AR Show with Jason McDowall Jason McDowall: Investor | Advocate | Entrepreneur

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop, multiplayer games to life.

Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of CastAR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $15 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017.

Previously Jeri was a race car driver, computer shop owner, and toy industry veteran. She was also recruited to Valve to lead the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. She contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller. It’s also where the story of Tilt Five originates.

I last chatted with Jeri as she was wrapping up a Kickstarter campaign for Tilt Five, just prior to COVID.

In this conversation, the first of two parts, we rewind the story back to its origins at Valve and the early decisions about what to do with their technical innovations. We continue the story through the trials and tribulations of an underfunded hardware company fighting to survive, and Jeri brings us to the present day, sharing many insights along the way.

Jeri describes how she and her team have found a solution to a difficult set of problems for AR glasses, and now Tilt Five is generally available and establishing a niche that combines the best of board games and video games.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.

He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

He was also recently the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders.

In the second part of my conversation with Karl, we talk about:
- the current state of µLED tech,
- challenges with AR displays and optics,
- diffractive vs reflective waveguides,
- the unique opportunity for Lumus,
- history/comparable of DLP and LCOS to today's pursuit of µLED and AR glasses,
- importance of "hands free" and implications on device input,
- if or when AR glasses will replace a smartphone,
- which technologies will win in the mid and long term.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.

He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

He was also recently the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders.

Like my previous interviews with Karl, this was a long and wide ranging conversation that I split into multiple parts. In this first part, we touch on:
- rise and fall of high-end digital photography,
- silicon-based camera sensors,
- challenges of unique manufacturing processes have with volume and price,
- the downsides of the smartphone supply chain,
- rumors about Apple's efforts in VR and AR,
- the size of the VR market,
- the military and enterprise opportunity for AR,
- "four-corner markets" and how they apply to VR & AR, and
- the benefits and risks of video-passthrough VR.

Part 2 will continue with a deeper dive into µLED display and popular optics technologies.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Maryam Sabour is the General Manager and Head of Business for the AR Headsets group at Niantic, where the goal is to enable everyday adventures and real-life social interaction through location-based augmented reality.

Maryam studied law and business at university, going on to earn a Juris Doctorate at McGill University. Early in her career, she was drawn to entrepreneurship, having founded an e-commerce company and a legal clinic for startups.

Maryam was drawn into the world of VR, where she spent several years working as a founder or consultant across several projects, before taking on the role of the business development lead for Niantic’s then nascent Lightship AR platform about 5 years ago.

In this conversation, Maryam shares her path from law to entrepreneurship to Niantic, and explains why Niantic became a hardware innovator.

Maryam goes on to discuss:
- the tradeoffs and challenges in making a device suitable for outdoor gaming,
- some lessons learned from early explorations,
- how the hardware fits into the broader Niantic strategy,
- and how the company thinks about privacy.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Ohto Pentikäinen and Jamin Hu are the co-founders of Doublepoint, a company creating human-computer interaction technologies which are initially focused on detecting the moment of touching an object.

Ohto is a serial entrepreneur having been a co-founder and CEO twice by the age of 20 before co-founding Doublepoint. His earliest venture was reimagining the high school learning experience by creating a platform for multidisciplinary, self-directed learning.

Jamin has a passion for music and earned a degree in Classical Piano Performance before expanding his focus to pursue a masters degree in biomedical engineering.

In this conversation, Ohto and Jamin share how they crafted a unique high school curriculum to train entrepreneurs, what's missing in AR and other gesture sensing tech, and how mixing piano with bio engineering results in a new type of touch sensing technology.

They go on to share their vision for the company and their approach to getting there.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.

Stan Larroque is the CEO and co-founder of Lynx, a company creating the first all-in-one mixed reality headset. The Lynx R1 offers a unique VR device with good video-passthrough of the real world to create mixed reality experiences.

Stan was inspired by the early Oculus device, the DK2, but wanted a better connection to the real world. As he finished his university education, he embarked on the journey to establish the leading European mixed reality hardware technology company. Along the way, he’s received support from industry founders and insiders including Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey, and optics expert, Bernard Kress, of Microsoft and Google.

In this conversation, Stan shares how his passion, a great team, and a few mentors have helped shape the company into Europe’s leading mixed reality hardware company.

Stan starts by laying the foundation for why he believes the Lynx approach to video passthrough is the right path for the market.

Stan goes on to touch on:
- the retention issue for VR devices,
- why the fully-featured AR headsets such as Hololens will cease to exist,
- his approach to establishing a contender to compete against Meta,
- Lynx’s approach to privacy, and
- the opportunity and imperative of being based in Europe.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com. Please consider contributing to my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theARshow.