Vuzix taking a shot at Google & Microsoft

This is very much a company to watch. We know they get displays from Microvision (According to Vuzix financial documents) 

The Blade3000 does look like something that people will wear and even wear in public. (Nothing else passes that test) -- so it's something to watch. It is getting attention in the right places.


Entrepreneur

With two titans and a unicorn startup leaving their footprints in the AR field, how can the much smaller Vuzix compete? By aiming lower, says founder and CEO Paul Travers.

"We come from the perspective of practical," he told me at the company's CES booth. "We don't think you need to land the whale. It's a different approach than most companies."

Indeed, its newest device, the Blade 3000, may just be the first piece of AR hardware to be adapted by tech enthusiasts since the Google Glass. The company is aiming to introduce it to the market for under $1,000 this year, with the price dropping to under $500 in 2018. And unlike the $1,500 Google Glass, which had a design that resembled a one-eyed cyborg, the Blade 3000 looks like a pair of Oakley sunglasses.

***

Vuzix, which was founded in 1997, holds more than 41 patents and has 10 additional patents pending, according to its website. It received a $24.8 million investment from Intel in 2015. Travers had worked at Eastman Kodak but said he left after many of his projects were killed by the company. He first started a business making sound cards in a basement and then sold it.

And even though Vuzix has been around for two decades, he still doesn't consider the company successful.

"If you want to succeed at being an entrepreneur, you just have to not quit, have tenacity," Travers said. "You've got to be willing to hang through the hard stuff."

Interesting stuff from NVIDIA

At one point, you just wonder if the guy slipped just a bit.

To go straight to what we think is the good stuff, start at 34:00....

Thanks Joe!


At Source

ZenPhone AR - Project Tango

This shows a little of what it's up to and how it does it. 

It will be a lot better when there's LiDar and a wearable AR screen

The museum tour was one of the early use cases cited for AR and PicoP.

AsiaTnews

Waymo Manufacturing Partner?

Answers and poses the big questions:

Who would be the manufacturing partner? STM does a lot of automotive work. 

Magna Electronics as well, and they know Microvision. 


They're also talking about selling it to other companies.
Bloomberg


Forbes -- more at the source

Waymo this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit revealed that the latest generation of its hardware and software is being used on Chrysler Pacifica minivans that begin road tests this month. A total of 100 of the vans are getting radar, sensors, cameras and laser Lidar units for 360-degree, high-definition images of a vehicle's surroundings, all made by Waymo.

Having the company’s hardware engineers and software developers work together on the entire system has brought “design-driven” component cost reduction, Krafcik said. Further savings will come from high-volume production.

“We’ve scaled now so that we’re moving from units of tens to units of hundreds,” he said. “Think about the radars – we have six in the cars. We’re building 100 Pacificas now, so that’s 600 individual radar units. That’s quite a bit.”

“As you increase in an order of magnitude from tens to hundreds you’ll find cost reduction, but now we’re getting ready to scale to thousands and tens of thousands and we’re going to find there additional manufacturing cost down efficiencies,” he said. “We’ll also probably find it makes sense to work with a partner to help us manufacture these things.”

Museum Tours with project Tango

There are a few reasons that this is really interesting.

First is that a museum tour kind of application with PicoP was one example cited years ago to stockholders. That the museum's displays could be projected onto a blank wall, and someone who isn't there could experience the exhibit.

Second, this is a use of AR that is already going mainstream.

Thirdly, it's gathering data so that when AR is implemented with glasses, there will be an ecosystem for it to land in -- it will be immediately useful.



Pocket now

Lumin is “a mobile tour that uses Tango capabilities to add AR interactivity and information to further enrich your visit” at the museum, according to the official Google Blog wording. Visitors will be able to explore Ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Mesopotamia, in a very different way; all they have to do is ask for a Lenovo Phab 2 Pro phone (powered by Tango) at the front desk, in order to take their experience to the next level.

Google promises that Tango will reach more museums around the world, and promises uses and benefits which will allow users to experience more: “see more, hear more and learn more” is the tagline, and we can’t wait to find out more about the future of Tango and AR.

Microvision Featured in EEJournal -- LIDAR

More and more is coming out about this. The price improvements claimed by Google are very interesting -- replacing a $75,000 unit by Velodyne with something costing a few hundred dollars.... 

EEJournal

Most recently, lidar has been embodied in slightly gawky units atop cars that just scream, “Something is different about this vehicle!” Using rotating mirrors, a beam can be steered 360° around the vehicle and up and down (to some extent) to map out everything that’s within range. But there’s some thought that, if we’re serious about letting the neighbors see us inside one of those, we need to improve the aesthetics.

This came up in a presentation by MicroVision at last fall’s MEMS Executive Congress. They have a MEMS mirror setup that we saw a couple of years ago as used in their pico-projector application. They use the same basic setup for heads-up displays and for lidar (which uses one extra ASIC); they adapt to the application by changing out the laser diodes and software.

Rather than rotating 360°, their MEMS mirror waves back and forth in a sinusoidal scan, controlled by a 27-Hz resonator; individual pixels are defined by turning the laser diode on and off. The faster the scan, the faster you can get an overview of what’s nearby. By slowing the scan, you get more detail. It sounds simple in principle, but they say that they have to battle jitter in the mirror and temperature effects on the laser. Control and compensation are the tough parts.

Check this out at TheVerge

Self Driving Cars -- Sebastian Thrun

I was drawn to the article because of the person and the topic. 

If we accept this as true, people will adopt self-driving cars faster than we think. 

They're going to need 3D sensors... 

GovTech.com

Q: What technical barriers remain?

A: When a human driver makes a mistake, he or she learns but nobody else learns. When a self-driving car makes a mistake, all the other cars learn from it as well as the unborn cars, future cars. The rate of progress is much faster.

The point has been reached when self-driving cars are safer than human driving. Look at Google: There are 300,000 miles between critical interventions when a human driver has to take over. That’s longer than the typical mean times between accidents for human drivers. The technology is there. What’s missing are business models.

Facebook Building a phone?

So, project Ara was one of those programs that it seemed PicoP would be an excellent addition to. 

Google recently shelved Ara. Apparently it's popping up over at Facebook.

Given Facebook's past of gobbling things up, and throwing a lot of resources in directions, this could get interesting.



C|Net  -- More at the Source

Ara, a Lego-like phone with modular parts, would let buyers snap on a better camera, additional batteries or any other creative hardware a developer might dream up. It was set to be the first phone entirely designed by Google, the three men claimed.

Then the Ara project was abruptly shelved.

But now, all three of those men work for Building 8 -- a secretive new division of Facebook. There, they've been joined by an impressive list of heavy hitters that reads like a who's who of the tech world: Motorola, Tesla, Apple and Amazon, in addition to that contingent of Google ex-pats.


What's Building 8?

Originally, it sounded like Building 8 was a skunkworks where Facebook could prototype a whole bunch of new technologies -- like 360-degree video cameras -- and figure out the fastest way to get them into consumers' hands, usually through partnerships.