Hello everyone! Thanks for joining us on a brand new podcast episode of The Leader Show With Lou Carter. Our guest today is Paul Travers, the President/CEO of Vuzix, one of the most sought-after technology companies that deals in display engines, waveguide optics, augmented reality, and wearable computing.
Vuzix has recently been certified as a Most Loved Workplace and one of Newsweek’s top 100 most loved workplaces. With that brief introduction done and dusted, let’s jump into the conversation with Paul Travers.
Lou kicks off this episode by asking Paul about the driving force behind Vuzix’s success in the realms of virtual reality and display.
In response, Paul mentions that the main reason Vuzix has been successful so far is because of the efforts put in by its team members. Everyone working at Vuzix is aligned with the company’s vision, which ensures flawless collaboration across all teams.
Citing the metaverse, Paul highlights that Vuzix has been a player in this field since 1993. This speaks volumes about the expertise the company possesses in the tech that enables virtual reality. And the best part is that all his teams are psyched to be leading the charge in this industry, meaning that they are always highly motivated.
When asked how he brings employees, customers, and the entire ecosystem together as a leader, Paul mentions that it is inbred in his team. Some of the companies that Vuzix works with have to hire and train hundreds of people regularly. Using Vuzix’ VR glasses and custom software, these partners can streamline the training process, thereby fostering a collaborative work culture.
The fact that people’s base pay has gone up over the past few years makes employees excited when they come to work. It’s also because the glasses the company manufactures tend to gamify and make things happen faster and easier and onboarding quicker, making people’s jobs easier.
Additionally, technology has a major role in bringing employees and customers together. It allowed people to get into hospitals where they could not before. A person no longer needs to have to do proof of concepts anymore to use VR technology and glasses. They just need a piece of software, a laptop, a set of glasses, and remote support software.
Another reason people in Vuzix’s ecosystem thrive is that they have witnessed firsthand the fruits of their hard work. During COVID, when people were sequestered at home, they were busy making medical devices, which greatly helped many people amid the tough time.
Paul mentions that it was quite gratifying when they witnessed open heart surgeries take place with the help of their products. Thus, his employees could see the fruits of their labor and get rewarded for it.
Talking about rewards, Paul also mentions that every single employee working at Vuzix is a partner in the company, so they are sort of rowing the boat together. While recruiting, Paul makes it clear to the prospects that each of them will have a stock option plan to motivate them to give their best.
Being a public company, Vizux is always getting measured by the markets on how they perform. So, when they are performing well, their stock prices go up dramatically, which is, of course, a direct result of the hard work and dedication of the employees toward the company.
Lou compares Paul with Elon Musk and calls him the Elon Musk of virtual reality glasses because of his engineering mindset. However, Paul’s unsure if he can be referred to as the Elon Musk of this industry since Paul is a technological person and likes to be on the plant floor. His primary focus is to work with engineers and be a part of solutions at Vuzix, which helps set the company’s pace.
Paul and Lou discuss a lot more on this episode of the Leadership podcast. Let us know your thoughts on this very informational podcast episode.
Louis Carter : Paul, it's super great to have you here with us today. Congratulations on becoming a Most Loved Workplace Certified and one of Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces.
Paul Travers : It's fantastic, Lou. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having us on to talk about Vuzix and our team, but yeah, it's super exciting to be included in the list, frankly.
LC : That's really great to hear. You know, and today we'll talk about all different kinds of things, learn more about Vuzix, you as the driving force behind Vuzix. And also I'd like to talk about a little bit about your patented incentive program and stock options, all the things that makes Vuzix really an awesome most loved workplace. And get a little bit into your technologies too, because you really are the driving force behind everything with the virtual display fields and virtual reality in the, in general, in the field, as well as in Vuzix.
PT : You know, a lot of people say that and it's true that I'm the guy that sits at the top, but part of the reason why Vuzix is one of the most loved places to work is because we have a team of people here that really make it happen. And I think everybody's pretty well aligned with the vision here too. And I tell you Lou, we're changing the world. I mean, you just saw Facebook with their name changed to Meta. Well, that whole idea, the metaverse and, you know, stepping into the digital world and then the real world in the digital world coming together- we've been doing this since ‘93 actually! We were the first company to come out with a consumer VR headset. Mind you, we had a name change from that first company, but still, Vuzix has been leading in this space. And I think our whole team here, everybody from the people on the plant floor, right on through to the engineers that build it to our sales team, we're all pretty psyched to be leading the charge in this industry, which is gonna be the future of computing. So, lots of great reasons to be excited to be here at Vuzix.
LC : Your field really leads in this exponential growth in technology, and you've done that as well. And you're right, in the nineties you were doing this! When we weren't even thinking about any of it, and now with the metaverse, you're creating this new way of thinking, being, knowing, doing. And that's what kids are doing today. They're creating their own computer programs, they're living within these new environments. And when they come into the workforce and when they're 20, they'll be creating those new environments and ready to go. So you're actually creating that future for our next generation.
PT : I tell you, Luke, think about it for a minute- from the perspective of an enterprise for a second. Yeah everybody I think, well, most people have a feel for virtual reality today. And you put the glasses on and you step inside to a virtual game kind of a thing, and maybe you converse and talk and shoot the bad guys. For Vuzix, we're working with folks and our hardware connects the digital portion of what they're creating. The Ava factory, there's a digital twin in that factory, the entire factory, every sensor, every motor, everything is sitting out on the internet. Now you got an employee who's walking on the plant floor maintaining it. How does he know the status of those sensors? And if a system is wrong? And so what Vuzix does is- our glasses, you put them on and they connect that digital twin, the digital world, the metaverse as it were, and it connects it to the user in the real world.
So he can be walking down the plant floor, he looks down at the motor, he can say, Hey, that needs maintenance now so the plant doesn't go down. Maybe it's a production line, so we better get the bearings replaced or get them oiled in advance. And it just connects that digital space with the real world. And that's the beginnings of changing the way everything gets done. It's also gonna be changing the way people do everything. I mean, you think about today, phones are being completely modified. You take your phone, you point it down the street with the camera, and instead of maps where you're looking down at the map on your phone, you see the street and there's an arrow painted on the road in front of you, and there's a little fox that comes out and runs in front of you to help you to get to the restaurant that you want to get to. It's not designed for a phone, that's designed for a pair of glasses. So operating systems, everything about computing is bringing the digital and the real world together, and Vuzix is driving it. And it's my team with their vision, not just me, but it's a great crew of folks that have learned the whole future here, and it's been over the last- since 1993.
LC : In bringing your employees, your workforce, your customers, your entire vendor and ecosystem together to not just learn, but believe and know that they're part of this new future- how does that work for you? How do you create that kind of collaborative community for yourself as a leader?
PT : I think it's inbred. I mean, my sales guys, the business development guys here, and it's not difficult when you're dealing with companies that have got supply chain problems today, and they're trying to resolve them. They've got onboarding. Some of the companies we work with are bringing on literally, you know, 300-400 people a day, even in some cases. And how do you train all those people? Using our tools, it's an obvious easy answer, and it's the only way, quite frankly, that a lot of these things can get done. I would also say that, you know, people's base pays are going up. I mean, around the world, I think in the United States, $15 an hour is becoming sort of the minimum wage. And so you need to be able to get more, and you need to excite your employees when they come in.
And our glasses sort of gamify it and make things happen faster and easier and onboarding quicker, and it makes people's jobs easier, and that sells itself. Yes, you have to open the door to begin with. And in fact, it's been only 20-odd years of opening doors, quite frankly. But with Covid, remote support, being able to be in operating theaters where you couldn't before because you have the glasses to remotely get into the operating theater. I mean, these kinds of things, I'll just like, the minute somebody sees the first one is done, it's far enough along to convince the next guy to do it. And today, there weren't over a thousand operating theaters around the world. And it all started from the very first ones being in Taiwan with one of my employee's dads, who was the head of surgery and the entire operation.
But once people saw this being done, it allowed people to get into hospitals where they couldn't before. So the technology sells itself a little bit, but it has taken a long time to get to the point to where it is that easy. Applications just work today. You don't have to do proof of concepts anymore. You just take a piece of software, just like you have a laptop and you're putting Word on it. You take our glasses, you put remote support software on it, you put knee surgery software on it from companies like Pixie, and boom, they're doing something that could never be done before. And you don't have to build it from the ground up. It's point and click now. So it's getting easier and the vision's easy to share because it's so exciting the way this is changing the world.
LC : You said it so well there. I know that the way that companies are most loved and they succeed is when you believe in, everyone believes in and utilizes the technology. And that's the perfect example. As you said, your operating theaters, those are your employees, your customers, , your ecosystem of people who are part of who you are, and everybody is into it. People thrive in an environment that uses your very product.
PT : So in the middle of Covid, right, everybody's sequestered at home and the likes, but my team, because we make medical devices, the manufacturing plant floor could be here. And nothing was more gratifying to the team than they were seeing an open heart surgery and the results of what was being done with product that they built with their hands coming off of the manufacturing floor, that these guys, I mean, they, it's so important to them. Even the quality systems are easy to put in place here because everybody's so wanting to get it right. And it's exciting to see the results of it. You know, some companies come and go and you work for AUM and you never put a product in the marketplace. Quite the contrary here at Vuzix, it's being successful and our employees are seeing the fruits of their labor happen, and they get rewarded for it at the same time. Every single person that works at Vuzix has a shareholder of Vuzix they're partners with the whole team here. So, you know, we're all rowing the boat together.
LC : So tell me more about that, about the shareholder stock options, the Patent Incentive program. How does that work for you and what is it like? Tell us about it.
PT : Yes. Well, first of all, the basics. I mean, we're a public company today, which is for a company that's in the metaverse like we are, there are very few pure-play public companies. So Vuzix's stock symbol VUZI for those interested, we're out there and we're getting measured by the markets on how we perform. And my employees, I make it a point that every single one of them, when they come in the door, end up with a stock option plan, so that as our value goes up, because of everybody's hard work, the value of their stock goes up. And, and how, you know, quite frankly, some of these options can be worth an awful lot of money. I mean, a year and a half ago or so, I guess we were probably trading at unfortunately about 80 cents for various reasons. It was going into Covid, almost everybody was getting trashed.
And, you know, over the last year we were up as much as in the high twenties and we're trading around $12 or $15 a share. That's a great appreciation from 15 cents or 30, excuse me, 80 cents to where we are today. And you know, quite frankly, we're in an industry that's going to be in the billions, it's completely changing the future of computing, right? So there's so many places in the world where our technology is gonna be important in play. And every shareholder here, every employee here is a shareholder and can realize the value and appreciation for the work that they do besides just the paycheck.
I think we have pretty good benefits also. I noticed we looked, there were 80 or 90 employees on your list. I think Vuzix now- just since you guys voted us to be one of the most loved workplaces- just since then, we're now at 110 employees. So we're growing. And again, it's an exciting place. People who come up with ideas, and it can be somebody from the plant floor to some of our senior engineers, it doesn't matter. If you help develop a patent here at Vuzix, you get bonuses for having done that. There are incentives all over the place to be at Vuzix. Not to mention the wonderful incentive of just the work product that everybody is doing, being a lead company competing with some of the biggest companies out there and winning. It's exciting.
LC : Paul, first of all, congratulations on becoming public. That is an enormous life event, an enormous business event. What an incredible thing. And your performance has been amazing. I wanted to ask you, how has been the reaction from employees and the investor community about most love work becoming a most love workplace and certified.
PT : I mean, it's a wonderful stake in the ground. The number of comments, emails, feedback I've gotten from some of our vendors, you know, some of our closest companies that we work with, of course, our employees are super excited to see that we're there. There's a thread on LinkedIn that is probably one of the more visited threads regarding Vuzix's winning this. So it's been really good for Vuzix actually. It's bringing a lot of attention to the company coz not everybody gets on the top of one on our list. And I look at some of the names on that list and we are in really good company.
LC : Absolutely. And so well deserved. This patent and center program is amazing. The stock options are amazing. The sense of the future is incredible. Now that you're growing as well, you're part of something just enormous. It kind of reminds me of like kind of Elon Musk and his thoughts about the future because you're going really with those other technologies, you're following those technologies as you go into space, as you drive your car, as we continue in, dare I say the word: singularity, that's another a hundred years. We're not there yet, but as we continue on that path of just technological exponential growth, you are in it and can be and really can be applied to so many different parts of that value chain. How can anybody not want to do this?
PT : It's interesting. Maybe we think a lot of ourselves here, but we consider ourselves really the pioneers in the space, not just sort of following. I mean, these are hard problems to solve and there's very few companies that are actually generating revenues with smart glasses and AR glasses and the likes, and the enterprise space has embraced our products. And the reason why they have is we have years of experience here. We have intellectual properties. If, if you came to our plant floor, it's like a semiconductor plant floor but for optics, it's quite amazing. And you put all this stuff together and it's allowed us to make solutions that actually work. Some of the competing products that are out there are heavy. You know, if you put something on and it's in the way and it requires a significant force on your forehead, so you've got a red band when you're done and you know you're going into a nine-hour operation, you just can't wear that for that period of time.
We have, you know, eight-core processors, they're really trimmed 2.8-ounce packages. They're designed to wear all day long. And it's come from a history of solving problems and making solutions that actually work. It's one thing to make a bulky thing cord going down to another thing that you gotta have that gets in the way. It's quite another to make these super lightweight devices that you can actually go to work with today. And we've done well with that. But the next generation technology that we're working on, Lou, you mentioned Tesla, you can imagine if you had a battery, if Tesla had a battery that could get them 10 times the charge so the range that they could get out of their current battery, some of the optics and the display engines and tech that we're working on here at Vuzix are gonna enable that kind of thing but for smart glasses.
Before these things come to the point where everybody wants them, they have to be sexy, trim, and slim. And my team knows that some of the stuff that we're doing is enabling that kind of stuff and that's the future of this industry. And yeah, it's interesting. We have companies like Arc Invest who is a big investor in Tesla. They're also an investor in Vuzix and the reason why I believe is that they see we have this vision for the future. And so as cool as our stuff is today, wait to see what's coming. And I think that's part of what drives the rest of my team here. They know that it's such an exciting time and the whole world is coming around to realize that this technology's the future.
LC : It absolutely is the future. And you've led your way in doing so. And what I wanted to say too is the level of exponential growth and user experience that you have created with your employees is incredible and it leads the way. If you look at your competitors and there are others and they are in AR space and glasses space, they pale in comparison to where you guys have gone and how you've looked at the experience. So how, and you've finely tuned it and you've become experts in UX as well. Tell me about like that kind of fine tuning, you know, I know I always talk about Elon, but I know Elon gets on the floor, he looks at everything. He has an engineering mindset. Tell me about how that happens at Vusix in terms of sort of the excellence and user experience and getting to that level that you have achieved.
PT : I mean, I don't know if Paul Travers could be compared to Elon Musk. I have a lot of respect for Elon, but I am a techy person. I like to be on the plant floor. I like to work with engineers. I like to be part of the solutions here. And so I think that it does help set the pace here at Vuzix. I’m not the only one though, doing this now. We have teams of folks, but we have experts that have been at this longer than any other company on the planet. If you think about it, we go back to ‘93, right? And so I've said this before, when we want an expert to help us resolve a problem, I don't have to go hire somebody. For the most part, there are folks here that have done it before, between my own team and some of the outside folks that we work with. We, really do lead the future of this industry right now. Lots of big dogs are coming, we know they're all gonna play here, but we think we've got some intellectual property that probably will be in a lot of devices coming up besides our own even. And when it comes to enterprise without doubt, Vuzix is the lead horse in the race today.
LC : So I might call you the Elon Musk of the virtual reality glasses industry. Okay, I can dub you that. What do you think, Paul? This is perfect for stock options.
PT : I love Elon and being compared to him is not a bad thing.
LC : But it's not a bad thing. It isn't. And well, cool. So patent and center program, stock options, amazing vision for the future. You're doing incredibly well in UX design. Your patents are becoming part of your own technologies and many other technologies. Life is good. I mean, life is good. Things are getting better. Things could not get better. What is next?
PT : We started a little bit of history on Vuzix. You know, we made these great big bulky headsets. If people look up the VFX One headgear, you'll see there's this football helmet-sized gizmo. And I will say in some ways it looks every bit as good as a modern VR headset. We had hundreds of titles that worked with it. You know, titles like Quake, Dune, these first-person shooters, all of these… This was early though, ‘93, ‘94. You think about the pc, they had VGA graphics adapters, and Nvidia, I'm not even sure if they existed back then. We regrouped because we knew these were big bulky things, and the processors weren't fast enough, and we couldn't build virtual worlds good enough to make a metaverse back then although the concept of the metaverse was there.
But in any event, we moved to the defense space, we made tactical eyewear for the special forces. We worked with companies like iRobot and they came to us, the special forces guys and said, look, this is cool. And it allows us to do things like drive robots around inside buildings and the likes. But we want to get rid of this and we want to get rid of our laptops and we want super lightweight glasses that look like Oakley's. We call it the Oakley Gate. So we learned through all of this that if you make a big bulky, heavy thing, you're gonna fail. And the sexier you can make it, the more people wanna put it on and wear it. And you think about people's iPhones today, they pick 'em up or they're smartphones that they even polish them at times because they're like a fashion statement to them. Glasses are even more difficult because you wear them all the time. So this look and feel critical and Vuzix, since we started with the defense guys, have been trying to get to this Oakley gate, that fashion look and feel, solve that problem.
And there's fundamental things, the processors, I mean, it's amazing what companies are doing now with smaller and smaller nodes. They're building their silicone on, all of that stuff is shrinking. I mean, when I started my first business, a 10 megabyte hard drive was a big deal.
LC : Yeah [laughs]
PT : There's 32 gigabytes that ship in our current glasses. So it's all shrinking and all that. But the optics right now, if you see most of our competitors, they have great big optics engines and things that stick out that make you look like you just stepped out to Star-ship Enterprise. The display engines that drive those optics, these are all the things where Vusix has a big focus. And you'll see, even coming up here at CES, it's gonna be a lot of fun. And we have several new products that we'll be announcing at that show and showing and the mission is to get to that Oakley gate. And I think Vuzix is getting closer and closer. And in 2022 you'll see some really cool stuff, enterprise-focused. And then in ‘23, I think you're gonna see an even further leap forward with display engines that are just unbelievable and waveguides that I think outperform everything out there today. So you put those things together and you can start to make that Oakley gate that everybody wants.
LC : At CES can we tell people, what they can look forward to? Or is there a secret that you're, you may not tell them or…?
PT : I can only say you should look forward to CES.
LC : Absolutely. Paul, would you be willing to do a show and tell with what's behind you? The wonderful displays?
PT : These are just displays, but I could pick one up and give you guys a feel for how they operate.
LC : That'll be wonderful. I'd love that. Yeah.
PT : Well, let me offer one more piece.
LC : Sure, of course.
PT : Well, the other piece is a software. So to be successful in enterprise today, it's not just, here's a cool computer pair of glasses cuz people put them on like, okay, that's really interesting, but what do we do with it? And so Vuzix has a bunch of ISB partners, guys like team viewer and the likes, and their software works on our glasses. We also have our own SaaS model software that we're coming out with that are in some vertical markets. And what's nice about these are in an enterprise, if you can solve a problem, people are willing to pay for that. If you can get significant ROI and annual recurring revenue fees for software. So, you're seeing Vuzix starting to do that. We're building an ecosystem of the hardware and the software in a package that from a revenue perspective and from a margin perspective will raise from both sides of the equation.
So we're building this ecosystem and we're building the next generation of glasses for the future. So we've got a, good position and quite frankly, we've thought it through from the perspective of being in this business. We're not just a waveguide supplier as it were because today being a waveguide supplier is probably a hard business. There's just not that many people shipping yet. So, we, as know, we sell full system solutions and people are buying them in volume and they're buying them in thousands of units per quarter today and growing.
LC : What what's great about what you said is that everybody wins in your ecosystem, and they get to be in their own strengths and you help bring them up while you go up with them. Everybody wins.
PT : Yeah, everybody wins. And I think that's the key, right? I mean it doesn't- selling ice cubes to Eskimos is not very easy to do, frankly.
LC : I'm so stoked to see those glasses and learn about them. Would you show them? Everybody wants to know what they are. Would you like to show them to us?
PT : Yes, I will.
LC : I remember when you guys were interfacing with the iPhone, that was cool
PT : That Lou, the glasses that we made back then, they were consumer glasses.
LC : Yeah.
PT : They were not AR glasses in that they were immersive. Right. But literally, it was a really tiny slim piece that went in front of your eyes and you'd take your iPod and you'd plug it into the cable.
LC : Yeah, I've got it. I bought it. I followed you guys since the beginning, did you know that? [laughs] It was, I got the monocular one.
PT : Oh cool, cool. Yeah.
LC : I wanted to get the binocular. You made the binocular?
PT : We did. And Lou, that holiday season, we completely sold out of that product. It was an OLED based display, small company. We had limited resources. So we built what we felt the volume requirements would be. And the OLED supplier that we had couldn't keep up. They were a small company too. And so we just sold out of every single thing that we had that year. It was one of our, I would suggest, it wasn't an expensive device. Still, it was between 250 and 350 bucks, something like that. But it was so great because you just plug it into the iPod…
LC : It was awesome
PT : … And if you got a monochrome iPod, this was like beautiful full color and you could watch your videos on it. And so yeah.
LC : You could do your email too.
PT : Oh yeah. Mm-hmm.
LC : So anyway, I missed that one. So you had the developer version and the consumer version and I missed the binocular one. But I got the monocular and I was excited about that because you were ahead of your time. No one was doing that. Nobody.
PT : This whole space has been a little bit ahead of its time. We, I mean if you think about it since, gosh, the early nineties, VR has been trying to make it in the world. Earlier than that even if you go back to, you know, US defense programs and the likes, it's all changing today though. Companies like Facebook/Meta, the world's being designed now to connect the digital and the real world together and the technologies getting to a point to where it can easily do that. I mean this thing's got an eight-core processor in it.
LC : That's the one.
PT : Yeah, in the front. It's got a 4K camera that's image stabilized. It's got auto-focus built in. It's got this rail, it's a standardized rail we have here at Vuzix. So you can slide it on different mounts and you can see the guys in the back there. They're all sporting a rail that allows you to do this with it. It has a beautiful OLED display with like 10,000:1 contrast ratio. So it's crisp right to the corners. I can put it low in my vision like this and point it down so the camera can look at the work product. Not to throw others under the bus, but there are some companies that have it so it just sits up here like this. Google glasses. So if you're a doctor and you're performing open heart surgery, let's say- one of the cool applications is training in the medical space.
You have a doctor down in South Africa, he's trying to do an operation. He's got the glasses on and he's looking at the operation. The expert on the other end, okay, he's got a screen just like we have in front of us here. But on the outside edge of the screen, he's got heart rate, blood pressure, he's got CAT scans, he's got X-ray x-rays, and in the center, he's got the doctor's point of view. So if you got Google glass on, you almost have to break your head to get the camera to look down at the work surface. It's designed to be able to be moved around in the user's field of vision so that you can put it where you want it to perform the function that you're trying to do. At the same time, with this beautiful AK camera, I'm streaming high-resolution content that the doctor on the other end is seeing the sutures even. It's that fine of a resolution that it can see.
So this is a workhorse. Again, unlike some of our competitors it's designed so that you can run it all out so the processor doesn't have to get throttled. That's part of the reason why it's got this built with this sort of design here for air flow through the device. We didn't wanna cripple it, but we wanted it super lightweight, 2.8 ounces kind of a thing. And you know, you wear it, like I said, like this, you can put it anywhere you want in your vision. You can adjust the eye piece here. We have several new versions of this that are coming. I can't get into the details on it, but it makes it even more flexible for the user and there are more sensors in the head of it so that you can do other things. Today we have doctors that use this, they put the glasses on. The camera- you're doing knee surgery, okay- screwed to the person's knee are these upright mechanical devices and there's QR codes that are sitting on the top of those flat super structures.
The glasses with the right software look at where those are in space and they know where they are in relation to the knee. So the doctor literally just reaches down and adjusts a couple of screws while he is looking through the glasses. It's telling him the angle that these things are against each other. So, you get it just in the right spot so that when you put the screws in the guy's knee, they're aligned and screwed in the right place so that when the guy gets up from the table, he's not walking a little bit shorter on the right-hand side right? I mean this is all stuff that nobody was doing two years ago and these glasses are a workhorse in those kinds of environments. They are not see-through though, in this particular case it's occluded, right? I can't look through this eyepiece.
These glasses on the other hand, these guys are see-through and with this pair, there's a touchpad on the side. There's a high-resolution autofocus camera built into this guy also. It runs Android, as does this other one. There are also touch pads, there's also voice control in all of these. Our newest voice is amazing. You can like operate every single thing you want. You just got the glasses on, take pictures when he grabs a picture, you can post it real-time if you want now up to YouTube or Facebook or you know, all of those kinds of social media applications. So, there's this whole first-person point-of-view stuff that's going on. Now, some of the smart glasses that are coming out from companies like Facebook and others and Snapchat, it is just about taking a camera today because that's all the tech that they can fit in the glasses. These guys do all of those things today, you can run an Amazon Alexa on these glasses and when you put these guys on, this is like looking through the heads-up display on a high-end car or maybe a fighter pilot's cockpit.
So the image literally gets projected inside this lens and it floats out in front of you. Like it was a 3D holographic kind of image. So it's a completely different experience. It's designed to be more in the real world with imagery. So you can do things like turn a valve and as you're turning the valve, you can see the open or closed amount that the valve is in real-time. This is this whole metaverse and tying into the real world and the digital world and I'm a technician on the plant floor and I'm getting real-time feedback of all those sensors and systems on that plant floor equipment directly connected based upon what the glasses are seeing now. These are cool. This is our blade.
LC : That's the blade, that's right. I've read about the blade. Those are awesome. It's so sleek. It's sleek, it's cool looking, heads up display. It's a precision instrument used for operating theaters. I mean it's incredible.
PT : This is the display engine that's inside the blade. So this whole end, this whole piece, this giant beautiful D O P display engine, Vuzix's designs, this and where we're going, the next generation display engines.
LC : Oh wow. You, that's like intel. You guys are, you're looking at the chip down.
PT : Yeah. It's sort of like Intel inside. I mean, let's see if I can't balance that thing on there. Right?
LC : Oh, sweet. Whoa.
PT : You can imagine how much trimmer and slimmer things get when display engines and optics, which now we can make these half a millimeter thin as opposed to the two millimeters that they are today. I mean, all of this stuff is shrinking and it's allowing us to make glasses that are- ta-da - the Oakley Gate
LC : That would fit here.
PT : It would, it probably would disappear in that temple.
LC : It and I, I could do the heads-up display here, which would come here to binocular view. Yeah. I mean, which would be incredible. And on yours as well. Yours are sleek, so they're sweet.
PT : Come to CES Lou.
LC : I really want to! [laughs]
PT : For sure.
LC : I would love, you know, I don't know if I told you, but I've been in technology since I was a kid. I was programming when I was seven in the Hayes 1800, you know, Bob Micro modded with the Apple Two Plus and Basic Pascal. I've been in technology for, you know, 45 years. I love it. I love everything about it.
PT : You gotta be super excited right now because there's so much change happening. I mean, it was cool. Apple went from the Newton to iPods to the iPhone. That's all evolutionary stuff and revolutionary at the same time. It hasn't stopped and the best parts are coming. It's an exciting time for sure.
LC : Well, I'm excited about it and I'm excited about everything that you've accomplished and you're going public is incredible and even all of your products are beautiful. The Blade is beautiful. The heads-up display is incredible. The fact that you're getting to that chip level that can go into most temples is amazing. I love your heads-up display. You guys are right in the future, right there.
PT : Thanks Lou. You wanna know why everybody likes to work here? That's part of the reason. They're building the future with Vuzix. And that's the other thing. There's nobody that stands here taking credit. It, it's a team of folks and it takes everybody here to make this work. There's no way I could do every piece of this. It's very true that I present well and I know the story and I have the vision for where we're going, but it takes a village as they say. And I think all of my employees appreciate the fact that the management here at Vuzix understands that.
LC : Keep on prospering and live long and prosper as we say. [Laughs]
PT : Absolutely.
LC : See you soon.
PT : See you.
