Jason Yim is the CEO and executive creative director at Trigger, a company that invents mixed reality experiences for both consumer and enterprise use for the world’s top brands, including Disney, NBA, Sony Pictures, Adidas, and many others.

Jason and his team at Trigger have been working in AR for more than a decade and are often pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Together they have logged 175,000 hours of development time.

For these reasons and others, Jason was listed in Next Reality's “30 People to Watch in Augmented Reality for 2019”.

Jason was born in Singapore and raised in Hong Kong before moving to the US for high school. He graduated with a degree in graphic design from UCLA. After starting his own design firm, he became the president and creative director for Hans Zimmer’s marketing firm, Media Revolution. After a decade there, he started Trigger.

In this conversation, we dig into a few projects Jason has done with the National Hockey League, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, and LEGO. We discuss some of the lessons learned he’s learned, and he shares his broader perspective on the industry, and where the opportunities and pitfalls lie.

Through the many projects he’s done with LEGO, Jason has come to appreciate that no amount of prior success or brand recognition should stand in the way of recognizing the uncertainty of the next big idea. LEGO doesn't assume they know the right answer. They methodically test and iterate, and as a result, they consistently find the fun in their new products and experiences.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop games to life. The Tilt Five system enables you to see, hear, and interact with realistic 3D holograms that entertain and educate.

By the time this episode airs, they will have recently completed a Kickstarter campaign where Tilt Five raised more than $1.75 million for their initial product.

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 at Valve as the first member of the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. Through this, she contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller.

In this, the second part of our conversation, Jeri shares some of the trials and tribulations of her experience at CastAR, including its ultimate demise.

From those ashes emerged Tilt Five. Jeri describes what’s different this time as well as some of the underlying technology and its tradeoffs, and the deep seated ethos and focus of the company.

Jeri goes on to talk about the pros and cons of running a Kickstarter campaign and how to do one well. She also describes the path to full AR smartglasses that can be used anywhere and would be used by everyone.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Jeri Ellsworth is the co-founder and CEO of Tilt Five, a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop games to life. The Tilt Five system enables you to see, hear, and interact with realistic 3D holograms that entertain and educate.

By the time this episode airs, they will have recently completed a Kickstarter campaign where Tilt Five raised more than $1.75 million for their initial product.

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 at Valve as the first member of the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions and bring the entire family together in the living room. Through this, she contributed to the early development for Valve VR (which became the HTC VIVE), the Steam Box, and the Steam Controller.

In this, the first of two parts of our conversation, Jeri shares stories from along her amazing path from being a high-school dropout to building race cars to engineering electronic game systems to being recruited at Valve.

Jeri recounts her early attempts to break into an engineering role in Silicon Valley, and the struggles she faced as a high school dropout.

Jeri goes on to describe the painful end of her time at Valve and the start of her CastAR experience. She doesn’t mince words as she describes her missteps, setbacks, and successes along the way.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Kelly Peng and Garrow Geer of Kura Tech. Garrow is the COO, and Kelly is the founder and CEO.

Kelly has a background dotted with many innovative projects, including building brain-computer interfaces, integrated circuit design, and a new type of engine for flying cars.

Together with the team at Kura, they are building a new kind of optics and display module that will enable smartglasses to achieve a groundbreaking set of specs: 150° field of view, 95% transparency - meaning the outside world isn’t shielded by dark sunglasses, as well as high brightness for use both indoors and outdoors, and an eyeglasses form factor.

In this conversation, Kelly and Garrow describe the pursuit of their game-changing product, something that could enable the type of smartglasses that you or I would actually wear.

They describe the startup environment they’ve created, the unique perspective they have on the technology, and their progress towards bringing their vision to life.

They also share some stories about the dark side of the AR industry. Unfortunately, they’ve experienced everything from nefarious NDAs to infiltrating spies attempting to steal their secrets. That’s not cool.

Kelly wraps up by sharing a solid piece of advice. Namely, don’t get advice from people just because they are close to you. Get advice from people who are actually experts in their field. Experts in an unrelated field don’t count. That may seem obvious, but it’s advice too few entrepreneurs follow.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Nick Cherukuri is the CEO and founder of ThirdEye Gen, a maker of see-through, AR smartglasses for enterprise. Similar to the Hololens approach, ThirdEye Gen is making an all-in-one device that sits on your head with no tethered compute pack, but they’ve got a significantly smaller form factor.

While attending the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, Nick started an AR/VR club that quickly grew to several hundred participants. Straight out of college, and using a combination of his passion, vision, and fresh thinking about the market, Nick was able to recruit a team of experienced engineers to join him as he founded ThirdEye Gen in 2016.

In this conversation, Nick describes his early experiences with AR & VR, and how he came to to found ThirdEye Gen straight out of college.

He describes the lessons they learned after releasing their first product in 2018, and the characteristics they discovered that matter most to enterprises. These learnings are baked into the new X2 product.

These X2 glasses certainly satisfy a lot of the standard enterprise use cases, but we also talk about a couple of novel use cases as well as Nick’s perspectives on the broader industry.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Tipatat Chennavasin is the co-founder and general partner at The Venture Reality Fund, an investment firm focused on early-stage companies building immersive, spatial, and intelligent computing for consumer and enterprise.

Prior to life as a VC, Tipatat was the co-founder and CEO of mobile game startup Big Head Mode, Inc. that he sold to PlayFirst to focus on VR.

He also spent many years as a creative director or design director working with cutting edge interactive technologies, including computer vision, interactive surfaces, and gesture-based interactive displays.

In this conversation, Titpatat shares one of his first experimentations with VR, and the impact it had on his life. He describes how he came to start a VR and AR-focused investment fund, and some of the insights he’s observed within the changing AR industry landscape.

One of those observations is about turnover among head-mounted display companies, and the potential of Hololens 2. He believes the increased usability of the Hololens 2 will open up more uses cases and drive better results during trials with enterprise customers.

Tipatat goes on to share his take on recent failures, successes, and near-term possibilities of AR.

A few of his portfolio companies that come up in the conversation include Beat Games (maker of Beat Saber), Varjo (high-end VR headset), Torch 3D (design & publish AR apps), PLNAR (computer vision for insurance), Vantage Point (anti-sexual harassment training), Phiar (AR navigation and object recognition) and Apprentice.io (guided instruction for lab workers). (Note: I am also an investor in Torch 3D and PLNAR.)

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Hardie Tankersley is the VP of VR and Solutions Consulting at Silverdraft, a company that uses a unique supercomputer architecture to address the significant computational and processing needs of high-end rendering, VR, visual effects, and visualization. Honda, Audi, Tesla, GE, and Autodesk all rely on Silverdraft for product visualization in VR.

Previously, Hardie spent more than 8 years at Fox Television, where he was Senior Vice President of Innovation. There he created the very first mobile apps for Fox TV as well as interactive experiences for American Idol, 24, Glee, and others.

He also developed the first-ever, Emmy-winning virtual reality experience for Sleepy Hollow and a virtual reality behind-the-scenes series for Scream Queens.

Early in his career, Hardie spent nearly 8 years at Apple.

This is the second of two parts of our conversation. Here Hardie continues his exploration of the challenges of crafting compelling entertainment content in VR. While acknowledging the success of Beat Saber, Hardie doesn’t believe VR is well suited for games.

We go on to chat about where he thinks VR does have a lot of utility today, and some of the lessons he’s learned in driving engagement within VR experiences.

We also talk about AR and how it fits with VR. Hardie believes that AR and VR are not two ends of a continuous spectrum. While they share some underlying technologies, they are fundamentally different mediums.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Hardie Tankersley is the VP of VR and Solutions Consulting at Silverdraft, a company that uses a unique supercomputer architecture to address the significant computational and processing needs of high-end rendering, VR, visual effects, and visualization. Honda, Audi, Tesla, GE, and Autodesk all rely on Silverdraft for product visualization in VR.

Previously, Hardie spent more than 8 years at Fox Television, where he was Senior Vice President of Innovation. There he created the very first mobile apps for Fox TV as well as interactive experiences for American Idol, 24, Glee, and others.

He also developed the first-ever, Emmy-winning virtual reality experience for Sleepy Hollow and a virtual reality behind-the-scenes series for Scream Queens.

Early in his career, Hardie spent nearly 8 years at Apple.

This is the first of two parts of my conversation with Hardie. In this first part, Hardie shares some wonderful stories from his days at Apple in the 1990s.

He goes on to talk about some of the early experimentation his team did in VR at Fox, and the reactions from the executive team. Based on these and other experiences, Hardie explores the many challenges he sees in creating compelling entertainment content in VR.

Hardie has some great stories and strong opinions, and I think you’ll really enjoy this one.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Chandra Devam is the co-founder and CEO of Aris MD, a company incorporating conventional scanning technologies and their unique data processing and visualization software to deliver X-Ray vision within AR and VR across a number of medical and industrial use cases.

Chandra is a serial entrepreneur who started her career in telecommunications, and then spent several years at Microsoft, before setting off on her own.

With ArisMD, she rejoins with co-founder Scott Edgar to apply her out-of-the-box thinking and ambitious ideas to AR and VR. She has a passion for building and creating new things the world needs in a way that hasn’t been tried.

As her bio states, she’s been an entrepreneur her whole life and lives in a way that challenges her and the people around her. She leads without ever having to ask people to follow; they just want to see where she will take them next.

In this conversation, Chandra talks about growing up in a silo on a farm with no running water, and how it sparked her imagination and creativity.

She describes the unique approach she and her partner, Scott Edgar, are taking to enhance surgery, as well as industrial inspections, and ultimately save lives.

Their efforts launched them to the winner’s circle of the 2019 NASA iTech-Cycle I competition, where NASA seeks out the best emerging new technology that will enhance future space exploration and humanity as a whole.

Chandra believes the freshest and best solutions often start with a clean slate with no undue influence of what was done (or not done) in the past.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Chris Pickett is the CEO of DigiLens, a company on a mission to enable the next generation of waveguide-based AR displays using their proprietary waveguide technology.

Chris laid the foundation for his career by earning degrees in engineering and law. He went on to become the head of technology licensing or the CEO at 4 startups and a couple of other companies that focused on innovating and licensing technology and intellectual property around semiconductors, image sensors, optics.

Most recently, he was the President and CEO of Pelican Imaging, which was acquired by Tessera.

In this conversation, Chris shares his perspective on the importance of waveguides in creating eyeglass-thin smartglasses, and what sets DigiLens technology apart. As Chris explains, most waveguide optics are complicated and expensive to manufacture, but DigiLens has a different approach.

He shares his background in licensing IP for unique materials, designs, and manufacturing approaches, and the strategy they’ll be using at DigiLens.

We talk about the recent $50M they raised from the likes of Niantic, Universal Display, Samsung, Sony, and others, and what those investors mean for the future of the business.

He goes on to comment on what he views as the best type of early customer – one with a clear focus on the end-user experience, not one chasing arbitrary specs.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.