The AR Show: Mike Wiemer (Mojo Vision) on Making AR Contact Lenses a Reality
Jason McDowallAug 30, 2022 at 10:48 pm1h 3min
Jason McDowall
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 Mike Wiemer. Mike is the CTO and co founder of Mojo Vision, a company enabling invisible computing with AR AR contact lenses. Prior to Mojo Vision, Mike was the co founder and president of Solar Junction, a company that developed innovative multijunction solar cells that set the record for conversion efficiency twice. Previously, Mike spent eight years at Stanford working his way through a bachelor's, master's and PhD with an emphasis on semiconductor physics and optics. In this conversation, Mike shares some insights from his experience at Solar Junction, and how he came to discover the opportunity for smart contact lenses. He breaks down the set of very hard problems the team has had to solve and making these AR contact lenses and the successes Mojo Vision has had and clearing those hurdles, as well as the recent milestone of creating a prototype that people can now wear. He talks about the challenges of motor vision specifically and AR more generally,
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01:03Mike Wiemer
I think what I've come to realize is that it's hard. It's hard because it's about creating systems. And it's not about a single technological innovation. And those systems span not just the physical domain, where it's like, how do I make it smaller or lower power, they span, product choices. They span into the kinds of data that we can, we can serve up right and the reasons people would want to buy these things. We can look at Google Glass for learning, and those learnings about what these systems can really be good for. It's not one size fits all right? I mean, different systems have different applications.
Jason McDowall
He goes on to share a broader perspective of the opportunity he sees for smart contact lenses and AR glasses. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. Let's dive in.
Jason McDowall
One more thing, before we get started, after four years of running this podcast, I've decided to open a Patreon and fund ongoing maintenance improvements that way, rather than taking on advertisers, if you've enjoyed episodes in the past, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/the AR show, I'm going to find ways to engage more intimately with subscribers through events such as small group conversations with me or a popular guest, or some other sort of exclusive content. patreon.com/theARshow T H E A R S H O W. Now let's get into it with Mike.
Jason McDowall
Mike, you are a serial entrepreneur, having lived and worked in schools in Silicon Valley your entire career, will you share a story about kind of the magic of being an entrepreneur over a young entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?
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02:44Mike Wiemer
Sure. So I think 28 years old coming out of grad school, I did grad school at Stanford, and coming out of grad school, and I thought to myself, I want to start a company and tried to put myself in a good position to do that. And we wound up starting a company called that we called solar junction. And the whole point of this company was to do ultra high efficiency solar cells. For those of you who might follow the solar category, these are ultra high efficiency, multi junction solar cells. And something that I think is completely and utterly absurd, just absurd about that story is that none of us on the founding team, none of us had ever even built a solar cell before we started that company. And I remember sitting around with my co founders in particular Holman and visit, who are you know, Silicon Valley ecosystem, people now as well. And we had bought these books on solar cells. And we had them open. And on this big table, and we're reading them, like to each other, we're reading them, and we're like, Oh, what is fill factor and what's voc and, you know, trying to learn the language of solar cells. And through the magic of Silicon Valley, somehow, miraculously, we got the opportunity to start solar junction. And I don't remember exactly the details, but something on the order of three years later, we'd actually set the record for the highest efficiency solar cell that anybody had ever made. And it's on the chart, you can look it up. It's an inter governmental agency chart, like different government agencies around the globe can can do these standardized solar cell tests and post numbers to the chart. So solar junction is on there twice. I'm proud to say. So somehow the absurdity of the Silicon Valley machine, you know, sometimes allows fun things to happen like that. So there is an there is an opener,
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