The AR Show: AR for Training in Highly Intense and Dynamic Environments, Starting with Fighter Pilots

2:19AM Oct 11, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Glenn Snyder

Keywords:

visual effects

real

building

ar

years

started

move

hololens

put

headsets

air force academy

technology

vr

problems

find

plane

fly

augmented reality

people

team

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 Glenn Snyder. When is the co founder and CTO of Red 6, a company that has developed an augmented reality solution to allow real pilots flying real aircraft to see simulated threats and other training scenarios. The air solution works outdoors in the bright sun and within high speed dynamic environments. Glenn has long held a passion for aircraft technology and visual effects. After gaining acceptance to the Air Force Academy he shifted course and attended Savannah College of Art and Design to earn a BFA in visual effects. He worked on visual effects as an artist, Technical Director and Director of pipeline for Hollywood blockbusters before starting his entrepreneurial journey. After working for several years on innovative VR and immersive experiences, he met Daniel Robinson, a fighter pilot who become the co founder and CEO of Red 6. In this conversation, Glenn shares his background in visual effects and some of the inspiring and difficult moments in his career. He also discusses some of the challenges he and his team have overcome in creating their solution at Red six, and some of the progress and experiences they've made so far.

To start, we were doing Air to Air Refueling allowing people to go up and be behind a KC 46 tanker and do a refueling mission, then we added in what we call a scripted bandit, essentially, an entity that doesn't have any real control just turns itself to the ground, and you chase after it. And then we stepped up and did the more pathfinding AI where I can kind of control the jet where he chased after it. And over the past two years we've been working with in tuning a full up within visual range AI, where you and a wingman can go after a bandit, and they have the full doctrinal understanding and dogmatic understanding of what a fighter pilot is. And there's decisions they make and the strategy to put yourself in a control zone and make a shot, to where it's thinking about 10 seconds out to try to, you know, juke you or moves you in a direction to try to get behind you and take a shot.

We start with a story about a fun and slightly crazy early tech demo using VR and remote control of a real car. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. And please support the podcast@patreon.com slash the AR show. With that, let's dive in.

Glenn, tell me, what is this crazy VR experience you had around Venice?

So it's actually kind of the Genesis story of the technical side of Red 6, but I'm in 2014, you know, a lot of a lot of the things that happened in my early interactive installation days, you know, pipeline days kind of happen haphazardly, or somewhat randomly. But my my old business partner, Adam Ammeraal, who runs master shapes, he was essentially hanging out at his at his apartment in 2014 2013. And we had just gotten access to the DK ones. And we were just essentially trying to build anything we could in immersive world, because now you know, I'd use VR for the first time, so we're just building stuff. And one of his buddies was over who was a producer locally. And he saw what we were doing. And he was like, hey, you know, we're doing this car thing with cash flow this year, and all of the commercials had been around pushing drivers to their extreme limits. Could you drive a car in virtual reality if we could get the funds together for it? And you know, Adam was kind of just like, Yeah, I think we could pull it off. And then we spoke again, and actually kind of put our heads around and we came back and like, yeah, if you guys have enough money to do this, I think we can actually drive a car in VR, which at the time, we were kind of guesstimating. You know, I had done some cannabis work in the past. And I was pretty obsessed with hacking cars, and how do you find sensors. And so my pretty rudimentary understanding of localization was that I was going to take in, you know, the, the wheel sensor and the steering wheel, and I'd be able to figure out how to track the car with that. So Adam, and I, with all the confidence in the world of a, you know, 26 year old went in and said, like, yeah, we can definitely do this no problem. And so we were able to get a contract around figuring out how to take a stage three Roush Mustang, wrap some sort of sensor suite inside of it to figure out where the car is, drive that into Unreal, and then let people drive a car in VR, put it in VR headset on and make a whole world for them. And again, it was like, about four of us working on it. You know, it was Adam and myself, our buddy Rob, and then Mike alar, who was like, you know, at the time a renowned unreal developer, we lived locally, and we got all together and start building it. But the the idiocy comes here, again, mid 20s really just hopped up on the idea of creating something incredible. We were testing essentially around Venice, so we would like go to a parking lot and make sure there was nobody around, put somebody in the VR headset, get someone in the passenger seat holding the steering wheel and the emergency brake. You know, like just kind of feeling it over just in case something would happen. We could grab the steering wheel Pull the emergency brake, but that was essentially how we were testing. We were going around to places that midnight two o'clock in the morning when no one was around. We had a couple run ins with the police in the middle of the night when they'd pull up be like What are you doing here and we're like

We're driving in virtual reality. And the first response would be to laugh at us and think that we are insane. The second would be when I think that's really illegal. And luckily, no charges press no tickets or anything, and oh, just kind of shoot us away. But yeah, essentially, we'd made a course, you know, down around palms Boulevard in Venice that we were driving on, like the normal streets. And then we had to like major parking lots in Marina Del Rey that we were, you know, potentially taking over in the middle of the night, and driving and I have some early videos from like, the first day Adam and I got it working. And we were driving around. And it's, it's kind of terrifying, because, you know, he doesn't know where he is, the tracking isn't quite right yet, either. And so he thinks he's done like a 180 and gone straight, but it really actually got new about 230. And now he's headed toward a wall. And you just hear me go, no, no, no, no, no. And I just, like, grabbed the steering wheel and tried to turn it away. But that was, you know, what I thought was, we will not what I thought what we what we had to get done at the time, we had, think about four months total to go from job start to Job film of someone driving a car in VR, which had never even been thought of before, let alone executed on so you know, we we worked 1820 hour days, and we we did crazy testing around Venice, it was It was wild.

That's pretty insane. I'm just trying to imagine the boldness of the person who's in the physical car, while the testing is going on, especially in the early couple of days.

Yeah, it was it was pretty crazy. I mean, first I had to hack a Mustang, right. Like before we even got Mike involved and tried to start building this in Unreal and making the tracking, I had to first figure out just how do I pull data off of a Mustang, you know, I found a bunch of like Arduino CAN bus reader cards and plug them in, essentially hooked it up to an oscilloscope and then just turn the steering wheel left and right to see any spike in the data. And then I'd be able to trap it on that message. Because CAN bus essentially just spurts out every single sensor in the vehicles system out across one channel, and then you subscribe to different values. And then on top of it, those values are usually in some binary format that's purposefully proprietary, so you can't really get access to this data. So I had to sit there and one by one, listen through all the messages and then start combing them out like okay, these four chains, when I turned the steering wheel, but is one a power level is one steering angle, you know, and kind of had to break those down and then find correlation to them that took a good like, month, month and a half just to find the throttle the brake, the gear you're in and where the wheel was turned. And so the early days of trying to get this work before we realized that the odometry, from the tires on the steering wheel wasn't going to be nearly enough for us to track this at 70 miles an hour. It was definitely pretty hairy. And so we would, we would take that data and then drive it around and see what it did to the car. And that was I was very naive at the time, if you will, I didn't know too much about game engine. So I assumed the physics engine that was in Unreal, would be able to do real world physics for tracking a car. And I thought like, Oh, I'll give it the throttle pedal. And I'll tell the car in the game that it's giving throttle, which will correlate to the real world, you know, real world, one to one. And as you can imagine, it didn't work out like that.

You know, sometimes being naive going into a project is the best attribute the best tool you can have in your toolkit, because you just don't know that you can't do it. So you do I totally

I totally subscribe to that I remember hearing a story about Kelly Johnson and the SR 71. And he essentially said like, you know, I brought in what the government needed to my top engineers, and they'll just throw it to the side like, Nope, can't happen. He's like, but then I found a group of 20 year old guys that didn't know it wasn't possible yet. And I showed them the papers. And you know, in a few months, they had plans that we were ready to start building on. And I think there's there's a lot to be said about being naive having the skills and expertise to actually be able to do it if you can find the way but going in with that. Yes, it's possible mindset is kind of how I've done everything to this point. And sometimes it is pure naivete, you know, sometimes I, I assume things are more possible than they are. But then I also find, if you go in with that attitude, and you don't mind working really hard to figure something out, you know, there's almost always a solution, there's always, almost always some way to, to pull either older technology or invent something new and pull it together into a system that can actually do what you're hoping to build.

Yeah, that's such a great perspective to bring into a project for you, when you kind of think back to your own childhood. What were some of these kind of early moments that you remember where you kind of set off down this path of, of tinkering or combining this visual and digital and all the rest?

I have a couple of stories that like you know, you have those pivotal core memory moments that just kind of stick with you. And one of them I must have been like five or six and you know, my grandparents live locally and my grandparents had a basement where my grandfather used to like Workbench stuff, right? And I found this rotary dial phone like an older like not like you know, early 1900s But like an 80s still like older relic of the rotary phones around and I was so obsessed with how the On and Off mechanism worked of putting the dial back and down that I was I was hitting it with metal. And I remember I was like, I was using a screwdriver, some nails or something, I didn't know how to use tools yet. So I'm like shoving things in to try to break it apart. And the nail got stuck to the receiver by the speaker. And that was the first time I learned you know, I didn't know this. But that's when I learned that speakers were magnets, I didn't really know what that meant. So I got really intrigued by it. And I started kind of breaking the receiver apart. And again, I'm like, first grade, second grade, destroying my grandmother's telephone. And I break it all apart and find this magnet. And I start like cutting the magnet out of it from the speaker because I'm just like so obsessed with holy crap, this is a magnet. And my I hear my grandparents come home, I take it, put it in little box and shove it under the drawer and kind of hide it. So I don't want to get in trouble. But two or three days go by, and I'm back over there after school and my grandmother brings out the basket of all the broken parts. And my stomach just fell through the floor. I just had that that oh my god, I'm in trouble moment. And she goes, Hey, I want to show you something. And she was really just kind and sweet about it. And I was like, again, I'm thinking I'm in trouble. And my older cousin Travis was there a lot she said, hey, you know, you should really look at this Travis got really into, you know what this is, and he broke it apart to learn more about it. And that's how you learn everything, you know, take things apart and learn how they work. And that's how you can get a really deep knowledge of something. And I was like, Wait, this is a good thing. I'm not in trouble. And so I kind of just confessed, I was like, that was me, that wasn't Travis. And she was like, I'll keep it up, you know, started bringing me things like take apart and try things out. And that was a really big moment for me because it just, it showed me I wasn't going to get in trouble. If I started trying to figure out how things work, you know, and I kind of took that through the rest of my life is even if it's you know, new tech comes out or new thing comes out, I'll try to buy a bunch of them and then just start pushing them together and seeing how they work in a system together find it there's a new way to use that technology that maybe someone hasn't quite thought of yet or are followed through on. So that was a pretty big one. And then I also had a teacher I think in third or fourth grade, like I was saying I have a really hard time with just sitting still, like just being still is difficult for me. And I did really well in school on tests and stuff. So I'd finished the assignment, and then have like 20 minutes left to class and I would just be a Trump problem kid, right, I start messing with people and talk to people and I just disrupt the rest of the class. And to that point in all my school, I would get, you know, detention, or they put me in the back of the class and make me do silence, you know, treatment or whatever. And then I had this teacher Mrs. Brown who actually brought me over an art pad with a pen, and was like, why don't you just hang out in the back and draw while you you know, come up with all this stuff, or, you know, while you're waiting for everyone else to finish. And that kind of sparked the creativity side of me because then it started realizing I had all this extra energy I could use but I don't need to wait for class to catch up, I can just use my imagination, just build things and you know, drawn and create. And those tools kind of really set me on a path of wanting to build things and create you know, physical technology, but also express my creativity and kind of bring my imagination into it. So like looking back, those are definitely two core memories, if you will, that probably set me on the track that I'm at now.

It's pretty amazing seeing that combining those you went to college you studied visual effects, this idea of combining technology and the visual together was that kind of the reason why you're excited about that.

That really was you know, I It's funny, kind of funny story. Now looking back on red six, I was planning on going to the Air Force Academy, I found programming in high school, I was a huge fan of math. And I've always loved flying my dad was a huge F 14 Growing up so they were you know aircraft models all over my house and my dad was obsessed with Top Gun and Tomcat simulators and such. So when I was getting ready to finish up high school I you know, had all the the resume and such to go to something like the Air Force Academy. So I was fully in, like gone for my meetup with the academy itself. I had already done my letters of recommendation, I was pretty much set on going to the Air Force Academy and around the end of junior year going into senior year. And my mom came in, you know, as 2003. My area in particular was hit very hard by 911. We're right across the bay from downtown Manhattan and our whole area stock market. So many of the people that passed away that year, lived right in my community, you know, we came back to school, four or five days later, there were only about 50% of the people there because everyone else had lost a mother or father or some relatives. So a lot of people were very passionate to go and serve right after that. And I was definitely one of those people. But we'd also just lost so many friends and family members in Iraq and Afghanistan in those early years. And my mom came in just kind of bawling her eyes out at one point when I had finally like said I'm gonna go to the Air Force Academy, and she was like, do me a favor, like you love drawing you love art and I hadn't really taken it seriously at that point. I'd like taking art classes but I didn't really dive into it. And she was like, just try something in art school for one semester. You know, the please don't go to the Air Force Academy. They're gonna put you you know, in a plane, you're gonna go to war. Just please try art school. And if you hate it, I'll never ask you again and you can go. So I had this whole mental idea that I was going to go to SCAD for one semester and And then, you know, in the spring, I was just gonna go sorry, I tried to go on the Air Force Academy. And when I got there a funny story Adam who I just mentioned, he was actually living across the hallway from me freshman year. So he was the first person I met at SCAD. He actually helped me unload my stuff from the car and into my room. And he was doing this major called visual effects, which I had been trying to chase down for a couple years, I actually saw a 2020 clip about kids at USC doing visual effects as a major, and how they were using my and this was like 1999 2000. And I was trying to figure out how to find these schools. And being an East Coast kid, I didn't even know University of South Southern California was USC, I thought it was University of South Carolina, which is very hilarious now, but so I reached out to them. And they were like, We have no idea what you're talking about. So I kind of given up on this dream of there being this major, where you could use math and, and science and art to make visual effects. But I got down to SCAD as an illustration major, I met Adam, he showed me what he was doing in Maya and I was like, Oh, my God, that's the thing I saw on TV. What is this? How do you do this. And that was when my eyes were opened up to visual effects. And it kind of, like you said, took my love affair of coding and programming and creating things because in the early days of visual effects, you were essentially coding to bring things up, and then being able to express my creativity and build my own worlds in one major. So that, you know, I quickly changed from illustration, decided to move on from the Air Force and visual effects was going to be my life because it kind of finally pushed all my passions together into one thing.

So you end up leaving college, having successfully earned a degree in visual effects and went on to be a technical director working on various films and things. What was one of your favorites?

Oh, man, I got very fortunate I So prior to so I graduated from SCAD, I had a internship with with side effects, who makes Houdini and that was my key software. So I left SCAD with this, like giant smile on my face, I'm going straight to side effects. And I you know, I've already late like landed my dream gig as an intern, I'm definitely gonna move my way up. The financial market crash happened, like, right as I was leaving SCAD and my internship lasted three months, and they went, we don't have a role for you right now. We're firing everyone. So good luck. And I just moved everything of my life to California. So I spent about the next six months, very broke, like eating a couple times a month broke, trying to figure out how the heck to stay in Los Angeles and getting my power turned off. And you know, all these crazy things happening to where I'm essentially living in a one room apartment, just doing everything I can to stay in Los Angeles, like going to local businesses and making their logos and websites and just unable to get any visual effects work. So I finally, again, back to the Air Force. And finally given up like August of 2010, I got to the point where I was like, I'm not eating, I'm not sleeping, I might actually die if I stay here. So I just need to go to something that I know will accept me and I reached back out to the Air Force and said, Hey, I am given up on this art school thing and this art direction, I'm going to come back and let's do the Air Force Academy. I have a degree already kind of just go to Officer school. And again, going down the tracks. And I'm working with a recruiter figuring out a release date when I'm going to go and actually get an email from a professor at scan. Who said hey, are you still looking for work? I have someone locally, you should go check out. So I go into this meeting. Again, I just want any work. And the slides me over a contract for remastering Star Wars Episode One. And so I had gone from absolutely nothing I am unable to eat. I'm not even able to pay my power. I actually had to borrow a suit from a friend to go to this interview. And he slides me over a contract for Star Wars which was at the time like and still is one of my biggest passions in life. So I you know, that was that was my first real feature film. And while many of the others were fun and interesting, Transformers was great, you know, I got to do really cool things on Ender's Game. But being able to do that remaster of Star Wars is like my first gig coming out of poverty was just, it was the greatest feeling on the planet. I got to learn so much there I got to build up a team I went from a very junior artists to doing very well in the in the program to where they made me a lead. And then actually it did so well on Star Wars that they asked me to take a team of about 16 of us to India to teach in India for about six months. So that was that's probably the most pivotal film I worked on. But Ender's Game, I got to make floating zero G vomit for Ender's Game. So if you remember in Ender's Game when they take off there one of the kids pukes in the bag and then it comes out start splashing around actually got to make that effect. So every time I you know, it's usually you're working on lasers or fire or some background thing in Houdini. But to get like a key element like that, and it's vomit and zero G is definitely a fun memory to and a great visual. Visual, you know, it's really nice on your demo reel to just have a kid throw up which was always It's the fun comical moment, but it's not exactly pleasing.

What turns you on to the potential for augmented reality.

The first videos that were coming out of the Kickstarter around virtual reality really got me going because my my whole thing once I got into visual effects was like how do I take people to another world? How do I tell them stories where they feel like they're there. And I would always try to do with like really big screens or like wraparound screens or some dome projection. You know, it always be. And this is in college, when we were just trying to, you know, take five or six monitors and put them around make you feel like you were in a box. But there was never a way to immerse people. And then when I got into when I got into the DK one for the first time, like I said, I was I was blown away, I was like, wow, I can transport people here. This isn't linear anymore, I can make a whole world and then they find the story by kind of exploring it. And that was a lot of fun. But it didn't really, it didn't really hit the daily use. I want to do this all the time kind of checkmark for me. And so we started kind of looking at how do you experiment with these things? Will people be in VR, and augmented reality was such like a North Star, it was like this is so blatantly obvious we need to be getting to this. But the technology was nowhere near it, that we were trying to do almost anything you know, Adam and I, one of the first things we did with the DK one was actually take stereo camera from an RC kit and glued it to the front of a dk one, and then did the pastor code. So like, end of 2012 and early 2013, we were trying to work with pass through augmented reality, when we had set that up with like a fan and a light in a room with like balls that were floating in space, and you'd walk up and you'd hit the one bond and turn on a fan. And you hit this other ball. And it would turn on a light when I got a fun little, you know, Instagram video out of it at the time. But it was really the kind of start opening my eyes to like, there will be a point at which we're just looking at these graphics, and they're one to one with the real world. And it just adds a whole layer to our experience. When I got really obsessed with mobile AR and web AR for a while in like 2014 to 2016 because it was the only accessible version. You know, augmented reality headsets, like the HoloLens and Magic Leap just weren't available yet. There were a ton of those projection systems that people were making where you know, you slid in your Android phone, and now you had a combiner in front of it. Now obviously, as you know, odg and daiquiri are working on some incredible products at the time, but I couldn't get my hands on any of them. So I was like the mobile phone is going to be my winner here. We're going to figure out how to do this. And the first thing actually made that was releasable. In augmented reality, we're all Snapchat lenses, you know, we did Snapchat was such an early, you know, early team on this that that Adam actually made a self based he has a character he does for Master shapes, he made one of master shapes floating in like a space in a mobile phone in Snapchat, and for that blew my mind that we could just create these things, drag it in, and now anyone who's in Snapchat can use it. And you know, that kind of showed me the mass adoption. And I started thinking about what are the phases people get to you start in some social area, and you just kind of get used to it with face filters and things in your area. You know, you move into more dedicated apps, like we built one four, Jeep that was a Jeep configurator called adventure reality. And that allowed you to like put a Jeep in your space, move it around, we actually did full interaction with it. So you could drive it open and close the doors, you know, change every parameter of the GP normally could hop inside of it. And then we also had an area where you could go into VR, and have a wraparound 360 and take pictures of it in the Sahara or take pictures of it, you know, in Utah, but that really showed me how far mobile AR was going. And that started to be right around when the HoloLens and Magic Leap started to come into play. When I got really excited about those, I mean, when I got my my HoloLens one, I think I experimented with it consistently for four or five months. I mean, we were even at one point in talks with the Russos and some of their product team about making like a focal lens, or like a lens corrector with a little knob in AR where you look at a person and you just turn the knob and you see where the focus is for the real camera. We were trying to build anything with it because it was so exciting. It was so exciting in the early days.

In terms of projects that kind of became commercially utilized. Did you end up building anything interesting for HoloLens at that time?

Not really, you know, we were trying to we were essentially trying to sell everyone I think this was 2014 or 2015. The HoloLens had just come out, and we were making demos for almost everything. But that field of view was killing almost every experience we tried to sell people on, you know, we were talking to even historic areas about rebuilding them, you know, could you go to Machu Picchu, put on a HoloLens and watch it rebuild itself because you've rented the HoloLens. And everyone we showed it to was like, this is really cool. But it's like looking through a postage stamp, you know, it's like, it's this tiny little field of view. And I'm gonna move my head all around in unnatural ways to get any decent view of it. And they'd always push us back to VR. And they'd be like, That's cool. Call us when AR is there, but we just don't see it just yet. So a lot of those projects were really experimental. We had a lot of fun building wild things in our in our space. We're always trying to connect sensors and connect you know, real world things like Lidar and Kinect cameras and stuff to start making interaction with them. So we had like a dance partner thing where we took one of the maximum models and you could kind of put your hand out and help twirl around a ballerina and stuff but couldn't really get anyone to buy on it. The mobile people would jump into but not with nearly headsets.

Was there another super fun project that you remember from that time we were at the test attorney and Associates.

Yeah, so we had a lot of fun man that the entire time period, you know, it was essentially Adam and I coming up with crazy concepts with whatever the newest tech devices, you know, we always used to joke that new technology was our creative, you know, they're always like, what's your creative style, it's finding what's the newest sensor this month, and turning that into a way where people can interact because we were really obsessed with making physical interactions that like people could come up to, but it would delight them by making it grandiose or large or have a key takeaway. One of the most fun ones we did was with Jordan, they were doing like the Jordan 24 release shoe or something like that in Vegas. And a lot of the times what we were getting hired for was Google Verizon, someone was releasing something. And they wanted to make a three day event where they're, you know, guests came in and got to do something just outlandish, and then get a video to take home with it. So we built a 60 foot led basketball floor, one of the teams we were working with went out and found the only led floor on the planet that had enough protection to actually dribble basketballs on like, jump on. And then we did the similar wall behind it. So you had this like big L of huge led and huge led with a basketball hoop that could move at the end of it. And so we made these graphics where the floor was there, and as you ran, you'd see your footprints to it. But as you jumped, the whole floor would look like it was dropping out below you. So it looks like you jumped 200 feet, and then you'd be able to dunk because we moved the hoop to the right area for you to be able to dunk. We had a Lidar scanner that was tracking all of your position, so it knew where your feet were. And we're tying that all in. And then we hid cameras throughout the event, you know, above you to the side behind you, and took some footage of some of the pros lacing up the shoes and putting their shoe on. And then cut that all together in real time in a software called nuke from visual effects that basically cut you together a 15 second takeaway video of lacing up the shoes, taking your first few slow dribbles, and then running for it with all these different angles. And you'd go up for this dunk and it would grab your hang time in real time and let you slam it down. And you get that video to your phone in about a minute, minute and a half. So by the time you went over and took your shoes back off, you get a text message with a full quality video there. And that was really fun for a few reasons. First, it was a really big system undertaking to get all these sensors to work together to get all of them lined up properly to make the Edit natural on the backside to host all these videos because we had 1000s of people come together over the weekend, you had to make sure it was all hosted properly and shipped out. But also just the people they brought there were so happy to play with the shoes, they were already beyond delighted. They were like oh my god, I get to dribble in the Jordan factory with the new shoes on. But then they saw the whole place light up and it became like so interactive that everyone was just losing it. You know, we had MBA pros there we had Jordan exist there and regular just everyday people who love Jordan there. And the excitement was so tangible for the three days that you know, Adam and I were on three hours a night asleep if we were lucky. But the energy was so real that we just we were fired up the whole time we kept making tweaks we kept making it better, like literally through the entire event. So we actually didn't finish finish the code probably until like the second to last day. But those were all just really adjustments to make it better and better. We could have easily finished five days earlier. But it just it wasn't good enough for us. We wanted to make it really exceptional.

And I want this experience now like to see a permanent installation somewhere.

You know, we it's funny. So their team now does really incredible stuff still around the same space. And they have this basketball one that blew up around saps show that they were taking around the planet where like you know, it automatically collects where the basketball is moves, the hoop does floor interactions for you to know where to go for the next group and they're having a lot of fun might be able to bring you to one eventually.

Very nice. So you talked about early on this infatuation that your dad had with military and fighter jets and the Navy fighting experienced fighter jet experience. And and now you're at Red six. So how is it ultimately the Thies kind of military Air Force fighter pilot sort of trend in your life come together with the visual effects and being always at the cutting edge of technology? How did red six come together for you?

It's it's one of those, like I said, a lot of the lot of the things in my life had been serendipitous, if you will, you know, just very random. We are working out here in the space. Like I said Adam and I were doing all these interactions, we kind of got this reputation for being the people who would do very extreme insane things in virtual reality or in interactive, you know, we we made a roller coaster out of a Cuca robot arm where you threw a VR headset on. We were trying to make a surf simulator at one point we did the driving cars, but so we just kind of get this reputation of people will do crazy things. Or if anyone will do a crazy thing in VR, it'll be out of England. And this producer called us and he essentially was like, Hey, I'm working with the Air Force right now. They're looking for any VR or AR things you can put into a plane to be able to enhance training and at the time, we were like okay, we'll put a VR headset in the back of a plane and we'll let you fly with you know, fly it but you're not going to be in the air. It'll just be a simulator and we We're really looking at this just as another job. And the producer who called me, in Los Angeles, you get tons of calls all the time for work. And it cost a lot of money to actually pitch on the work, you know, it could be 15 $20,000, just to put together a professional pitch to actually bring into an ad agency to win the job. And we've done it like four or five times with him, and we'd wasted a lot of money, because we hadn't gotten any of the work. And so I told him, please, until you actually have a contract locked down, don't call me because it's getting really expensive. And we're not really winning any of this with you. So he calls me again, and I'm like, Dude, I told you to stop calling me. Do you have any contracts? What's that? I said, No, no, don't hang up, don't hang up, don't hang out. I'm talking to the Air Force. Right now. We're going to have a lunch tomorrow around this idea. And I have an F 22 pilot here, I think you really need to meet. And I had been, again, avoiding this person for a while. And then he tells me he has an F 22 pilot. And that immediately strikes that childhood nerve that whole I've wanted to be an Air Force pilot my whole life. And I went

alright, well, I've never talked to an F 22 pile. And that's really cool. I can meet you for lunch, you know, because I'd really just wanted to meet this pilot and see what it was all about. And so we sat down, kind of spoke about what it was. And I saw in the first day that the contract he had mentioned, that was totally real, he had fully locked down wasn't really real, he was still trying to fish. But Dan, who is now my partner was that F 22. Pilot, and he and I hit it off immediately. And we happen to live right down the street. So really, it ended up being you know, Nick, myself, Dan, and Adam kind of getting together constantly and figuring out, you know, what could we do in this space? And I'll never forget this damn, we're sitting at lunch one day, and Dan's like, well, that cash flow thing you did? Could we do that in the plane? And could we possibly do it with something other than virtual reality? And at the time, I thought he was kidding. And I was like, yeah, if you know, anyone don't have to let us fly this in real time. So I've been thinking a simulator up to this point. And he's like, No, let's put it in the plane. Let's go fly it. And I was like, You're no one's gonna be dumb enough to fly in VR. And he's like, Well, I've got a ton of background as a weapons instructor. And I'm really capable. And I'm also building a plane right now. So I could put this into my plane. And to that point, I'd never met someone who had built a plane or knew anything about you know, general aviation. I was like, what you mean, you're building a plane? What, what does that even mean? And so he and I kind of kept going down the track, then he was like, you know, I saw this augmented reality stuff, I think I showed him the HoloLens. And he was like, Hey, can we switch, this not doing the VR do an AR will be so much safer, it'll make a lot more sense. And we can probably get buy in from the Air Force if we could do that. And at the time, obviously, the HoloLens was a tiny field of view, the brightness was nowhere near what you need. And as far as I knew, there wasn't anything on the planet that could even get close. So I was like, I mean, we could, but we're gonna have to wait four or five years for material sciences to catch up for like a releasable product. And so we kind of went down this route of okay, well, then we'll start building the software, we'll start tying all this in. And we'll show the HoloLens or, you know, once the Magic Leap comes out, that'll have to be much better, right. And we'll just show that to the Air Force in each iteration. And basically go we're getting there, the headset manufacturers will catch up. But we just couldn't find anything that got even close in the first six to eight months, you know, we couldn't find anything that was even useful enough. So Nick, and I started kind of perusing all of you know, the AR forums, and all of the things that were coming out of China and Southeast Asia and homebrew kits around here, we started going, I don't think waveguides are going to happen with the field of view, or the brightness that we want in the next five to 10 years. And this was 2017. So what if we started looking at some of the older projection based technology, and just pushed it to its absolute extreme, you know, like, most of these don't work, because you're trying to wear them on someone's head while they're walking around. And the bigger screen you have plus the power consumption makes it not worthwhile experience. You know, there's all these limitations and constraints that happen, because most of them were originally designed with the, you know, mobile, you know, as in walking around pedestrian as their use case. So you don't have access to a full compute, you don't have access to, you know, large amounts of power or cooling or any of that. So that kind of took projection based birdbath, whichever version you want. They're kind of off the table for the normal consumer. But it's beautifully aligned with everything we need, you know, it was absolutely lined up perfectly for it. So we decided to start picking apart what does that mean? What you know, what combiners are out there? What screens exist, what technology do you have to be able to get screens brighter and really started going after maybe there's an older architecture that we can push to the extremes and actually use in our use case. And that's, that's kind of how that all came together was. Someone told me that they were going to have an F 22 pilot at lunch, and six months later, I'm trying to build an augmented reality headset. It was it was a very, very fast turnaround.

That's pretty incredible. When you were sitting there you kind of got gone through this evolution of maybe VR made no, it's got to be AR and you kind of saw that there was a path right even if you took some pages out of the older playbook in terms of technology you saw there was a path Yeah, how did you describe for yourselves the vision for the company at that time,

the vision really was to make the best possible training experience for fighter pilots. That was like the number one goal, it wasn't the best augmented reality or the best sim experience, we wanted the best possible training experience period, we wanted it to be as good if not better than having real live planes up there to fly with you. Because there are some limitations, you can't fly within a certain range of each other because of safety. We can't replicate the physics of you know, a different air platform to the way you would want to in a dogfight, for instance, a new J 20. You can't really make an F 35 Fly exactly like you can get kind of close turn off sensors and such, but you can't really mimic it. And so our real goal was, let's make it so we remove what we call Red Air, which is the other planes that come and fight as bad guys, right, they show up in the air. And they're essentially just there to be target practice, which loses a ton of training for the guys that are playing Red Air, right. So if you're an Air Force pilot, and you're going up for Red Air, that day, you're not getting any real training for yourself, but you're still wasting your own time and wasting tons and tons of money on that aircraft. So the goal was let's let's remove red air and make this an entirely synthetic environment for the first time ever. Because now we have augmented reality that can do within visual range. And that was really the core focus of that first demonstration and you know, proving to the airforce that this could be real,

what is the name Red six as it related to this idea of red air.

So it did actually, we were sitting around there, there were six of us that first time that we were like we're doing this, you know, and I think actually we had originally been looking at as a contract. And Dan with his extensive background, the Air Force was able to actually reach out and call someone at the Air Force Research Lab and go, Hey, you know, we have this idea we're batting around, we think we're going to make it but before we do, just want to make sure DARPA and Skunk Works aren't 15 years ahead of us and are just going to make us waste our time. believe his name was Moses, the gentleman who was running the airwing, there said, My sole job for the past five years, has been to try to find an augmented reality solution for within visual range. So if you're telling me you can actually do it, you guys are already owning the market. And I'll support you 100%. And after that phone call, Dan was like, I think this is less of a contract and more of an actual company. And maybe we should start a company around this. And so we're sitting there, there were six of us. And as like, you know, the Apple story, or countless companies prior, we came up with a quick name to just be able to LLC and call ourselves something we're like, we're Red Air, there are six of us, it's red six. And we kind of chased after that. And a few hours later, I think it was a few hours later, one of the guys popped on went, oh my god, it's a Star Wars reference. Red six is one of the main characters in Empire, he was like, this is this is great. It's a Star Wars reference. And so it kind of stuck. And as we got more into the branding, and figuring out where like, you know, it's, I know, it's a placeholder, but read six sounds really cool. And the logo comes out. And actually, I know they won't be able to see this, but actually made this in 2017, or 2018. That was like the red six logo around around an F 22. And we kind of just, we got married to the idea. And we've been read six ever since.

That's so cool. Thanks. You kind of describe that this is meant to be a better training experience. For the pilots. Part of that you kind of talked about being that if you're up in the air, you're training, you're not providing training for somebody else, right, you're not kind of being the dummy pilot. Yep. And it's a lot less expensive, it's less dangerous, there's less chance that people get hurt, because you're an actual plane. And you're flying against virtual targets, right, you're creating these virtual situations, scenarios where you're fighting against virtual targets, and it could be that you're practicing in mid air refueling, it could be that you're practicing against some sort of enemy aircraft, or some sort of formation, maybe the friendly aircraft or it happens to be. And, you know, given your background, and which is really mixed, both the artistry and the digital and the physical and kind of combining these things, how much of the solution is about the software versus about the headset itself?

Well, you know, if you would have asked me in 2017, or 2018, what I said 100% software, I'm never gonna make hardware because that's a stupid man's game. I'm not going after that world. That was I routinely said that to Dan and Nick, when we were first starting, I was like, We do not want to get into hardware. Hardware is a world that people are spending billions of dollars on that we're never going to catch up to. We're only doing software. And since that wasn't an option, we had to fully go after hardware and the software is a lot you know, there are there interesting problems that happen when you start trying to do real time graphics processing in an environment that's moving at 160 to 200 knots. There are interesting problems that I had never seen before, around injecting data into those environments at the right speed. You know, there are things we've gotten away with for a long time around simulation and video games because there's not a real world reference. You know that there isn't some you know, the the real world is fixed. That's just where it is. So now if your things start to move in weird ways, that's your problem. And you have to figure this out because no one else, you know, when unreal, when someone packages a game in Unreal, they probably have the exact same problems that I'm talking about. But they don't see it, because it's part of the overall environment that they're showing, we've had to combat some of MBSR. And being cagey, because a lot of our patent stuff that's being released here coming up is specifically around this. But we, we've had to invent some ways to clean the data and use it effectively in order to move in this environment at hundreds of miles an hour. And, you know, roll rates of 720 degrees per second, you know, with a real pilot who perceives the real world in correlation to that. So latency is is not an option, a head tracking, and accuracy is not an option, vehicle tracking. And accuracy is not an option. Because there's true real world consequences here, that person could be chasing an entity the wrong way and flying to the ground, they could do a maneuver that they're chasing, and the plane could stall and it could fall out of the sky, you know, so there's very real consequences around the software not being able to output what it needs to, for the first time in my life, everything up to this point, besides the VR racing thing has always been, oh, that's an error or bug, you know, we'll deal with it later. But we can't do those in the plane, because it could actually be very unsafe for our pilots and our passengers,

they have all these real world environment, the characteristics of that operating environment are really extreme in terms of the necessity that it'd be actual match match the real world. And the extreme physical conditions with the pilot, that's massive rotations, lots of speed, the plane in the pilot might be moving slightly differently, depending on I guess, what's going on in the aircraft a little bit. And the slight informs is this massive computing challenge that you have this rendering challenge and all the rest. This is a case where you're using local compute, you're basically packing a massive workstation effectively, under the seat or behind the seat of the aircraft, is that right?

Yeah, then in the early days, it was essentially like the most power I could get, I didn't care what the form factor was, I'm gonna bolt in the back of the plane, we'll figure it out later. Now we're much more mature, we're, you know, confining that compute, we actually know how much overhead we need in the early days, I was like, I have no idea, I've got a 30 ad in there, I just know I have a ton of overhead, I don't actually know what my characterization is around my, you know, compute needs. So we've shrunk that down quite a bit, we have multiple versions now one that we are building for the T 38. That's very compact, and fits into what they call the map case, essentially, in the backseat. And when I say very compact, I mean, it's still a size of like the white pages, you know, like a yellow book. But with that it's a GPS unit power cleaning board, you know, input and output controls, you know, because it's a hard switchable box that has to live in a military aircraft that's going to do, you know, seven or eight G's. So we've really confined that down. But the operating environment is, is very difficult, right? So we're trying to get very high resolution, the the headset ends up being about 4000 pixels across when you count each eye. And so we're doing quite a bit of resolution because we also are driving two headsets off of that one compute. So we have a front seat and the back seat plus, like a tactical display, or situational awareness display, all coming out of one computer simultaneously, as well as the head tracking data coming in the vehicle tracking fusing all of that, managing all the entities managing the wider multiplayer network, because this is now a multiplayer environment where you can do more than one plane, it tends to drive up a bunch of heat, right? Because you're just trying to process all that simultaneously. So it's been an ongoing problem of trying to balance those needs of you know, the resolution and clarity we're trying to get with the amount of heat, we're outputting, especially in such a confined space where I don't have a ton of area to dissipate it. In the recruit in our demonstrate aircraft here in Santa Monica, it doesn't have any type of cabin pressure, air conditioning or anything like that. You just have a vent coming from the outside air. So if it's 100 degrees outside, it's at least 100 degrees inside. And kind of working through those problems. You know, I mentioned before, since we're not on a pedestrian user, we have to we get to remove a lot of constraints. But now that we're in a plane that can do you know, seven or eight G's, doesn't have an air conditioner, and is doing 200 miles an hour and constantly vibrating. We also now come into a bunch of new constraints, and how do you make that safe. And, you know, I'd love to be able just take my gaming PC and throw it in there and hope it works. But now when they pull five G's, that four pound video card is getting up into the you know, 20 to 40 pounds range and will snap off, it's connected there. So a bunch of new problems show up luckily, problems that are currently accessible within material science, where I think some of the augmented reality problems around waveguides and some of the things people are trying to do right now or more in the longer term Material Science Solutions. These are actually solvable constraints, but it definitely hasn't been as easy as I hoped it would have been five years ago.

The T 38. Is the training standard training aircraft for the Air Force, right, correct, changeup I should say it's not propeller based. It's an actual Yep. So the the set of constraints and acts that extend to The rugged the AR Rig itself. Can you talk about you talked about that you can go backwards to kind of look at what the playbook is in the past not going to be trying to make a waveguide work because it's mostly inefficient and just doesn't quite apply to solving the set of visual experience problems you're trying to solve. So you go backwards in time to kind of look at what's worked in the past, what is it you are working right on right now in regards to the hardware and and what's special and unique about it.

So the hardware over the past, I'd say six to eight months now has been going through a privatization like a design for manufacturing process to take it from, you know, we've been learning how we're learning a lot, we did about four iterations of the headset internally through 3d printing, diamond turning and all of those technologies in order to make a demonstratable product here that we could keep working with the Air Force on and kind of tuning to their needs. But over the past few months, we've been taking that, you know, stake in the ground, essentially and saying, here's the first version of the releasable set of our hardware. And let's put that through design for manufacturing, do our injection quality, and really get that thing certified to go fly. While that's happening, we have some very exciting technology I can't go too deep into. But I can say that I think we actually showed it to you in a web, we're getting out into the 120 to 160 degree field of view setup without people swim. So we figured out a way to essentially make an eye box horizontally infinite, with about a 15 millimeter vertical, and there isn't people swim. So you can essentially put up your head and move it like this as almost as much as you want. And those rays will still get to your eye properly and still, you know D warp and appear properly. So that's kind of the direction we've been going out here is we've got yet 90 degrees. And now we're pretty immersed. But we want to take it all the way out into your peripherals and make people feel like they're actually in these environments.

I saw that demo at Awa and my eyes didn't even know what exactly was going on. My brain was so happy with this experience, because I don't think I appreciate this concept of Pupil swim. That's kind of the visual, the digital experience kind of shifts around a little bit as the rig itself moves a little bit on your head. Yeah. And it was like I was staring at a sticker. The image, the digital image was actually just a printed sticker on the lens. It was that solid in terms of its It was impressive.

I'm glad you liked it. It's been you know, that was a few months ago, it's gotten even further. And we actually, we took a subset of that combiner in that design and made about a 90 degree field of view one and diamond turned it to use the exact display stack that we're currently using. And I got to see it yesterday for the first time. And it's It's wild. I mean, it's fully working here now with our existing display assembly. Again, up to 18,000 nits brightness with it as well. So the clarity is just insane. And the MTF, you know that the fall off of the resolution across the lens is so clean. It was that was a very happy man yesterday, I was a very, very happy man. So it was great to have this conversation the day after we saw that working properly.

That's pretty amazing, is we kind of think about this evolution of the technology, you have a unique set of constraints that you're working against, you're trying to solve this problem, does what you're doing end up applying to consumer or enterprise sort of headsets, or is it really unique to the solution here.

So I you know, without getting too much into some of the things we're working on right now, there are a lot of the work that we're doing right now, I think does align into the commercial markets and does start to open up, you know, we have some partners around commercial experiences and commercial user interactions that that will start bringing this to bear in the commercial space. And you know, especially the combiner that I'm talking about, I was just mentioning before, that lack of Pupil swim starts to open it up to a lot of high intensity environments, that augmented reality previously weren't going to be able to work in you know, we haven't actually started approaching anyone about this. But being able to put into like a football helmet is now relatively real, because as that helmet moves while he runs, I'm still able to show them the proper image and have that correlate to their eye location. So it doesn't start to break it like right now if you were to put on almost any off the shelf unit. If you'd start running as opposed to walking slowly, you'll see that that eye box starts to move. And you can't really make it out that well. You start like like if you're holding binoculars in front of your face, and you're trying to find that I box properly and kind of goes black, you get a similar sensation when you're running. So what we're doing now I think starts to really open itself up into more commercial markets, not maybe not necessarily an everyday user on the ground wearing one of these yet. But I think we're getting pretty close to that, to be honest.

That's pretty awesome. What have you been able to demonstrate recently in terms of your kind of original primary mission around enabling a much better training experience for fighter pilots?

So you know, to start we were doing Air to Air Refueling allowing people to go up and be behind a KC 46 tanker and do a refueling mission. Then we added in what we call a scripted bandit, essentially, an entity that doesn't have any real control just turns itself to the ground and you chase after it. And then we stepped up and did the more pathfinding AI where I can kind of control the jet where you chased after it and over the past Two years we've been working with and tuning a fillip within visual range AI, where you and a wingman can go after a bandit. And they have the full doctrinal understanding and dogmatic understanding of what a fighter pilot is and the decisions they make and the strategy to put yourself in a control zone and make a shot to where it's thinking about 10 seconds out to try to, you know, Duke, you are moving in a direction to try to get behind you and take a shot. And that's what we've been shooting for a past couple of years, which has been fantastic. But we started to go into, like broader training and larger training. And we thought, you know, one of the problems that's happening with the Navy right now is how expensive it is to do carrier qualification training. So young guys who are going out to land on the aircraft carriers don't get to actually do that until they're possibly going out for deployment, there's a lot of self flying, if you will, tools inside of the F 35. And such that like something called Magic Carpet, that lets the planes land themselves is essentially on the carrier, but there's always going to be fall back into manual need. So a few weeks ago, we're actually almost a month ago, now, we put a USS Ford aircraft carrier at about 3000 feet, with a huge sheet of water around it. So essentially, like a little sandbox of water at 3000 feet, that's about like a mile wide. And that allows us to actually do tanker landing qualification, so we can get down to it, it's a full size of a carrier. So you can fly next to it, see the numbers, do the landing approach, get out and come in at the right angle. And make sure that your approach is correct, even with movement to the boat, and what we call the pilot director lights that let you know what angle here at to make sure you're gonna get a constant flow into the carrier there. So that one's been really exciting because it's massive, right. And so you look out here, when you're flying, you're about 10 miles out, you start seeing this little boat that looks like a little rectangle. And as you get closer and closer to it, I mean, it's the size of a football stadium, you know, and it's just out there floating over cameo. And we can actually come through and fly and see all the aircraft that are along the deck and actually make these approaches. It's a really, again, going back to the cost saving it's it's so extremely expensive to be able to do that. And it's so unsafe and what you're doing right you're trying to land on a runway that's doing 15 knots into a headwind while it's rocking back and forth, and low visibility and such. So it's probably one of the riskiest maneuvers any Navy pilot has to do is getting on and off the boat, and being able to give students the reps over and over and over again, to get that muscle memory without actually having to go to the boat, I think there's gonna really change how the Navy actually does their training long term.

That's super impressive. You do that at 3000 feet in the air, super safe. If you happen to overshoot or undershoot. Nobody's getting hurt,

you know, one of the most interesting parts is and also for us really test out our opacity. So you know, because we can bring the brightness up, I can't see the real world below, you know, we have our own military airspace that we get cordoned off for us. So we know no one else is near us and such. But you look down, I can't see anything below me because the headsets that bright, it's fully opaque to the outside world behind it, which was, I have some pictures that I took, you know, through the headset those days. And it's I mean, we did it inside the cockpit just to get like a reference, and you can't see the cockpit behind the image at all. So it's been a really nice pushing test of the opacity of the headset.

Yeah, that's super impressive. Thank you. So given kind of the scope and the complexity of all the things that you're building, and also the reality that this has always been a long term undertaking. How do you manage investor expectations?

Really, that's been about finding the right people that believe in the mission and support us and follow through. You know, Dan, and I have been brutally honest, since the beginning. One of our biggest tenants here is we don't do vaporware period. You know, we work with all of our customers directly. We're brutally honest, when we have setbacks, or we're brutally honest about the things we don't like about the product yet, specifically, with the Air Force, you know, we've had about every three months, we have them come out and check a demo out. And we were just brutally honest, hey, we're having some latency over here that we're trying to work through. And the entities don't operate properly in this section yet. But we're working through that, because we found they want this just as bad as we do. And so they're willing to work with us even when their problems as long as we tell them. And we have the same approach with our investors where it's, we're finding the right people that believe in the mission, believe in what we're trying to build. And then we're just completely honest with them, and we're transparent with them. You know, we're not a leadership team. That's a comment, we have to come up with some way to express this to the to the board, Daniel, just call the teams or the people out on the board and say, Hey, we're having this issue. It's going to set us back a couple months, but you know, we're doing everything we can to get there. And they know the character of the people that we look to hire and the people that we've brought in here as a team and they know we're very fortunate to have a team of absolute all stars. And so if they're having a setback if they're having an issue, it's not because we didn't work 16 hour days, you know, the past four weeks is because chances are the laws of physics are pushing against us at this point, and we're trying to find a way around them. So we've been very fortunate it, our investors absolutely love us because I think we're some of the only technology teams in this space that they're working with that are just, we're not vaporware, we're showing you what's real. And we're building AR with a real purpose. You know, we're not building AR for the 4 trillion consumer market in 2050. You know, we're building AR for next year for a dedicated use case. And that's the only things we go after we go after things where we can see that we can make a real pivotable impact in the next one to five years, Max.

Yeah, absolutely. He kind of noticed that transparency, being forthright, building the right team and being honest about the fact that you have a problem, and you actually have the team that can address that problem, I can have been key, as you as you look out over the next year or so, next couple of years, who are what causes you the most concern at this point,

the biggest concern to me right now is probably, I don't want to sound cliche, because everyone's saying that, but it really, obviously, the chip shortage, and all of the shortages that we're seeing show up in different areas of technology, as well as some of the bigger companies making shifts away from long term support for different components. Right, it used to be that, you know, someone would make a component and it would be supportable for the next five to 10 years, maybe longer, if you had a government contract, the rate that cellphones VR headsets and computers are updating, a lot of these component manufacturers don't want to support them even three to five years, because they're going well, there's gonna be a new iPhone out next year, and I'm gonna have to reset up my entire manufacturing line for this next component. So really just shortage of components, I've been really happy to see that we've got a huge amount of investment coming into the country through the government to try to start building up some localized versions of our manufacturing, again, which I think would start to ease some of those problems, because I can talk directly to them. And even if it's more expensive, getting to work out, you know, the kinks, and all of that right here locally is going to is potentially going to help quite a bit. But that's really been the biggest concern. You know, like I said, I'm very fortunate to be surrounded by a team of Yes, and extreme developers and hardware engineers, we don't hire people, and we don't focus our team on the butts, you know, like the, well, we could do that. But here's going to be a problem that can come down six to eight months, you know, we go, yes, and this may be a problem eventually. And this is ways that we could possibly mitigate that. But let's make sure we're making the right decision so that this has the least amount of problem for us. And then we can come up with a way to get around that. So the team brings my confidence up in such an incredible way for the first two and a half, three years, it was just me coding. And so people would ask me big question, they'd be like, how are you going to do this? And I would be like, I do not know even what you just asked me. I'll be right back, I need to go learn. And now I've got this team of engineers with me that on a daily basis, just blow me away and kind of show new ways to solve problems I had never seen before. So on the hardware and software, yes, there are challenges. There's hard things, getting a helmet through injection quality is always a difficult process. But I'm really confident I have the right people to do it properly and do it efficiently. And I'm just hoping that the global economy doesn't keep us from getting to our goals.

Let's talk about those goals. What what is red six look like five years from now.

You know, I've had this this dream since I was a kid of having this company that did cutting edge technology, and then worked with defense and creative it was kind of like I was mentioning before that I wanted to be an Air Force pilot and I wanted to you know, work in creative and I wanted to work in programming. So I always had this like dream of like a skunk work S company that was always developing new technology and sending those out into different commercial and DOD related spaces to help solve real problems. And it's, it's kind of starting to build into that, right? It's kind of like, you know, we're focusing on augmented reality right now. And like the ways that to solve problems that are directly in front of us, but that allows us to start expanding into, you know, ground based AR headsets and an overall Metaverse background in architecture and protocol layer, as well as moving into the commercial space connecting different professions in different areas into their own their own ability to interact in a fully digital space, but then eventually tying them all together. So I know it doesn't really sound like I'm saying anything, but imagine if essentially building up silos of digital interaction separately, and then pulling them together as one industrial Metaverse, essentially, if you will. So you've got people working in agriculture and people working as surgeons and people working as manufacturing. And I think longterm red six will continue to build, you know, the absolute highest quality and most premium ways to interact with the metaverse and whether that's, you know, deeper into augmented reality headsets or a smaller form factor or, you know, into something like the Mojo contacts like that space has always kind of been really intriguing to me. And I think the goal is really are always to just truly immerse people into a digital space that helps them do something better, whether that's flying a plane And, or driving a car or throwing the football, I think those will be a lot of our goals. And then the other side will just be trying to figure out in current material sciences and current understanding of those materials reaction with physics, what are the, the most immersive ways to interact and tell stories and and, you know, let people engage and collaborate together. So, you know, the team here has gone from, like I said, one or two people in 2019, to about five, in 2020. And now we're at almost 80, something people, about 40 of those being engineers, and that team is rapidly growing, you know, we just started up locations in Orlando, in Denver, around military modeling SIM in Orlando, and military hardware in Denver. And those teams are rapidly growing, I think we'll probably have, you know, 40 to 50 people at each of those locations here within the next six months to a year. But it really, that starts to allow us to elevate ourselves and go, you know, we've been head down, turning on this on this overall demonstratable prototype, and some of the architecture what you could go to, but now we have the team to really just completely go all out and see how we interact with different engagements and move into consumer spaces and move into commercial spaces and start to explore them.

That's ambitious and awesome.

Thank you, I have a perpetual optimism, you know, and it's I don't know where it comes from. I don't know why it started. But I'm always, I'm always looking to the future, even though, you know, things are always looking dystopian. I always am going Yeah, but there's technology, there's good people. And there's incredible things to make, we are going to be better on the other side of this. And I think the same way with technology, like I mentioned, a lot of times I go into things, kind of naive, you know, I may end up treading in an area that I don't know quite as well. But then I become obsessed, and I research about it. And I haven't run into a problem just yet that there wasn't a solution. It doesn't need to be the final solution. But it needs to be a solution with phases to get you to that final solution. And that goes for just about anything. You know, I been very fortunate that when people bring up problems, if they seem extremely hard, I get excited, as opposed to like running away from them, my brain goes, Oh, this will be fun. I have no idea how to do this, this will be really fun. And those are kind of the things that I chase after.

I think that sort of optimistic, enthusiastic mindset is, is key to every successful entrepreneur.

Thank you. Thank you, it's been, you know, Dan and I, when the early days, like 2018 2019, we'd be sitting out on a surfboard in the ocean, we'd be kind of talking about where things could go and what they could be. And we knew where we wanted to go. And we had no, no hold backs, you know, we just said we're gonna go full bore on this. And it's all because we're both so able to see through the mire, and like the, you know, the the BS that gets in the way and all the knows, you know, I work with a lot of prime, you know, DOD contractors now. And there's always, like three or four people in the room that just want to say no, you know, it doesn't matter what it's about, they're looking for that window where they can go, oh, actually, that won't work because x or your thermals will never get low enough. So there's no way you can do it. And it just is so disheartening to see that in these companies that are producing for the military, where I'm like, no, no, yes, there will be thermal problems, but how do we solve them? Not? There's no way possible, because I'm already flying with this. So it is possible, let's figure out how to make it even better. You know, one of the funny stories we had in the beginning was we are calling around to a lot of the larger Prime's you know, sorry, Prime's are the big DoD contractors, Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, you know, the ones we've all heard of. And we were calling around to see if anyone wanted to partner with us around this because we were working on investment. This was 2019. And we talked to one of the primes and they said, Yeah, it's on our roadmap, too. And then Nick, and I just looked each other our stomachs dropped. And we're like, No, one of the primes is actually we knew we were gonna find someone else working on this. And the engineer goes, Yeah, and I think we'll be ready about 2035. And we had like, 80 hours flying already. And so we just came up voice and we're like, we're flying with it right now. And we had three or four engineers jumping down, there's no way you're full of it the bow blind, we just like just come out and fly with us. Just come join us in Santa Monica will take you up for a flight we'll show you it's real. And they jumped out went oh my god, you you actually did it. That's that's real. And that's how we've approached almost everything there. And I try to drive that into the primes as much as I can. Where you know, when I work with them, I'm like, That's nothing's impossible. Like we're at a stage now where as long as you're not defined laws of physics, nothing is possible impossible. You can find the technology you can find the people and you can build something to make just about anything right now

about it. Let's wrap with a few lightning round course here. What commonly held belief about AR VR spatial computing? Do you disagree with

the sunglasses form factor is a hard one for me and I think it's only because I see it as a stopgap I see the Mojo contact vision and go in that direction as like really the be All Endo, you know, this is gonna sound very dystopian, but I've had this dream since like 2012 2013 to go directly into the optical nerve in the back of the head where the optical nerve crosses, and be able just to heck with putting something in front of me and adding more light to it, let's just decode and go straight to the optical nerve and tell the brain what we want to see. And I see a lot of the areas that people are going in right now in consumer base sunglasses as a really interesting stopgap, quite frankly, there's ethical concerns around contacts, there's consumer of you know, uptick around, or uptake around whether people want to wear a contact. When I look at the immersion side of it, I don't see a lot of daily use cases. And, um, this is probably going to age terribly, we're going to re listen to this and five years, and they're gonna go, we all use this daily, you sound like an idiot now, but I don't have a ton of use cases where my daily HUD adds a lot of benefit yet. And maybe that's just because the quality hasn't gotten there, you know, I've tried all of the Norse, all of the every version that's out there around having a daily augmented reality HUD where my messages come up. And for the first couple of days, I'm super into it, I always get really excited about it. And then after about day four, day five, it's just kind of strenuous, and I don't care about I don't want it in my face all the time, I want to be able to pull up my phone and look at when I want to. So I see a lot of that initial use case until people really format we always joke here until someone finds the Instagram of AR It's gonna be really hard to sell that that idea, you know, what is that daily driven use case? What is that purpose for this technology? Again, I'm probably going to date this terribly who we're gonna listen to so a few years ago, where everyone's wearing AR sunglasses, and they're absolutely incredible. And I just sound like an idiot. But I just just haven't seen anything yet. That really excites me about it.

That's fair. That's fair. Besides the one you're building, what tool or service do you wish existed in the AR market?

I want something like Tilt Brush. In augmented reality with my real space. Like I want a collaborative tool, you know, very similar to all the HoloLens Metaverse videos they were making where people would be in architecture studios and working across the planet with each other and collaborating over like clay almost where you're sculpting things and making those things. I think, being able to work the way I work right now where you know, I step out to my team, we're very hands on very open and collaborative, be able to bring in my people that live in other locations, so Orlando in Denver and bring them physically, if you will, into the space that I'm in and have us interacting in real time. That's that's really where I want to get to that that hollow portal or whatever people were calling it a few years ago about bringing someone to another space and really teleporting their ability to collaborate with you to wherever you are, that's when I will go cool, I'll buy a pair of sunglasses, I'll wear the damn things. But that's always kind of been my dreams.

Nice. What book or article Have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound,

you know, as we're scaling up, and as we're we're building out quite a bit now I've been reading this right here are high output management, by Andrew Grove, he was the CEO of Intel in the days that it exploded from, you know, Ram and initial chip manufacturer to being Intel. And it's been really incredible. I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts that are history driven, I love hearing about stories throughout, you know, American and world history where you get into the nitty gritty details of decisions that were made. And I find that it makes me a better leader and a better technologist to understand where the world and other people have been when they had were faced with some of the similar challenges. So reading this book has been great, just seeing how this company exploded, and how, you know, the process ended up you know, the process of how to manage people and how to, you know, make people feel like they're part of in their owning that section of it not just you know, some assembly line worker, or not someone who just feels like they're going in for their nine to five and how important that was for Intel success has been very validating because I spend a lot of time focusing on the human part of my my employees and my team members, right? Like, I care very much about every person that works for me and not in like some, you know, me, me, you know, every person, everyone on the team as a family, but like I, I've chosen all of the people that work for me, very specifically, because of their skill sets and their attitude and the way they think about problems. And then we've built up this company in this product together. And I care very deeply about everyone to the point where, you know, we're very stringent unless there's something that comes up we only work nine to five or you know, an eight, eight hour day. We don't do weekends. You know, we don't do all the things that normal startup does anymore, Dan, and I took on that brunt. You know, when we started the company, he and I were working 16 hour days, seven days a week didn't take vacations for three years. And we took on that Brunt to really prove that this could be a thing. And now as we've scaled we've tried very hard to keep retention up keep burnout low, keep everyone happy, you know and allow people to have a work life balance and allow them to you know, go home and do it. thing while pushing technology as far as you possibly can. And I think a lot of that goes to people work better when they're happy period, I don't give into this idea of corporate management of you know, burning people to the ground, and then letting them swap out because there's more humans to jump in, the people that you have, and the resources that you're able to find are your absolute most expensive, you know, resource that you have available. And if you get the right people, and you get them happy, and you're working with them, and they feel part of the team, and they feel like they have ownership in it, they will create things that you could have never possibly imagined. And that same invention is never going to come out of quarterly you know, measurements of your productivity over last quarter Did you up your productivity by 1.2%. And if not, you're fired, or you're getting a demotion or you're getting suspended, I truly believe if you find the right people, you will never be as hard on them as they are on themselves for the quality of work that they put out. And so you're better off rewarding those people and you know, building them up and working with them and giving them ownership than ever chastising them or calling them out on a monthly you know, all hands call. So I really, really focus on that. And it's been great to read a lot of this book, because so much of it kind of points toward the people being the resource, you know, and the people being the capital that the company owns. And it's been great to read

high output management and you drove Yeah, it's a classic. It is.

It's so funny, I, I don't have any business background, right. Like I came to I went to art school, I was a visual effects kid, I did pipeline development, I moved in interactive, and now I started this business. And so I'm kind of catching up on all the NBA reading that a lot of these people just had in their first year of their MBA or something. And things that I've been doing my whole life kind of intuitively, are in these books, I'm like, Oh my God, there's a rule to this, I had no idea. Like, my I was really fortunate growing up, my grandfather did very well, and had a lot of businesses. And when I was a kid, he used to kind of just instill knowledge in me all the time. And a lot of it around, you know, he used to say, being the owner means that you do all the work at the end of the day that no one else wanted to finish. So it's like that's not you know, yell at them in the morning and get them harder on it. If it's leftover, that's yours to do now. And you know, one of the other things you say all the time is if you're on my team, and I don't care what your position is, if you're standing next to a shovel and a hole needs to get dug, guess what you're digging holes today, you know, it was kind of this idea of, we're all in this team together. And if it needs to get done, pick it up. It's because someone else is gonna pick up your slack at one point when you're feeling well, you know, and a lot of these ideas and just stupid little quips you gave me growing up on finding like in these books, and I'm like, did he just read the book, and then turn to me and tell me the same thing, or it's been very interesting to catch up on a lot of these things. I guess everyone else has been studying for years.

Having gone through an MBA program, I can tell you that leadership is not actually on the curriculum. Makes sense? Yeah, I think that business schools do a really poor job of teaching the soft skills, truly allowing the sort of learnings the real learnings that you're going through right now that are really the ultimately the important ones that a C level exact needs to have to be a really effective leader.

Definitely. And I had some cauldron moments, you know, growing up where when I was at prime focus, the company was shifting, you know, it was it was growing very rapidly, the visual effects house was, and they were kind of buying up companies and kind of spitting them out left and right, you know, it was very ugly time to be there to be completely honest. And I got moved over to pipeline development, because I just got really bored of doing visual effects. I wanted to build things. And I moved my way up. And I was, you know, essentially a mid level developer with a whole team of people, probably four or five people above me to the chair of the board. And then all of those people quit. And it went from me being the junior guy sitting around to suddenly I'm sitting in, you know, board level meetings around what will technology and pipeline be doing in the future, I think I was 23 or 24 at the time. And everyone in the board is obviously in their 50s to 60s. And they know I'm just the guy sitting here because everyone else quit. But it was a real culture moment. Because I really took that as a moment to go, no I can I can elevate to this, I can pull this off. I don't know anything about what they're talking about. But I think I can elevate to that. And I ended up holding that job for probably seven or eight months before I ended up quitting because they were moving to Vancouver. And it was very, very big learning experience for me, because prior to that I led about when I went to India at about 4500 artists, I had three shifts daily to 1500 each. And that gave me this huge sense. Again, I was 22 at the time, and this was oh my god, I have to manage 4500 people on a real feature film, and I can't screw this up and God taught me a bunch. But then to go to the next stage, which was, you know, elevated to the board level thinking of how does the entire organization operate? And how does the pipeline move and how do we move assets across and how do we make sure we don't lose those assets because the MPAA is auditing us constantly and how do I do that in a political way to make sure that my CEO doesn't you know, burn the department down? Was was a really interesting experience and a very tumultuous time around visual effects and specifically that one company that I've carried all the way through. And I've been very fortunate to have these touch points in, you know, leadership and human interaction that I hope is building me toward a good leader to take my team into where we're going

along those lines. And maybe you can't really cover this path just right now in this answer, but if you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, or 23 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old when

I tell them not to freak out, I was having a lot of panic attacks at that point, I didn't, you know, I had a lot of impostor syndrome. And, you know, there's, there's advice that I would give myself back then. But I don't know if it would take me off the path that I'm on now. And I, I would love to, there's advice around, you know, just taking a deep breath and, and, you know, making the right decisions at the right time. But I also think, you know, having those panic attacks, and having a freakout through this, and really, you know, put out fires and learn, it probably drastically elevated my ability to be where I am now. So I don't know if I don't know, if I change too much, I probably maybe changed some of my dating history back then. You know. But the but the technical side, I mean, I got, I'm very fortunate, I can't cut stop saying that I've, I've wanted to change my my direction, and career and life multiple times since I graduated college. And every time I've been fortunate enough to be successful in that, you know, I've wanted to go from being a VFX artists doing pipeline, and I found an avenue to that, to where I was the director of pipeline development, Imaginary Forces. And I wanted to go do interactive design, and crazily enough, and I have to shout out the owners, their Imaginary Forces, when I was starting up and going full bore into interactive, I was their director of pipeline development, making great money and building out a team. And I was just honest with them, I was like, listen, I really want to start my own company. And I'm going to kind of put in my resignation now. And we'll have to figure out how to kind of sort that, and, and chip there was like, Hey, listen, it's hard to start a business, it's really difficult to keep yourself fed and paid. What if you came on and just lead the team, but worked part time, I'll pay a full time. And you just kind of come here as necessary to lead your team and start your business, I believe in you. And that was, I knew this guy for a year, maybe 10 months. And it was a really incredible opportunity for someone to let me you know, have all of the take on the risk of starting a business while not necessarily taking on the risk of not being able to feed myself and pay my rent. And I can never thank him enough for that one. But I've been just very fortunate to interact with some incredible people who've led me to where I am now.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you lived through that he knew what it was like to not eat, not get paid early in your career,

there was a point. And it's funny. Now looking back, it was very scary, then I would, I would scrounge together some cash. And I would go over to the 711 around the corner and buy like a piece of their pizza, and two of their chicken tenders. And I would cut them into pieces. And I would get one piece of pizza and two pieces of chicken every few hours over the course of like five days. And that's literally all I would eat for like four days. And it was brutal. I mean, my ex girlfriend at one point bought me a pizza from across the country. She was in college and bought me a pizza online and got it shipped to me when Domino's started doing online ordering. And the guy came up to the door and asked me for the credit card because in the early days number they used to like rub the credit card on there to make sure you had it. And I obviously didn't have it, but didn't have it. And I hadn't eaten like No kidding, three or four days had not had food period. And I was essentially going crazy, like very primal at that point. And he's like, sorry, I can't take it and my body just reacted by just swatting the pizza out of his hand. And I just like I need to eat this, I have to eat this. And I essentially like chased the dude off the property because I was animalistic and the fact that hadn't eaten in a few days, you know, I never, ever want to have that experience in my life. And I never really want that for anyone you know, I look at people's troubles around, you know, food insecurity and stuff. And now I can relate to it so much that it just crushes me when I hear that people are stuck like that, you know, not to go completely down the different trout there. But I've been I've been very fortunate to pull myself out of that, you know, with the help of so many incredible people. And now I just want to be able to open that opportunity for as many other people as I can.

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

I think overall, just being optimistic about your ideas and chasing after them and not feeling like you have to plan out every single detail until you know you get stuck in planning hell before you actually take that first step is is kind of my overall direction with technology. And I think if if you're someone trying to get into this world, or you're someone that's trying to go after an idea that might have nothing to do with augmented reality just it's not a bad thing to not know every step you're going to do to get to the final stage. Sometimes it's the art of the way you know, the art is the process of creating and I think the more people that can take that optimistic mindset and go toward really, really hard problems the better technology as a whole will be across the planet.

Yeah, like that. Where can people go to learn more about you and all the work you're doing there at Red six? Well, you

can definitely check out my personal Instagram is underscore Glen Schneider. The company website is red six ar.com. And definitely check out our Instagram red six AR and my partner Dan at Red six CEO. We're always posting fun stuff. Dan's always posting some crazy things about him flying and my personal I do a little bit of behind the scenes around some of the optics we're building and what I can show at the time, so if you want to, you know, follow along with the story, feel free to jump on because we're having a ton of fun over here. Read six

grand thanks so much for the conversation. Please. Thank

you Jason has been great.

Before you go, I want to tell you about the next episode. In it I speak with Kyle Jackson, who was the co founder and CEO of tailspin, a company making immersive learning a reality for the future of work. Kyle is a serial entrepreneur who believes mixed reality in combination with artificial intelligence can enable us to have higher emotional intelligence and empathy, as well as informed cultural sensitivity and enhanced capabilities to communicate, learn and leap. We'll get into Kyle's background, how he transformed Tailspin from a services company to a product company that recently raised $20 million Series C round and the future of work. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. And please consider contributing this podcast@patreon.com slash the AR show. Thanks for listening