 million a year range. The primary draw of VR at home is entertainment. And while likely only a subset of console gamers will opt to have VR enterprise and education buyers will contribute to the numbers. Of course, Facebook's ambitions are much higher, they're betting they can create the future of social interaction within a VR experience. Allah Ready Player One, or rec room, that social VR app has seen its usage explode over the last two years. Part of that growth is due to the underlying growth in VR adoption, but much more of it is due to expansion to Android, iOS, PC and consoles. That is not VR. I imagine Facebook will follow a similar strategy using their existing digital footprint to expose their existing users to a new 3d virtual world, and then entice them to engage in that world via VR. Although that's probably not happening in 2022. Coming back to the hardware, Facebook, barrio and others put cameras on their VR devices, and some people call them mixed reality, they can mix elements of the real world with the virtual. I think the shining example of this in 2021 was the Lynx headset. This device uses a novel type of optics to move the screen closer to the eyes and reduce the bulk of the VR headset in front of the face. Instead moving some of those parts to the back of the head. The flip up display is a great concept and the video pass through the real world is reportedly decent, the devices are expected to ship in the first half of 2022. Which reminds me putting video cameras on VR devices does not make them AR glasses. It does make them better VR devices though, they become safer to use in our homes or offices, their ability to bring some of the real world into the virtual experience can make them better for some training scenarios or for some gameplay or for personal productivity. These video pass through VR devices can work well as long as motion is kept to a minimum. By this I mean the user should not be expected to move around the room much. And similarly, real world objects that could harm the user shouldn't move much or at all. So I don't recommend walking down the street or around the warehouse floor with forklifts lying around while wearing something like this. That's a long way of saying I do not believe these VR devices such as the links will be a viable alternative to AR glasses, we want to actively move through and engage with the real world or other humans in our presence. That will still be the case when Apple releases a quote unquote mixed reality device for the living room. optimizing for a fantastic VR experience results in a very different device than optimizing for wearability style and context in AR. When it comes to AR hardware, we're still a little ways away from cracking the nut on the right set of display and optics technologies to make consumer grade glasses. Because we're still struggling with this as an industry and these remain the biggest hurdles to consumer grade glasses it may be worth digging into for a moment. The display and optics are separate but tightly related problems. Light needs to be generated in full color that full color light needs to be controlled, it needs to be turned on or off or brightness adjusted for each pixel. Or in the case of a scanning display for each area representing a pixel that switched light needs to be stuffed into the lens of the glasses. This is where you might hear the term eaten do which is at the crux of the challenge of stuffing light from a display panel through a relatively small hole. The job of the lens is then to transport the image across its surface and then redirect it towards the eye combining with the light from the real world. Ideally an undistorted and undiminished view of the real world. Oftentimes, this lens is also magnifying or expanding the area in which the image can be viewed. This lens is often called a combiner optic. Each of these elements has its own basket of trade offs and getting them all to work together is very challenging. Generating light is typically done with LEDs or lasers. Controlling or switching the light for each pixel is often done with tiny mirrors as in DLP or shutters in the form of liquid crystals in LCD or L cos or scanning a beam of light and quickly adjusting the intensity as in laser scanning.

In the case of directly emissive displays such as organic LEDs or inorganic LEDs, the light is generated independently for each pixel or sub pixel so the per pixel control happens as part of generating the light. Full color might be done with separate red green and blue LEDs or lasers, but is often done with a color filter. Collecting the light from a display and stuffing it into the combiner optic typically requires a complex assortment of lenses and mirrors or diffraction gratings that try to act like mirrors. Redirecting and combining the display light with the real world is typically done with diffractive waveguides as seen in devices by Microsoft musics and snap reflective wave guides as produced by Loomis or curved mirrors and was typically called birdbath optics as seen in devices from Lenovo and real new eyes. And we've seen engineers group certain technologies together. DLP and lasers tend to get matched to diffractive waveguides Oh LEDs tend to get matched to birdbaths and l costs can go both ways. All of these functions of generating, controlling and redirecting light takes up space within the device. It takes time in terms of latency, and reduces power efficiency and brightness and visual quality. And behind each of these devices is a group of engineers making a challenging set of trade offs. Working with light is hard, making these extremely power efficient and space efficient devices is proving to be exceedingly difficult, many billions of dollars of investment in many, many smart engineers have not yet produced a consumer grade solution. Why should you care about the details of displays and optics, if you're listening to this, you're probably investing your time or money into augmented reality with an eye towards the future of AR glasses. Through this little sidebar and the podcast more generally, I'm hoping you come away with a better sense of when viable consumer gray glasses will be available and adopted at a reasonable scale. And I'm hoping you'll have a sense of what technologies have a better chance of succeeding so you can make better choices. For example, there's a lot to learn about the future of AR for the Microsoft HoloLens, and there is a nascent market for that hardware and the software built for it. But the first and second generation HoloLens hardware are not the foundation for a device that achieves mass adoption. The market opportunity may be enterprise first, but the winning solution is consumer first. Historically, for Information Technology, at least, the enterprises won by a consumer grade architecture that is modified to meet enterprise needs. Going back 40 years the PC architecture which was much smaller and initially much less powerful than the mainframes or mini computers that came before, but it was the PC architecture that ended up becoming much more prevalent and important. Today, the vast majority of enterprise computing and the internet is run on the PC architecture modified to meet enterprise needs. 15 to 20 years ago, the early stages of smartphone revolution were already apparent. Microsoft REM handspring Nokia were all leading the market with devices built for the enterprise such as the Nokia communicator, the rim, BlackBerry, or the handspring trio. However, it was the consumer oriented Apple iPhone that has come to dominate the enterprise market. That initial release of the iPhone was ridiculed by everyone who had some success in the enterprise. But after a few years, and some software and hardware enhancements, that consumer grade device supplanted nearly every other enterprise focused smartphone product, I expect the same to be true for AR smart glasses. The winner will be found among the teams who commit to wearability first and foremost, and then internally upgrade that device to be more capable. The goal is not simply to get something on our head. The goal is to make it truly wearable wearable is in I can wear it comfortably for a long period of time wearable is in I will wear it because it's socially acceptable and useful. Unfortunately, there's no magic shrinking device that will turn the Microsoft HoloLens or Magic Leap device into something under 70 grams, which is probably around the threshold for what our delicate nose and ears can support. They need to utilize different technologies and approaches. What about North vocals you might ask, there is a quality bar and a utility bar that also must be reached. The North vocals team had the right mindset but hadn't cleared those bars in the first iteration. Perhaps they're getting the extra time and resources they need now as part of Google, but I firmly believe wearability is the most important ability of AR glasses. That is why standalone devices like the HoloLens don't make sense to me for at least the next decade. The winning solution will leverage the pervasive and powerful devices already in everybody's pocket. connected to a smartphone to offload most computing and long range communication allows the glasses to be more wearable, which is key to adoption. Today, we see solutions that connect glasses to a phone using a cable, and we're beginning to see some solutions that connect wirelessly. There are situations where a wired connection might be appealing to alleviate some concerns around battery power or data latency.

But I think wireless will be the norm. And of course the device needs to be affordable. a $3,000 pair of smart glasses isn't likely to achieve mass adoption, wearability, compatibility, affordability, who's winning at these attributes? Well, nobody yet. But I have to say that I really liked snaps mindset. They seem committed to these attributes. Their latest spectacles version four is a small ish device that connects wirelessly to a smartphone. This version isn't for sale, but in previous iterations they sought to make something fashionable and affordable. And as I'm staring at their marketing page right now, 3d waveguide displays. That's that's not a thing, the 3d. The 3d effect comes from two different displays showing slightly different content. The waveguide here is for redirecting and combining the light from the DLP Projector. The marketing department is not helping my effort to help the world understand what is still the most critical challenge in this industry. Five years from now, we may not care because it might be a solved problem. But today, we still care. Snap reportedly spent $500 million to acquire wave optics, the maker of the diffractive waveguide technology they're using and those glasses. I personally don't think fractal waveguides are the answer. While they can be thin, they're grossly inefficient and the result in headworn device is not necessarily more wearable, ignoring the HoloLens and Magic Leap, which also both used to factor waveguides. These latest snap spectacles still aren't wearable enough at 134 grams. They need to cut the weight in half to be in the right range, perhaps another couple of iterations and a shift in display technology. We'll get them there. But I suspect we'll also need a different combiner optic technology. Aside from that snap also highlights another attribute that I think will be important to the early days of consumer adoption. Additive use. When snap introduced AR into the lens filters, it became one of the most popular AR apps available, it was not AR first it was AR added. Snap was already a compelling product with high engagement, AR was added on top to enhance the experience. The result has driven snaps usage and stock price to new highs. Similarly, early indications of the usage of the latest snap glasses suggests it will follow a similar model, focusing on occasional additive use that unlocks new functionality. And they've done a brilliant job cultivating a developer ecosystem around their AR tooling. More generally, I anticipate early successful AR glass experiences will be extensions of an app that we already use. You may wonder will we buy the glasses just for occasional use as an extension to another app? If it's compelling? I think we do. We buy specialized tools for the kitchen for the gym for sports for the workshop and elsewhere and then only use them occasionally, why not buy a pair of glasses if it makes the cooking Exercise Sports driving repair social expression experience better, assuming of course that the glasses are wearable compatible and affordable. Now for some more reflections on 2021 and anticipations for 2022. Most companies seem to be on a three year iteration cycle for their AR hardware. Although snap has been releasing a new pair of spectacles about every 18 months. Given that snap released spectacles to developers in q2 of last year, we might see some teasers or announcements of another iteration of the device near the end of the year or so. But I don't expect that device to be ready for consumers yet. Three years after the launch of Magic Leap. One Magic Leap announced a second version in 2021 and started to show the device late in the year. They have plans to make it generally available in 2022, presumably early in the year. This looks like a nice update compared to the first version. But I still don't think it's the answer of the consumer markets looking for or the enterprise market for that matter. It still falls well short of the goal of wearability, which again, I think is the Paramount attribute for consumer success. Maybe if Magic Leap had convinced the Hantek that the ML two was the right solution for hardcore Pokemon Go fans, they would have a better chance. But Niantic decided to partner with Qualcomm two years ago and went their own way. After some teaser images last year, maybe this year we'll get a better look and maybe even some hands on with the device they've been working on. But that initial experience will likely focus on Pokemon Go. And antics more recent attempt with Harry Potter wizards unite was deemed a commercial failure and is scheduled to shut down in a couple of weeks. This suggests Pokemon Go is more of an outlier than a forbear, and it's a negative signal for major IP holders. Independent of the financial success there Niantic was already investing in a set of software developer tools to make it easier for third party developers to make compelling get out of your house AR experiences.

I think the potential long tail of apps enabled by their SDK along with a few more breakout IPS is critical for 90 growth. That plus the hardware efforts reminds me a little bit of the playbook of their partner Nintendo. Speaking of major IP and entertainment powerhouses, Lumix is reportedly working with Disney on some explorations. The limits is the company that made five nights at Freddy's special delivery. Perhaps their current exploration with Disney will turn into an amazing Disney park mobile AR experience or something else with the Disney property. Speaking of snap and Disney, they've been collaborating on AR photo filters. Disney has been playing around with mobile AR for more than five years and back in 2017, they released an AR headset in partnership with Lenovo that allowed you to wield a lightsaber. That Lenovo Mirage headset and lightsaber kit cost $200 and reportedly sold a pretty decent number of units. Well, maybe not by Disney standards, but by the numbers that would excite any current AR hardware maker. Disney only made the one experience for the glasses, but tilt five already has 20 titles available for their AR tabletop gaming glasses. After some delays, they are reportedly shipping devices to early Kickstarter backers, and expected glasses will be generally available this spring. It costs $359 for the kit, and you'll need a Windows PC to run them for now. But Android support is coming. I had a chance to play with one AWT and the experience is quite good. And other specialized hardware plus software solution that debuted in 2021 was campfire 3d. Campfire solution focuses on collaboration around 3d models within design and engineering workflows. It will be commercially available in 2022. I love the focus nature of their product and approach. It meets the technology where it is today to solve a specific problem that is better with AR. Again, it's not the right long term hardware solution, but something that makes sense in the near term and from which they can establish a foothold to make future advancements. More on the Enterprise front. Microsoft announced the HoloLens two in early 2019. But it took them almost a year to work out some of the challenges in manufacturing an acceptable laser scanning and optics solution. With the initial release of the HoloLens in 2016. In the second version launch Three years later, that would put them on schedule to announce a new update in 2022. But I don't think it happens this year. I expect Microsoft to continue to focus on the Azure cloud and extending collaboration features to VR and AR devices under The mesh branding. Microsoft has some really excellent hardware and software engineers. I don't think they're delusional about the HoloLens and its poor fit for consumers. The question in my mind is whether they can let go of trying to build a standalone device with an emphasis on quote unquote immersion, and instead focus more on wearability. I also wonder whether they seed the hardware to others and instead focus entirely on the cloud. A company committed to not seeing anything to anybody is Facebook, aka metta. They want to win in our spending many billions a year to maximize their chances of success. A lot of that is on the VR side. But the AR focus research at Facebook is as good as it gets in many regards. They continue to take cues from snaps r&d efforts and launched camera glasses last year, along with some publicized efforts to understand how AR glasses might fit into our daily lives. I love that they

are so progressive and open with their research just as I shudder at the thought of giving Facebook access to the type of data that AR glasses will collect. And I really struggle with a dichotomy of the many brilliant well intentioned employees of Facebook reality labs, and the underlying business model and many compromises that are made as a result, another tech giant Google has been conspicuously silent about their AR hardware efforts. They quietly sell unit volumes comparable to the HoloLens but haven't really iterated much on the device in the last eight years. Google focused on wearability from the outset, and they push the boundaries of social acceptability. Given that snap and Facebook have released consumer focused products with cameras in them without the same level of backlash. It suggests at a minimum that companies are still exploring where those boundaries lay back to Google. I'm really intrigued about what they might be doing with the team and the technology from north. Another company focused on wearability and not immersion. That was 18 months ago that acquisition, I'm hopeful we'll see the result of the integrated effort at some point in 2022. I would expect the device to emphasize wearability compatibility with smartphones and affordability at least compared to other devices. Perhaps the future of Google AR glasses will resemble their Chromebook strategy, a just good enough device that satisfies the needs of a decent base of users. On to Apple, we've all heard they're doing something. Everyone's talking about it and a lot of people expect it to be announced in 2022. Some think it'll be their mid year developer conference. Others think it'll be announced closer to q4. What it is though, seems to be more debate. Similar to the links I mentioned earlier. I expect Apple will start with a device meant to be used at home. It will be a video pass through VR rig that will incorporate high quality audio and display probably OLED will also incorporate some apple design silicon for local processing and integrate with Apple TV three high bandwidth low latency wireless connection. Entertainment will be a major focus, but so will fitness. It will integrate with the Apple Watch for fitness tracking and eventually gesture recognition. I wrote that exact description for last year's kickoff episode. also predicted we wouldn't see it in 2021. I would add that we may see some examples around personal productivity when the device is announced. I give 66% odds that we do see it in 2022 or at least get to hear a lot about it. But my head comes from the lack of rumors about developer kits of this new device. Timing could still work if those dev kits are made available in q2 or q3 of this year with a showcase in q4. I don't think we see AR glasses from them in 2022. And I don't think the odds are very high for 2023 either. But a company that is shipping glasses today is unreal. We've been following their story for years and the glasses are now as a very recently available in the US for $600. You can buy a pair and have them within a week. As I look at their marketing page it seems the glasses which pair to a smartphone with a cable have gained some weight since their initial marketing debut and I last saw them they were initially SPECT to be less than 90 grams, but now check in 106 grams. The brightness is still really poor for anything but indoor use. Verizon is retailing them as a way to bring awareness their 5g smartphones and network. This is the same strategy in real followed in Korea, Japan and Europe. And real announced $100 million round of financing in September shortly before the US launch, which I think was really good timing on their part. I hope they don't blow it all on adspend for this release and instead pour most of it back into r&d. I think they have the right mindset in building a smartphone companion device, but it's still off the mark in terms of wearability. In 2021 new eyes also introduced a pair of designs similar to Enrile. It uses an OLED display and birdbath optics and connects to a smartphone tablet or computer over USB see their consumer focused pro three version comes in at under 70 grams. You can buy one today for $700. Despite the much lower brand recognition and marketing budget, I anticipate new eyes outsells and real in 2020 to last few here. Lenovo is continuing in the path of the former odg company and along similar lines is unreal new eyes, OLED display birdbath optics and a tethered device to a computer or smartphone. Lenovo has an enterprise focus and showcased a virtual desktop monitor solution at AWS in November. I thought it was an excellent demonstration of how AR glasses could be used to extend the display of a desktop computer. And I really liked Lenovo has opportunity to sell into their existing customer base and bring several other companies along for the ride. They announced their latest think reality a three glasses about a year ago and I think there's a decent chance that we see an update from them later this year. However, I anticipate that update to be more evolutionary than revolutionary and other longtime contender views X is still around. They're valued at almost $600 million. As of market close on the third of January. One of the only pure play AR glasses investments you can make in the public markets. Physics has been winning awards at CES for 18 straight years for technologies related to smart glasses. 18 years, they do a good job of crafting stories for the judges. And this year's entry is the music's shield, a concept for smart safety glasses that wirelessly connects to a computing device.

I honestly love this concept on paper. It's driven by a pair of single color micro LED displays most likely from Jade bird, and looks like a nice iteration on the music's blade glasses from a couple years ago. I'm sure we'll hear a lot about it in the CES related press this week. And if they're announcing it now, we can probably expect it to ship at some point in 2022. Since they are a public company, let's dig into the numbers for a moment in the third quarter of 2021. So July through September of last year, they reported $3 million of revenue, and almost 10 million for the first full nine months of the year. Over 80% of their sales were for products they call the M series with the price per device ranging from $1,800 to $2,500 per unit, assuming the highest unit volume product mix. Given those numbers, I calculate they sold about 2000 devices in the third quarter. And at that pace and kind of the first nine months of the year pace, they would have sold about 8000 to 9000 devices for the year. And this is only a marginal increase over 2020. Granted view six is not the top three in terms of unit volumes. But it's a good indication that there isn't a healthy AR hardware market yet. I mean less than 10,000 units, but views it's had over $120 million in cash as of the end of September. And given the current burn rate, we can expect them to keep churning for at least a few more years. On the component side Loomis showcased the Maximus in 2021. Their latest reflective waveguide combined with an L cost display from compound photonics. Loomis makes the best waveguide technology I've seen, but it's not being used in any of the more popular devices. And Qualcomm is continuing to invest heavily in the computing and low level SDKs and API's to enable compelling VR and AR experiences. With a recent announcement of Snapdragon spaces and AR focus set of software libraries. They are re entering the territory they had seeded several years ago when they sold euphoria. They've already made two acquisitions to support this initiative wicky tude as the basis for general AR SDK, and clay air for hand tracking, I expect them to continue to acquire in 2022 to quickly round out the offering. We'll also see more emphasis from them on AR glasses as companion devices to smartphones. In general. We've seen a proliferation of developer tools over the last couple of years, mostly from mobile, but some for glasses too. Not counting unity, unreal or other major tech offerings. A lot of these developer tools have been born of building an advertising experience or from building different kinds of enterprise solutions. Many of these independent companies survive based on the content and software development services they offer. But some are taking a different approach and watching Eko 3d and Alan Smithson's Metaverse for clues about how these independents will fare. Another area I'm paying attention to is around mapping and positioning. I've interviewed a number of companies doing camera based positioning or other advanced positioning techniques a couple years back, Facebook acquired scape Niantic bought sixty.ai ubiquity six seem to take a hard pivot and got acquired by discord last year. Phantasma has made good headway in positioning from micro mobility scooters as they wait for the air market to develop. But they also had a great contribution to the Wallace and Gromit AR experience last year. New entrants like dent reality have unique approach to solving indoor positioning. It's a foundational bit of infrastructure for AR that I continue to track with interest.

So in summary, for 2022, I expect more consolidation. Facebook is devoting an absurd amount of money to winning in both VR and AR, and they're willing to spend billions on acquisitions in the space. Others like snap and Google are willing to spend 200 to $500 million at a time on acquisitions. These exits and all the early learnings will help fuel new startups with new ideas and new funding, which is great for the industry, these VR devices with cameras that the industry will call mixed reality devices. We'll see lots of headlines and showcase some great demos. There'll be some really interesting glimpses of hope on the see through AR front in terms of achieving a truly wearable compatible and affordable form factor. But those glimpses won't contribute to meaningful sales in 2022. That said, I do think we see double digit growth and overall AR hardware sales as awareness and experimentation continue to grow. However, 2022 isn't the year that AR glasses break through to consumers. We're still talking a few 100,000 units across the entire market. VR is more than 20 times larger. For startups in the space, the biggest risk remains being too early. That said we're starting to see some reasonable size acquisitions when bigger tech companies are looking to round out their offering or to block a competitor. The AR startups finding the most success use AR as a complement to an offering because of course customers don't buy AR for the sake of AR they by a better solution to a problem, the cases around guided instruction, remote collaboration and data visualization or AR can provide a meaningfully better solution, because they can offer hands free heads up just in time, contextually relevant information. And it's at this intersection of these use cases and otherwise useful apps that I think will find early consumer and even enterprise success. I remain very enthusiastic about the potential for air glasses, but there is still some road in front of us before things get really interesting. I look forward to continuing to learn more about where we are and where we're going through the conversations I have with entrepreneurs, executives and investors. I'm grateful to be part of this industry. And I thank you very much for listening. Happy New Year.

Before you go, I'll tell you about the next episode, and I speak with Nicole Lazzaro. Nicole is the founder and president of XEO design. Previously, she was the designer of Tilt, the first iPhone game to utilize the accelerometer, but it's a research into player emotions that has attracted big firms like EA, Sony and Ubisoft. By tapping into emotion profiles, Nicole helps designers create more engaging gaming experiences that resonate with all types of players from casual to hardcore. In this conversation, we chat about how she's turned her focus and insights to AR and VR. We talked about her distillation of the four keys to fund an XR, her work on the Bose AR glasses in our current XR project. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast. Don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time