Dr Chris Parkinson and Vuzix' Smart Glasses

We explore how smart glasses moved from bulky prototypes to practical tools, why waveguides make displays vanish into lenses, and how hybrid AI solves the offline problem. Dr. Chris Parkinson explains the tradeoffs between tethered and on-board compute, and where enterprise adoption is outpacing consumer demand.

• Waveguides turning thin lenses into bright displays
• Tethered glasses as lightweight monitors vs full Android on-head
• Enterprise durability, all-day shifts, and safety constraints
• Privacy lessons from Google Glass and why context matters
• Vuzix strategy supplying components and building solutions
• Manufacturing waveguides at scale in the US
• Weight, battery, comfort limits and power tradeoffs
• Monocular vs binocular displays, resolution realities
• Prescription clip-ins and optical placement
• AI voice interfaces, cloud vs edge, hybrid workflows

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Background

Roopinder 0:19

Hello, and welcome to FoDES, the Future of Design and Engineering Software Podcast. My name is Roopinder Tara. On the show, we will have guests that will discuss tools and technology that engineers will find interesting and useful. Joining me today is Dr. Chris Parkinson, president of Vuzix, a supplier of AI-powered smart classes, advanced waveguides, and augmented reality technologies for defense and enterprise applications. Dr. Parkinson was co-founder and CTO and CEO at RealWare, a competitor to Vuzix. He has 30 years of experience in this industry. You might say he's a visionary in an industry that's all about vision.

Chris 1:02

Where are you? I'm in eastern Washington State.

Roopinder 1:04

I see. Eastern Washington State. So that's in the high plateau, I mean?

Chris 1:09

It's a desert. It's in the rain shadow behind Seattle, 200 miles away from Seattle. So it's dry, desert-like.

Roopinder 1:15

What made you live there?

Chris 1:16

Well, there's a Department of Energy National Laboratory up here called the Hamford Works. And I came out to see a postdoc there many years ago.

Roopinder 1:24

Oh, and you loved it.

Chris 1:25

I did it. My wife to me, and she's a local girl, so we're pretty much based over here. Very good. So we're here as to learn.

Roopinder 1:31

And this podcast is called The Future of Design and Engineering Software. We also add to that hardware as well. What you're working on is one of my wishes that I hope to see sometime before I retire. Smart glasses, they're one of those things that's been promised to me for years, like the flying car, tricorder, and Star Trek or Dick Tracy's watch. I believe I have the Dick Tracy watch. The tricorder is close to an iPhone. Yeah, but I don't have my spying car or my smart glasses. There you go. Is that a working model? Well, it's a working device.

What Smart Glasses Can Do Today

Chris 2:04

Is it? So display and voice, you drive it. Uh yeah, it's closer than you think this technology.

Roopinder 2:10

Is that right?

Chris 2:11

I think so.

Roopinder 2:11

That's what we'll find out, right? Okay. Now, are you gonna be able to show that? I don't know how you can show that to be interesting.

Chris 2:17

Yeah, because what I'm showing you that represent products that have been on sale of music for a little while. So I'm not showing you any of the secret RD.

Roopinder 2:25

Okay.

Chris 2:25

I've got lots of that, but that's behind the camera, not in front of the camera.

Roopinder 2:30

What does it do? Where do you want to start on this little journey? Okay. Here's maybe with my wishes. I want to wear something on my face, which I can get all the information that I would ordinarily like right now. I want it to be filming. The last few seconds, just so I could play the back in case I miss it. Like that, or show me my calendar appointments on the screen. So that sort of thing. Information right here, right on my hand. I don't want to look at my wrist, I don't actually look at my phone. Always there. When I go bike riding, I want it that information to be visible rather than looking down, which is dangerous, right? I want it to be projected into my ledges. Are you able to dig that? I think you can do that today.

Chris 3:07

Even if you look at what Zuckerberg has announced this week. The concept of having a display built into glasses, the display type is called a waveguide. So you inject the RGB colour on one side of the glasses, it belts inside the internal reflection of the glass and turns out and injects into your eye.

Roopinder 3:35

That was very uh very compact, actually.

Chris 3:37

Yeah, this is typically this is as bad as lightweight as it gets. So if you look on the website, this is known as the Z100 device. It's basically a Bluetooth-powered projector in here, projects into the screen. There's Bluetooth to your smartphone. All the content comes from your smartphone. Like we have a tiny battery. That's it. The whole thing just works in ways. And this one, you can see a blue tint here, I think, on the camera. So you've got one display that lights up.

Roopinder 4:02

It doesn't look bad on you.

Chris 4:03

So this represents one end of the spectrum where it's like it's a computer. In this case, this is a monitor on your head, a monitor with something. So now it's got to get the data and the content from somewhere, and that's where maybe your smartphone comes into it, they pair it together. This is a very powerful device.

Roopinder 4:17

Right.

Chris 4:18

So you've got endless spectrum where it's all the processing's in, this is just a lightweight thing. Then you go a bit crazier, a bit heavier, and you say, I don't want the smartphone, I want the smartphone to be in here completely. This is a pair of glasses known as the Ultralite Pro, which are coming from Vuzix. This is an advanced prototype product. This has two displays with full colour, and it has a computer engine here running a full Android operating system. But that requires more power, more battery-like, in a bigger four-packed tap. So that shows you the gamut of the technology space today. Super lightweight, it's brain dead, it's a monitor. This one is super smart and does everything you want. The industry is trying to figure out how to make the super smart one less heavy.

Tethered Displays vs Onboard Compute

Roopinder 4:59

It's all about militarization because there's headsets, RBR headsets, for example, that have very good graphics, but nobody wants to wear them for long. So militarization is the key here. What have you you've done with your designs, not just Vuzix, but your previous company, RealWare, made it more acceptable to that? Google Glass?

Chris 5:19

I think we broke a lot of ground there. In fact, V6 has run a parallel path with RealWare, which has been head in head for years, doing the same thing. We're basically bringing technology that is fieldable to the enterprise. The enterprise is a lot more forgiving in some respects and a lot less forgiving. It's more forgiving because in the enterprise, we need to deliver a tool that does a job. And that tool can be a little bit bigger, maybe a little bit heavier and more robust than one a consumer would accept. So the consumer wants the glasses like you're wearing today. Anything that weighs above that or gets in the way doesn't look as cool, they're not going to like it. The enterprise, on the other hand, people are already wearing high-viz jackets or things around their belt. It's just a tool. And when you consider it as a tool, you can get away with a lot. There's a typical version of the Enterprise headset that clips onto a safety hat, Facebook caps, and it gives you a display that's designed in a different way. Now, over the glasses. Here it's designed to get out of the way when you don't need it, and it's in the way when you do make it. It's designed to last all day long for full working shift. So different design constraints. But it's what it's allowed the companies to do is work on all the other facets, not just the display and the weight, but the user interface, the control, the voice recognition, using it to try and making it drive, and the application stack around it. And so I think over the years, the enterprise has now come to accept that this is a form factor that they will adopt in the future. It's gold trail, this is a bit crazy too. Oh, this is now becoming standard. They're seeing enough of these around that they like glasses, but they also understand the ruggedness required. For example, if I take these lightweight glasses into a warehouse, they'll get destroyed and broken immediately. Stuff needs to be rough and it needs to be tough. So here you have smartgrass designed for warehousing, where people bash it all day long, different design constraints. So I think the bottom line is all these devices are fit for purpose.

Roopinder 7:09

You have to design I didn't realize that headwear in warehouses was that prone to bashing. That must mean their heads are getting bashed too, right?

Enterprise Needs And Rugged Design

Chris 7:18

Well, because you've got people, if you are a consumer buying Apple glasses, you're spending $2,000, you're going down to the optician and have them all dialed in and nice and neat, you're gonna take care of them. When you're a warehouse picker, you're paid the minimum wage to go in and pick for a few hours, and then you're done. It's just a piece of equipment, it's a hammer. You drop it, throw it around, you put it down when you finish with it. You don't care, love it.

Roopinder 7:39

So it's gonna put up with a lot more abuse. I remember the Google Glass, they had some lot of issues. I don't think that Google anticipated them. One was the fact that people rejected and were openly hostile to the idea of being recorded against their wishes. What have you done about that?

Chris 7:55

Have you considered that hostility came because people were walking into bars and pubs and doing that? You took it into the consumer world, and the consumers are not ready for this. Even everyone's got their phone, and the moment anything happens, everyone whips out their phone and recalls everything. Different matter. The point is it, yeah, the backlash came. We're in the enterprise world, not an issue. This is a tool. And you go out there doing your job, and it's you're not really recording people and recording problems and so on. But again, because it's a tool, we don't have that same backlash. It's a web user plays today is that we've got two parts of the company. One is making these enterprise products, and the other is making the waveguides and the optical engine that go into other products, such as consumer glasses. So there's a whole slew of companies out there betting that smart glasses are going to take over from the smartphone eventually. That means billions of devices. So you've got all the big manufacturers. Music works with Quanta, which is a massive manufacturer in Taiwan, to build out billions of these in volume. That's half of the company that usually is all around supplying loans, and they'll supply to consumer at that point, but it itself won't be making the consumer product. Whereas the enterprise division is all about making a product and a solution set and selling that.

Roopinder 9:03

I see, but the parts might be used in a consumer product.

Chris 9:06

Yes, okay.

Roopinder 9:06

Is the wave dialogue be would you explain what a wave guide is?

Chris 9:10

Yeah, because it happens. I have one here. So here's a lens, right? So this is a traditional optic and lens system. You have a small, tiny TV in here, a red, green, blue panel emitting color, and it's about a quarter of an inch diagonal. It bounces that display through the prism, and you get another magnifying prism in front of it. So when you look at this thing, it looks like you've got a display that's yay big in front of your eye. That's the magic, that's the traditional way of doing it. Now comes a load waveguide. Here's a waveguide, a typical lens, and you take the same red, green, blue panel and you inject it into the top here. The red, green, blue goes, it bounces inside the glass, it sits pretty thin, it goes bum-bomb, bounces down there if I get the angle right. That blue square is the exit of the light waves. It bounces down to there and then bounces right into the eye and it spans and it gives me a bigger view when I want it. But you notice generally, if you get the right angle, it's see-through. So if I turn it off and don't have a display, I'm gonna lift something through, and there's no problem. But I'll put the display on, it's up there. And you can make that display opaque or transparent or somewhere in between and blend it in the background. So that's what the wave guide does. It's a remarkable technology that it just makes the lens structure disappear.

Roopinder 10:19

You don't need a lens, you're literally guiding the light into the screen.

Chris 10:22

These are made of sort of glass or plastic. Uh so they allow you to build out regular glasses now. And the difference is you've got an extra lump on the side, which is where the red, green, blue projector sits to inject that display.

Roopinder 10:35

Would you say Vusix' waveguides are state of the art?

Chris 10:38

Yes, completely. Both in the and I'll tell you why. There's quite a few companies that have been showing up waveguides recently, and it's one thing to show them off and build a few of them, but it's another thing to be able to mass produce in volume and at low cost. And that's what Vuzix excels at.

Roopinder 10:52

Now, why is that? Is it because the material that's guiding the wave must be very quality quality?

Chris 10:58

Essentially, waveguide is a bunch of lightning guiding the photons down. Some people are stamping them into glass, stamping the pattern into it, so we're etching, and it's all about getting the right technique that does scale up in volume and I think scale correct. Yeah, so they've been very busy over the years building this out. They can do this in the USA, which makes fairly unique in the fact they're manufactured in the US.

Roopinder 11:19

But it's a big thing these days.

Chris 11:21

Yes.

Roopinder 11:21

Yeah, yeah. Okay, all right. So that's a waveguide. Would you say that's the how should I say, limiting factor or critical factor, at least?

Vuzix Strategy: Products And Components

Chris 11:30

It was. Ten years ago, they don't really exist, and you have this. You can't make glasses with this very well. This is a huge step forward to getting more general acceptance. So now that pushes the technology barrier to the next thing. The next thing is the compute engine and the power required. The power is given to you by batteries. The more batteries you have, the heavier the glasses get. And there's a physical limit to how much weight a person is going to put up with in a pair of glasses. Typically, it's around, I think, less than 50 grams of weight on the bridge of the nose. After that, you start to feel it. And it's okay for maybe an hour or two, but for extended periods, it's not comfortable.

Roopinder 12:07

You're designing for all day wear or unshift. That's different.

Chris 12:10

Yeah, again, it depends on the target. A lot of this guy here is an all-day shift wearing device. It comes with a nice strap on the top and it's comfy and it wears like that. It looks heavy and a bit rugged, but the way the weights did, you don't feel it. And you can get rid of it, get displayed, and it's all good. Yeah. If I want to wear all day long, I can this will do all day long, but they're not going to do much for me. This is where we put the computational power of the smartphone. So a little few things like transcription. So if you're talking, like you know, write down what you're saying in text. This is just sending up a few display messages that will run all day long in this four factor. But the moment I want to do all the compute on my head, then we're running into problems. Especially if you want to do live streaming video or watching videos on YouTube, that's when my battery's gonna run down more quickly. To add an all-day battery now means more weight. You've got choices. Either put the weight on the head and people complain it's a heavier headset, or put the battery in a pocket and you have a cable running up here, but then people complain that they've got a cable hanging off their head. That's the technology, that's one of the barriers that we're up to right now.

Manufacturing Waveguides At Scale

Roopinder 13:10

I like the idea of having most of the power right in your pocket and your phone, and then the information being displayed at where you want it. Exactly right.

Chris 13:17

Use cases in my enterprise space, cables are not very good, they're frowned upon because they become snag hazards. But in an enterprise case, I mean in a consumer, it you don't have to think long back to before the Apple AirPods came around. What do we all have? We had earpieces with a VR cable running down to the phone in our pocket, and that was the norm. That was cool for a while. You could do it for a while, the technology is getting ready. So people are thinking about doing that.

Roopinder 13:42

Some people want it, some so really when you're just moving pixels from their phone to your glasses, that's not too much effort, too much work. Now we're limited though, because I have a beautiful display on this phone. Kind of display to a hand with glasses.

Chris 13:55

Different displays, different costs, different models. But the so the high-end displays here, this represents the latest. This is full colour binocular. So what let me start up? This one is for one eye only, half the cost, half the power. And everyone has a dominant eye. About 70% of the population are right eye dominant, they prefer their right eye for reading, and 30% are left eye. So one argument says, let me just feed your dominant eye with information. That allows me to cut down on the cost. And if you look at what Meta has announced last week, they have a system that's just one display on the right-hand side, the right eye dominant people. So they're trying it out. If you want to go with a full hog, though, you go with two displays, left down right, and they merge together to give you a bigger 3D effect floating in front of you, a bit like the VR headsets you talked about earlier. So here I've got dual colour, full colour, and it's in 3D. The resolution at the moment is nowhere near as high as what you're looking at. Maybe we're looking at 10, 720p type of resolution, maybe less than that. So it looks like the blue rectangle here, but when you look at this, it fills your frame. It's almost like looking at a full laptop one answer at arm's length.

Weight, Power, And All‑Day Wear

Roopinder 15:02

I see. Okay. But it's 720 pixel, right?

Chris 15:05

And they look pretty nice when you wear them. They're very compelling. So it's great. You can have the camera, for example, have a live camera view there. So you can actually have a camera on the headset typically, and this allows you to preview what you're looking at before snapshotting it or zoom in, for example, so you can see eye of what's happening.

Roopinder 15:20

Indulge me for a second. I've often thought we're wasting all these pixels and all this granularity on images because our eye was only looking at one little thing. If I'm looking at my room, I'm just looking at one little part of my room. The rest of it can be quite blurry, but to make an image that's that particular to what you're actually looking at, that would take eye track. I don't think the technology is there yet for that.

Chris 15:41

It is, it's called foveated rendering. So basically, we look at the way your eye's looking and just render that in detail, and the rest of them blur less detailed. So it is happening on different headsets. That's a bigger technology. Headsets you may remember from Hololens or Magic Leap, they are bigger compute devices, and we're able to start doing that to try to conserve power.

Roopinder 16:00

I see. So not refreshing every pixel across 4k per eye.

Chris 16:04

That's exactly right.

Roopinder 16:05

Yeah, okay. So 720 per one eye mostly, right eye. Can it be switched, or do you have to buy right hand and left hand? In this one, it's right eye only, the same.

Chris 16:16

No, of course you can't. No, like in in these guys, you can, the big industrial ones, you can flip them out and do that. But that's why the dual glasses and the jewel screen works. This is really the future. But the reason people like Meta have not got the dual screen, my speculation, not fact, is that it's cost. These displays are currently costing a lot of money. So let's just put one in for now and see how the world goes. And then we'll put two in later.

Roopinder 16:39

I see. Very good, very good. Okay, so you don't wear ordinary glasses, but would they work for people that have glasses?

Chris 16:45

The answer is they are like any other glasses, they have a fixed focal length on them. And if you need a prescription for normal reading, you will need to add a prescription to these glasses as well. So most of the glasses vendors, views included, have the ability to take clip-in lenses that clip inside and will put your prescription. So if you're plus two and one eye and a plus one in the other, you get the plus two, plus one clip-in, it just clips in as a thin layer and becomes part of the glasses and then back and running.

One Display Or Two And Resolution

Roopinder 17:15

That difference in curvature on both surfaces that doesn't affect the waveguide, the image, the lens.

Chris 17:20

It depends where you put the prescription, the outside or inside.

Roopinder 17:23

Oh, I see. So preferably guessing blended optics.

Chris 17:26

Blended was going to be still a bit of an issue here.

Roopinder 17:28

Very good. Okay, so I'm gonna get you to put it on so you have a single good shot. Okay, we can put the super fancy ones, the greener ones. That's good. Now hold that post. Very good.

Chris 17:38

Try the other kind of red, some smaller red ones if you'd like. How about that? The lighter weight ones.

Roopinder 17:44

That's good, very good. Good modeling. And the first one we saw, the bluish.

Chris 17:48

Yeah, these ones here. So these are the smaller little ones.

Roopinder 17:51

So these are my favorite. These are the Z100 devices. That's right. You've got to learn to talk American.

Chris 17:59

Yeah, that's right. Yes. Which one audience are we going to in? American or American. Okay, I'm gonna use the word colour without a new in it then from now on.

Roopinder 18:06

How long have you been in the US? Since you moved since you were in college.

Chris 18:09

Yeah, it's without revealing my age. About nearly 30 years now. 30 years, okay. I've adapted the accent pretty well, haven't I? I can tell you that's true. They all speak in Eastern Europe. Eastern Washington.

Roopinder 18:20

Because I've learned from British tutors, they came there many more years ago. Sixty years ago. And I was young enough to lose the accent entirely.

Chris 18:28

Okay. Ye ah. Did you come from?

Roopinder 18:30

England initially, India initially, that England, then they went to the US.

Chris 18:33

Okay.

Roopinder 18:34

Yeah.

Chris 18:35

This technology space is super exciting. It's wonderful. So for me, the opportunity, because I've just joined Vuzix, right? In the last few weeks. Yeah. To be able to build out products is one thing. But the cool technology that goes into it, these waveguides, to now have access to the company that's inventing those and delivering them. Means I can deliver we've got the full soup to nuts solution set here, which is a really wonderful opportunity to get involved at every level and deliver world-class solutions. So we shall see that coming. And I'm very excited.

Prescriptions And Optics Tradeoffs

Roopinder 19:03

That was quite the press release announcing your coming to Vuzix are very flattering. I think they expect the world of you.

Chris 19:09

It doesn't happen overnight, but we'll get there.

Roopinder 19:12

There's quite a bit of technology to tame here. So I have every hope and every good wishes for music to make the next one. And I will be in my way. Great. Did I miss anything?

Chris 19:24

No, I think that's fine. I think we've covered all stuff to cover. The other thing to add to this is you did add about Google Glass years ago. Two things have happened. The first is miniaturization of the 10. The wave guys have brought this wonderful fallback to download. The other thing that's happened is AI. What brings to these devices is a natural language interface. Ability, like your Amazon Alexa, talk to the glasses and say, Hey, show me this, show me that. How do I get to that? That for years has been really difficult to get an interactive user experience on smart glasses the old fashioned way without AI, without a natural language.

Roopinder 20:00

No conversation these days is complete without AI. So what does a person do? Then you have to have a microphone, you have to have these classes all have microphones built into them. What's the challenge then? Putting the neural microprocessor in there to handle the Yeah, that's right.

Chris 20:13

You need something. Really, the AI, people talk about edge AI on the edge. These large language models are best suited to running in the cloud. You can squeeze them down into these little processes, but they're not as good. And expectations are rising daily on how good they should be. If I give the user a cut-down version, I won't be happy. So, bottom line is you really should be using these cloud-based things, but then that means you need a connection. You need connectivity all the time. That's the next challenge in areas of enterprise. There are places where there is no connectivity. What does one do there? So you can't be reliant on needing a connection. It's great to think about now hybrid AI, where some of it's running locally, some of it's running in cloud. And so there's always different techniques that perhaps running with the AI is an essential part in the adoption of these devices.

Roopinder 20:57

I'm glad to hear you say that. It's not normal for a techie to admit that the internet isn't everywhere because every product now relies on it in the cloud. I attribute that to you being out in eastern Washington.

Chris 21:09

I learned many years ago when I went driving through Oregon, I thought I'll just follow the maps on my phone, so they start working. Oh no, I wish I had an old paper mountain with me. Even in industry in warehouses, there's corners where the Wi-Fi's on and metal buildings that have no connection. So it's actually a lot more prevalent than you think.

Miniaturization And The AI Shift

Roopinder 21:26

Oftentimes when you really need it, it's not there most of the time on airplanes. It's not there. So it's just not reliable enough to be broad skilled. So we agree on that subject. This is good. That's a challenge, isn't it? Isn't it a little frustrating just when you thought you might have the glasses for everyone?

Chris 21:40

And everyone is now saying, Where is the I can get I guess the answer is to get your musk and get a Starlink on my backpack and militarize that next.

Roopinder 21:48

Yeah, that's all right. We're cut out for you. That's there's a lot of uh a lot of things that are still way too big now. Edge computers, for example, that's like I've seen neural network chips, they're not small.

Chris 21:58

So I think for us, a lot of the approach might not be to solve everything at once. But you think about if I have an edge AI of some sort, if I can do stuff locally or offline, it may not be as good as I'd expect when I've got a tower connection, but it might be enough to get me through. And then the moment I get back into civilization and sync up, then I can use the cloud to maybe redo what I've done already locally, enhance it. So it's almost like the sync and forward metaphor. Let's do as much as we can to keep you going and then do properly.

Roopinder 22:28

Very good. And on that note, Al had that I thank you very much for being on our show and showing we and giving me hope that there is actually stuff out there that I've been longing for all this time. It's actually out there. I just need to get out for it and see it.

Chris 22:41

Be careful what you wish for.

Roopinder 22:42

You won't have an army of zombies walking around looking at their glasses now instead of their phones. That could happen, along with the great power, right? Yes, that's right. Thank you for your time today. Thank you very much. Thanks for being on and hope to see you again. Bye-bye.

Cloud vs Edge AI And Connectivity

Roopinder 22:53

Thank you for listening to FoDES, the Future of Design and Engineering Software Show, brought to you by ENGtechnica. I hope you have learned of a new application or technology that will help you with your job. If you have an application you think would be of interest to other engineers, please let me know by emailing me at roopinder at engtechnica.com or message me on LinkedIn.