A lot of XR

technologies started from projects in the military sector, including

AR. Today's guest Nick Cherukuri is working to bring what he's

learned from years working in tech for the defense department, and is

bringing it all to enterprise -- and eventually, consumers -- with

his line of AR glasses.

Alan: Hey, everyone, it's Alan Smithson here today. We're speaking with Nick Cherukuri, founder of ThirdEye, about their all-in-one AR glasses hardware and software solution for enterprise in logistics, manufacturing, and engineering and how these tools are revolutionizing how we work. All coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.

Welcome to the show, Nick.

Nick: Thanks, Alan. Glad to be

on.

Alan: I'm really excited. You

guys have a really original and awesome looking pair of glasses for

the enterprise. Walk us through your X2 glasses and how are people

using them? What makes them stand out from the competition? What's

the form factor? Just walk us through your solution.

Nick: Definitely. So just to

provide some background about ThirdEye, while we may be a relatively

new name in the commercial space, we have over 20 years of experience

developing this technology for the United States Department of

Defense. So that's our origin story. And as you may know, the

military, a lot of the technologies we use today have evolved from

there, so for example, the Internet, GPS, even Siri for your iPhone

originally came from SRI, which is right down the road from us in

Princeton, developed there and Apple bought it off them. So the

military has been a great incubator for these advanced technologies.

And augmented reality, it's definitely considered the next major tech platform. So we've been developing a lot of AR hardware and software applications for the military. And a few-- a couple of years ago, we decided to take some of our technical know-how, our leading engineers -- we have state-of-the-art labs here in Princeton, New Jersey -- and we decided to develop a commercial product. So we spun off into ThirdEye and we created-- just this year, we-- earlier this year, we released our X2 mixed reality glasses. So there's just some high-level overview of the X2. We wanted to really address the customer concerns. We felt this was an optimal time to get into the commercial market. So we feel it's too early for the consumer market right now, but the commercial AR market is definitely something that we are seeing a lot of traction happening.

So we wanted to develop a pair of

glasses that really hit some of their needs. And some of the needs we

heard were the glasses had to be entirely hands-free. For example,

many workers, they have safety requirements, where they cannot have

any wired packs. So you can't have a wired processing pack or a wired

battery pack. It needs to be all hands-free, compacted to one pair of

glasses. So that was perhaps the most critical use case that we

heard, that this is-- you had to develop the glasses in a way that's

entirely hands-free. So we made our X2 glasses entirely hands-free at

about nine ounces form factor. So it's something that can be worn for

a lengthy period of time. Another use case that we listened to was,

it has to be attachable to a hardhat. So the glasses could be as

advanced as you want, but if it can't attach to a hardhat, or to a

bumpcap, and meet some basic ANSI industrial certifications -- ANSI

Z87 -- then it can't be used in these industrial settings. So that's

something that we definitely incorporated into our glasses, to be

attachable to a hardhat, and to a bumpcap.

Our glasses are Android-based, so it's really easy to make access for upgrading to Android 9 soon, so we can take advantage of features like GPS, built-in. We have about a 42-degree field of view. So a binocular field of view is something we have seen customers