October 02, 2019

Visualizing the Future of AR, with Visualix’s CEOs Michael Bucko & Darius Pajouh

37 minutes

All the world’s a

stage, but in AR, that’s a stage we’re still building. Visualix is

hard at work building that stage with their street mapping

technology, which will one day help make everything from digital maps

to Pokémon Go a whole lot better. Co-CEOs Michael Bucko and Darius

Pajouh drop in to discuss their technology with Alan.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s episode is

with two amazing people from a company called Visualix. Michael Bucko

and Darius Pajouh are really, really passionate about analytics and

teleinformatics. Michael is a CTO and co-CEO of Visualix and has a

computer science/teleinformatics background, he worked as a data and

software engineer and founded many companies before. At Visualix he

does packaging, partnerships, and technology, as well as make sure

that Visualix has the best tech team in the world. Darius, on the

other hand, is the co-founder and also co-CEO. He studied physics

with a specialty in non-linear optics. He did not stay in research

for long, because he founded a startup and then raised $200,000 and

it fails — we’ll get into that — but he worked at a company called

Innogy, the largest energy utility company in Europe. And the venture

developer program that allowed employees to start companies, funding

from the mother company. And so that’s how in 2017, Visualix was

born. To learn more about Visualix, you can visit visualix.com.

Welcome to the show, Michael and

Darius.

Darius: Thanks. Thanks for

having us.

Michael: Thank you very much.

Welcome.

Alan: We’ve been talking for so

long and now we finally get to have a conversation on the record.

Michael: Amazing. It’s been

awhile.

Alan: It’s been a minute. It’s

funny, because one of my interviews today was with Dr.

Walter Greenleaf. He’s been working in VR for 33 years.

Darius & Michael: Wow.

Alan: So when you think you’ve

been pushing hard for a long time, think about Dr. Greenleaf. So,

Michael, tell us what is Visualix and how does it work? Why somebody

would want to use it?

Michael: Ok, so Visualix is a

mapping and positioning platform. We allow the largest scale, most

reliable augmented reality in the world. It’s very simple. You take a

mobile phone and you map a space, for instance, your apartment or a

warehouse. And then in this map, in this digital twin that you’ve

created, you can place augmented reality content. And then people —

viewers — can see this content in real time extremely accurately.

And it works at scale. So it’s very, very reliable, works at scale.

And we have an SDK for that.

Darius: And if I may add

something, so the USP that we created is that we do all the

computation on the backend. So we use the mobile only as a sensor to

really get the data in terms of data we get on the phone. But the

real computation, the heavy lifting for mapping, as well as

localization, is in the backend side. So this allows us to basically

escape the limitations of mobile devices such as phones or let’s say,

AR glasses that only allow shared experiences on an area of about 20

square meters or 50 square meters. So basically a small room. Where

we extend this from 20 square meter to 20,000 square meters. So about

a thousand fold. And this is something that you only can do if you

have a powerful backend. And this basically makes us the only company

that can create one spatial map that is together. You can basically

create one spatial map onto, let’s say, a whole factory floor where

you can localize with centimeter position.

Alan: That’s amazing. So some of

the use cases that I can think of just off the top of my head would

be directions for heads-up displays for people driving a forklift and

they need to get around to pick up precise things around the

warehouse. That would be one thing. What are some of the use cases

for this technology?

Michael: Okay, so the use case

that you mentioned is one of the very good use cases you can imagine.

There could be a person on the forklift, but you can also think that

that can be — the forklift itself — equipped with ARCore or ARKit

ready device. You can also think of telecoms and OEMs, they want to

have a large scale augmented reality infotainment, for instance, in

malls. And you can think about how automotive companies, so the

automotive sector, they might want to have in-car gaming experiences,

or outside of the car gaming experiences. They might be willing to

optimize their warehouses. They might be willing to map the world and

then augment the world the way they want.

Darius: Yes. We focus in the

kind of three areas of production manufacturing where basically, for

example, manufacturing companies and also automotive companies want

to create use cases around autonomous maintenance, basically having

all the digital twins that are currently running in silos, for

example — the digital twin of a specific machine, the digital twin

of the whole factory layout. They combine it basically in our spatial

map. So they overlay these digital twins with our point cloud. We

create and they’re basically– we create a standard of visualization

of all the digital twins that can be accessed at any point. So this

allows a worker to just hold up the phone and see basically the right

AR content on every machine, on every pathway, seeing the warning

signs that are particularly tailored to the specific status of this

worker, for example. So this kind of factory production setting is

very strong with us. The second one is this logistics type of thing,

where we scan warehouses only for the sake of mapping and

localization. And with this, we hope to either substitute a large

part of the beacon deployments, or of course enrich beacon

deployments by creating continuous digital twins that can be used for

documentation as well as other things.

Michael: So you can think of so

many use cases. I mean, we launched the SDK, and we have people

trying to do visual prototyping. We have people trying to do

construction. We have people who try to do maintenance. We have a

very good friend of ours who wants to be the large scale game. We

have OEMs who want to integrate our software into their hardware. We

have, as I mentioned, telecoms that might want to have our software

in the edge. Plenty and plenty of opportunities. And sometimes it’s

very, very difficult to imagine those use cases like, for instance,

in the construction space, somebody who’s going to assemble buildings

and you need to find innovative ways of assembling buildings, or

somebody who wants to do maintenance in, say, parking lots. Like

very, very unexpected use cases sometimes.

Alan: That’s incredible. I think

people are only starting to scratch the surface with the use cases,

which is why I asked that question first. And things like Microsoft

introducing– or announcing the world of Minecraft and augmented

reality, meaning anywhere in the world, you can start building

Minecraft blocks and it will stay there, positionally tracked, so the

next person that comes along and– basically what you’re doing is

that level, but made for industry and enterprise.

Michael: Yes. Yes, exactly. You

mentioned Minecraft, that is very, very thoughtful of you. So

Microsoft, as you know, we support ARKit- and ARCore-enabled devices.

But you can think Visualix could support, we have a number of

requests from AR glasses company, we could also support AR glasses.

Microsoft launched their Azure Spatial Anchors, we could support

Azure Spatial Anchors as well, and take their augmented reality to

the next level.

Darius: Yeah. So the cool thing

about our technology is that we are platform-independent,

essentially. So what we do is we take this local tracking capability

of, let’s say, ARKit, ARCore, Microsoft Spatial Anchors, or any type

of equivalent that exists in there. And basically with that, create

our own point cloud in the background, that enables the localization

and mapping. So this allows us that all types of devices can visually

localize themselves, and therefore, also display the same content in

the same map.

Michael: And now imagine, think

about Minecraft. What we can do with Minecraft is that we can create

the most realistic AR game ever created. So we can take it, we can

place this Minecraft content in the building or in a warehouse, and

you could actually live in the Minecraft world.

Alan: That’s just ridiculous.

I’m really excited about that. I want that in my life.

Michael: I want that as well.

Alan: I think if you took this

technology that you guys have built for creating this mapping and you

combine it with something like 6D.ai, which is doing real time point

cloud mapping, I think you could combine the two and really make

robust augmented reality, that is world sensing. If you wanted to

have, for example, a scavenger hunt and the scavenger hunt would then

take you in different places and you’d have to go find things, but

they could be aware of your surroundings and they could hide behind

pillars or people or– one of the things that’s coming out this

summer is the new Harry Potter game in AR. And I think they’ve got a

lot of things that they’re working on, to make it know that the world

around them is there. And so being able to use real augmented reality

in the world. I think we’re only scratching the surface of what’s

possible on this. Let’s talk about some other use cases, because I

think at the end of the day, you make a technology platform in which

people can create literally anything they want and by having this

very detailed mapping. What are some of the use cases? One that comes

to mind would be retail. If you wanted to have very robust augmented

reality experiences within your store without having to bring it

under beacons in your store, you could have centimeter accuracy

within a store and give customers the ability to go round and find

Easter eggs throughout the store. Is that something that people are

working on?

Darius: Yeah. We partnered with

Deutsche Telekom to basically enable to start. So the developers are

building applications that are tailored for this market. And we are–

we can’t share the news right now, but it goes exactly in this

direction. An exciting thing about us is that our technology is very

robust to changing environments. And that’s why retail specifically

is a very important thing for us, because in retail, such as a normal

shop, you can imagine that if you move products around, if you have

changing light conditions, solutions that do mapping and localization

that, say, only with ARKit or ARCore are bound to the limitations of

ARKit and ARCore. And this is very heavily correlated with robustness

and changing environments. If you change, let’s say, a small thing,

these technologies usually don’t work in localizing, but our

technology can. Yeah, it’s extremely robust to changing environments.

You can change up to 40 percent, around 50 percent of the scene and

still localize with high accuracy, still centimeter precision. And

then also we fill the point cloud and always keep it updated. And we

actually made this happen now.

Michael: By the way, we’re

actually discussing with one of the largest retailers in the world,

we’re actually discussing the rollout. So this actually happened.

Alan: One of my predictions from

a few years ago was that Apple and Google will probably create some

sort of game or experience that you’ll find yourself alone in your

house, chasing Pokémon or something around your house and you’ll be

scanning up and down and left and right. And really, what they’re

doing is creating a persistent cloud map of the inside of your space,

because if you think about it, Google has a map of the entire outside

world of this planet, barring a few other local places. But they’ve

got a beautiful map of the whole world that you can go in VR and

travel around in it, and Google Earth VR. But they have no real data

about the inside world. And that’s going to be very important as we

move to a world where we have a digital twin of every space.

Michael: Well, that’s one point.

They definitely have a very amazing map and they have done a lot in

this space. We actually know some of the guys that you mentioned

working exactly. He used to work on Google Earth. So he’s a good

friend of ours. And then my point was they definitely have a lot of

amazing technology and they have maps. But now the question is, will

they be able to– using their maps, would they be able to enable this

kind of accuracy, this kind of robustness? That’s an open question.

Also, another question is, we focused mostly on the indoors, exactly

what you said. And indoors, we can optimize our algorithms for

indoors as well.

Darius: And especially, what I

think it’s important to mention is that from a business strategy, we

went this direction of going indoors, especially in an industrial

warehouse, production facilities, retail. And this is where, let’s

say, a Google or an Apple can drive around with their cars, which

they have the power to do so very quickly. So we thought that the

space that I just mentioned before is a very good space to enter,

lucrative, we can really dominate the space without, let’s say, big

competitors quickly going in there.

Michael: Nonetheless, we’ve been

asked by a couple of top American companies, Fortune 500s, whether

that B-to-C direction would also be interesting to us. I mean, we’ve

focused on the industry. Nonetheless, we have a number of requests

from companies in the home appliances space, from OEMs who want to

have our software integrated, from companies that want to build

games. So our technology could potentially be used to– like for

instance, imagine that you take something that Google has, or one of

the other companies that use satellite imagery to create outdoor

augmented reality experiences. Now, if you have a three meter

accuracy, it’s not always going to be– or five meter accuracy is not

always going to be good enough for all of your games. So what you

could do is you could use it together with Visualix to create better,

higher quality augmented reality experiences in at least some places,

some parts of your game.

Alan: Interesting. All the

processing is running on the cloud. So this is probably lends itself

nicely to your Deutsche Telekom client. What are the implications of

5G with this technology?

Michael: So 5G is gonna bring a

completely new world, a whole new world. So there is gonna be– the

latency problems are not gonna be this dramatic anymore. We will be

able to introduce multiplayer. Say, imagine we for instance can–

Berlin, we’re based out of Berlin, we scan Berlin and we create a

game, and there will be Brandenburg Gate and a couple of other

places, say, one hundred places in Berlin, they will be spatially

mapped. So we’ve got to spend some additional time — like 2, 5

minutes each — and were going to to map all of them. Then what’s

gonna happen is you’re gonna have a very, very high quality augmented

reality, especially in those places. Now, if you want to have a

multiplayer and you want to be able to re-localize very often, then

this is where you see 5G, because this is gonna get heavier and 5G is

going to be very, very important for that.

Darius: Also very important

point is that, so as Michael mentioned, the throughput is one

important fact. The data throughput, as well as latency. The

throughput is going to be very important for the resolution of images

that we stream to the server in order to much more accurately and

robustly localize. This relates to, for example, the distance of

localization. This is something that current OEMs have a big problem

with, because you can only localize if you are, let’s say, two, three

meters, four meters from a wall. But with our technology, for

example, where we already stream high resolution images, we can

localize at distances up to 20 to 30 meters. This is a bigger SP that

on a street level is very important to localize with centimetre

precision rather than, let’s say, four metre precision.

Michael: Also, we optimize for

robustness. So imagine you have 50 players, very close to each other.

We can still deal with all of them. So it really works. And this is

very, very helpful. And 5G in this case would be necessary.

Alan: Yeah, absolutely. So if a

company is using this, how is it built in? You’ve got an SDK they

can–? Are they building it into their apps, or can they use web

based AR? How does it technically work?

Michael: Currently, there are

two major directions. So the first direction is that we work with

multiplayers who work directly with end customers, with large

companies and they do products together with those large customers.

The second use case is we approach large customers directly. They

have their own developers and they are building their products,

products that they want to build. In all cases, it can be either

something integrated into their existing apps, but in the very

beginning it’s most often a new app. If you want to start with the

Visualix SDK, it’s essentially five minutes, you download it, compile

the demo app, and it works immediately. You can map your space and

you can create a game. So if you are our customer, you will just take

the SDK. You will have an application in one hour or something. Very,

very simple. And then if we want to integrate it, you’re going to

integrate it. Some people want to integrate it into their existing

apps, like, for instance, royalty apps or user– like, apps for the

malls. Some companies just want to create some new experiences in the

very beginning.

Alan: It’s interesting, malls

was something that I was thinking about as well, for navigation

around malls, but also creating some rich experiences for customers.

And I think a lot of these companies, it’s hard to wrap our head

around the fact that we’re using smartphones now, but in five to 10

years — and I don’t know when — but we’ll wear glasses, and those

glasses will be our world of computing. And so what you guys have

done with the visual mapping and positioning is going to be vital to

the success of that, because right now the best thing we have is

Bluetooth beacons, and stuff like that.

Michael: Well, this is the

direction that we very much love. So we very much believe in this

direction. We very much believe in this world where everybody is

going to be wearing AR glasses. And what this means to us. Well, what

this means to the world is that the Visualix can enable pretty much

every AR glasses. We’ve had over 20 requests from different AR

glasses companies. So a number of them. And some of them just wanted

special modules, that they could use for AR eyeglasses. Some of them

want some sort of integration. Some of them just want to do some sort

of partnership. Some of them just want to learn. But that’s

definitely well, our patented technology is crucial to developing

glasses, because we work on top of ARKit, ARCore, potentially Azure

Spatial Anchors. We could support Hololens. We could support– well,

today I actually learned a couple of amazing things, and seems like

we actually pretty much off-the-shelf would be supporting a number of

them. But let us tell you later, because this is not yet public

information, but there’s gonna be a lot of amazing developments in

exactly this space.

Alan: Pretty exciting.

Darius: Also, another

interesting fact is that our solution can be already used, especially

in the industrial sector. Many, for example, camera-based systems

don’t have ARCore/ARKit included. So many companies are asking us if

we can make it a go-and-work with six-degree-of-freedom sensors that

they already have off the back, or include with the camera system.

And these things are about to come, that we will engage in further

tests with this, where these companies are interested to basically do

visual mapping and positioning, let’s say, with forklifts. So

forklifts are a big topic with our company and they are fine with

testing ARCore and ARKit enabled devices initially. But later they

want to go into the sector where they only have those

six-degree-of-freedom sensor plus camera systems. And this will, of

course, drive the cost even further down, down to, let’s say, $20 or

$30 a pop. And then if you compare this with a potential beacon

rollout that you need to have, with a thousand beacons this costs up

to 200, 300,000 dollars, plus wiring, plus maintenance. And if you

could substitute that amount of investment with only, let’s say, 20

dollars times — I don’t know — 20 forklifts, that’s like 500 bucks.

And then it works off the shelf. So that’s a very exciting future we

see, especially when it comes to warehousing.

Alan: Wow. It’s really

incredible. There’s so much to unpack here. I don’t think people

really understand, being able to visually map a space and apply

graphics and computer graphics to it. It’s actually not even

augmented reality anymore at that point. It’s really mixed reality,

because it’s world sensing and I think you guys are really onto

something with this. While you were just talking, I downloaded Harry

Potter’s Wizards Unite. It’s finally out.

Michael: Yeah. That said,

definitely very exciting. I mean, we know a couple of people at

Niantic. And they’ve been definitely working very hard on this. So

I’m very much looking forward to checking it out.

Alan: Yeah, it’s very exciting.

I can’t wait to go home, I’m going to go run around the neighborhood

and play Wizards Unite. [laughs] It’s like Pokémon Go meets Harry

Potter.

Darius: We have to try it out,

Michael. We have to try it out tomorrow.

Alan: Yeah, you do. Are there

any of the use cases that are using your software, are any of them

out in the wild right now, that people could try?

Michael: Well, definitely. So we

have– well, not exactly people. So the way it currently works, we’re

mostly industry. So what happens is- for instance, we have an

application, we do maintenance in the factory. And then people can

test this maintenance application in the factory. We also have some

forklifts and some devices running from other warehouses. And then

view in real time, so some other people, some warehouse workers can

access this information about the trajectories of the forklifts. And

then we have some deployments in the edge where, for instance, in the

US or in Asia there are developers working on building experiences.

Those deployments are in production and they are ready to use and

they are being tested.

Darius: One very important point

that we have to mention is that most of our clients for now, in the

beginning — this will perhaps change later — but especially in

Germany, most of the industrial clients are very privacy focused. So

we have a solution ready to go on premise, that just works

immediately. We can either install our service directly on their

server, we can also basically send them our package with a physical

server, that they just integrate quickly into their network, and they

can immediately develop apps within their network. So this really

alleviates a lot of effort. The installation is super simple. It

takes a half an hour to hook it up into your wi-fi and developers can

right away build applications that live in the AR space of their

factories. And I think this might be a very exciting direction for

the future, because if you have this physical server on premise that

does all the mapping and localization, then you can use, of course,

the images that you gather from the mapping process and the

localization process to get more analytics out of it. Semantic

segmentation on top of that. So we believe we really can be this hub

onto which other applications and other companies can just hook into

to create even more value beyond the mapping and localization alone.

Alan: Wow, you guys realize

you’re just gonna get bought by Google or something.

Darius: Bought?

Michael: [laughs] It’s always

very difficult to say. So, you are saying we’re going to buy

Google? Yes?

Alan: [laughs]

Michael: Not the question, are

we going to buy Google or…?

The question is definitely not whether

you’re going to buy Google, whether they buy you.

Darius: They have many smart

people, we know that. Probably have enough already. They don’t need

more.

Michael: Yeah. You always need

better and better and better. You can always get better.

Alan: Well, you guys seem to

have an amazing team. How many people are you guys now?

Michael: We’re currently 12 full

time people, around 15 overall. And you’re right, we have a very

amazing team. We would love to thank them from here now, because they

have helped us so far achieve everything we’ve achieved so far. We

have won a number of awards together. We won the Deep Tech Award in

Germany. We have demoed our application to a number of directors,

senior directors, everybody’s laughing always because we demo those

to a number of important people in this world. They really see that

we’ve made tremendous progress. And this is thanks to our team. And

we’ve been working very hard together. We’ve had very many moments

most of the time, currently beautiful moments. But also there are

challenges. We still are launching our Unity SDK, which is, again, a

challenge. And there will be challenges in the future, and maybe

cloud deployment, and a rollout. So a number of huge challenges in

front of us. But we can make it happen together. I mean, we work with

the ex-head of robotics at Google. We work with the ex-senior

director of AR enterprise at Adobe. And we have a number of amazing

friends who gave us advice. We work with around a number of people

from Metaio — ex-Metaio people. You know, Metaio got acquired by

Apple some time ago. So we really do focus on the team and we very

much believe that the value we create is thanks to the team and

thanks to our focus on the product, on the customer. And the biggest

focus on the team.

Alan: You’re on the right path

for sure. So is there anything else you want to leave people with?

Maybe some– a couple more ways they can use this, because I think

the best thing that we can do for the listeners is really give them

real life world use cases of this technology so that they can start

thinking, how else can I use 3D mapping and scanning in my space? I

would think mining would be another one, being able to have really

accurate maps of mines using people’s devices that they have.

Darius: So, for example, in

construction side, I believe Michael mentioned already, amusement

parks are a huge thing. They have a– I don’t know how many square

kilometres of space. And here it is very important that you have this

large scale mapping and localization enabled, that anybody who

basically picks up their phone, any one of these amusement parks,

they can just immediately localize with high precision. So everywhere

where we have a space from, let’s say, I don’t know, a thousand

square meter to infinity and you manage either things or people, then

our technology is kind of a must.

Michael: If your company is

going into the IoT space and if you are using, for instance, if your

insurance company. You might be interested to be in IoT space in the

future because you want to be more informed. And there are many, many

companies like these that you sometimes don’t think that it could be

relevant to them, but it is. If you want to be in the IoT space, if

you want to improve your IoT capabilities, then Visualix is perfect

for that.

Darius: Another very important

point is the ability to just do planning, factory planning, for

example. Many of our customers just use the technology to scan their

entire space — or the entire space of their customers — in order to

then better understand “How can I move this big machine into the

right place? Is there maybe an air duct that has to be removed? Are

the electricity outlets positioned at the right place?” So there

are many use cases like this where, for example, a large German

automotive company, they want to — with the Hololens — be able to

fuse together the future 3D model of the entire factory, and drop it

into the empty factory. And they are the challenge that it’s very

hard to localize and map an empty factory. But we actually managed to

do it because our technology is very sensitive. So they were very

astonished that we could actually fuse together this digital twin of

the factory with the empty factory floor. And anybody could then

localize and see exactly where the machines will be placed, and could

then better understand and say, “Wow, we really have to change

these electricity outlets. We have to maybe broaden the space so two

people can fit in at the same time.” These stuff are very

costly, if you don’t think about this early enough. And like this, it

can really prevent these mistakes from happening.

Michael: And there a bunch of

other use cases like for instance: currently if you want to map

spaces and create digital twins, you very often use large robots. In

our case, you don’t need a robot. In our case, you can just use a

mobile phone, so you can reuse your existing resources and very

cheaply create a digital twin of this space. We’re not a

visualization company, so it’s not going to be beautiful, maybe. But

what’s gonna happen is you’re going to have a very affordable digital

twin and it’s gonna be actionable, meaning that it’s gonna be an

actual IOP setup where you’re going to know the positions and

orientations of all the devices. For instance, you can use it for

documenting things. You can use for remote work. You can also use

those digital twins for virtual prototyping, like you want a new

forklift and you don’t know if this forklift is gonna fit in, and you

don’t want to destroy something. Also, it might be a very heavy

device, you don’t want to carry it. And you could try it in the

digital twin mode. So all of those use cases are possible. And the

SDK, that’s the crucial part, it’s very easy to use. It’s

frictionless. So you just take it in your hand, you give it to your

software engineers. They can immediately start working on these in a

5, 10 minutes. They can actually have the demo app ready in two

hours. They can have a simple app ready. This is how it works.

Alan: Wow. It’s really

incredible. You guys are providing a service that I don’t think

there’s anybody else doing this.

Michael: We don’t know about

anybody doing something like this. We don’t know about anybody. We’ve

been doing some research, and to the best of our knowledge, we are

pretty unique. And, you know, the technology’s patent pending. So

everything that we’re talking about, or a number of things we’re

talking about are patented.

Darius: There are some companies

we know of — I think like one or two — who do outdoor mapping with,

of course, help of LiDAR and other methods. And then do localization

in a perhaps similar way. But there’s no company that gives the owner

the power of mapping and localization at the same time with any

device. So there we are, very unique.

Michael: The very amazing thing

about our technology is that we reuse what’s the best in ARCore and

ARKit, potentially Azure Spatial Anchors. This means we could support

pretty much every device of the future. So imagine there’s gonna be

AR glasses. The AR glasses are probably going to use Visualix

technology. That’s how it’s going to look like.

Alan: Wow, that’s pretty

impressive. So if I had to put some money on this. My guess is Apple

or Google should acquire you. And this is my prediction. So I think

Apple or Google should acquire you now, because if they don’t, then

all of their competitors have the advantage that they will come from

your service.

Michael: You know, we are

starting to make money. So what’s happening to Visualix? We have

achieved a reasonable amount of respect in our space and work with

amazing companies, amazing customers in Germany, in the US and in

Asia. And we are starting to make money, meaning that SDK sales is

significantly easier than sales of technology because it’s an actual

packaged product that you can use pretty much off the shelf. So we

hope to start making more money, and take over more and more of the

industrial spaces in the world and create even more value for our

customers.

Darius: In terms of your comment

that you mentioned before, regarding acquisition: of course OEMs are

one thing, but if I was a, say, a large either industrial client, for

example, who wants a monopoly on this technology has a huge

competitive advantage in contrast to other industrial players.

That’s, of course, interesting as well. There are, of course, a

number of OEMs and software platforms, that are also active in the AR

industrial space. And that’s, of course, also potentially interesting

that they can defend themselves or have the unique value proposition

of our technology, to basically not let this go into other platforms.

So there we believe there are many avenues where we can go to,

partnerships, acquisition. But I think our goal is to really grow the

company and really create a lot of value. I think that’s something we

very much agree on, to continue this journey.

Alan: Finally, a startup that

wants to actually make money.

Michael: [laughs]

Alan: Yay! Yay!

Michael: We definitely make

money. We definitely want to create a lot of value. We work very hard

on this. We work pretty much all the time. And we are very motivated.

And we speak to a number of tier o1 investors in the US and some of

them really express– some of them approach us, and they say, “OK,

guys, you’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. So this is really

happening.” And, you know, you’ve seen Charlie [Fink] writing

about us. And, you know, he’s one of the most respected figures in

this space. And we are huge fans of Charlie. And when he wrote about

us and then again, we gave him a quick demo and at AWE, Santa Clara.

Those are very, very beautiful moments. And then we see that we

actually bring this value, we push the world further. And now, since

Apple and Google are pushing ARKit and ARCore and Microsoft is

pushing Azure Spatial Anchors, this is an amazing use for Visualix.

This is the best thing that could be happening for Visualix, ever.

Alan: I love it. Well, guys,

it’s been a real pleasure to have you on the show. We’ve got to wrap

it up. But thank you again, Michael Bucko and Darius Pajouh from

Visualix. It’s been a really amazing, enlightening podcast. And just

kind of close off, Charlie Fink is actually one of our mentors on the

XR Ignite program. So really excited and honored to have him as part

of that as well.

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By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse

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