Paul Travers has been in the XR

business long enough to remember the early headsets, which were not

exactly elegant in design - he describes one of his early models as a

football helmet. But today, Vuzix has managed to shrink a ton of XR

potential into sleek, sexy sunglasses that would look good on any

goth noir vampire slayer. He chats with Alan about the advantages of

svelte headsets, from military applications to making driving safer.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is Paul

Travers. Paul is the founder of Vuzix and has served as the president

and chief executive officer since 1997. Prior to the formation of

Vuzix, Mr. Travers founded both e-Tek Labs and Forte Technologies

Inc. He has been a driving force towards the development of products

in the consumer market. With more than 25 years experience in

consumer electronics field and 15 years experience in virtual reality

and virtual display fields, he is a nationally recognized industry

expert. He's joined by Vuzix's head of business development, Matt

Margolis. If you want to learn more about the Vuzix platform and

their headsets, you can visit vuzix.com.

Paul and Matt, welcome to the show, guys.

Paul: Hey, Alan. Thanks for

having us.

Alan: It's my absolute honor.

You guys are making augmented reality headsets that people actually

will want to wear. And I think it's amazing, your Blade glasses look

like a pair of awesome sunglasses. They're lightweight. They're

wireless. They're every-- they're all the things. How long has it

taken you guys to get there? I mean, you started in 1997. You must

have gone through massive iterations along the way.

Paul: Yeah, Alan. I mean, we've

made all the big stuff, the crazy things. They really started in '93

or '94 when we started shipping our very first VR headset, the VFX-1.

And if you look it up, you'll see VFX-1, it's a football helmet sized

gizmo. And then in '97, actually I bought out all the outside

shareholders and started Vuzix. A little bit of history there, we

started in the defense space. We were making thermal weapons sight

engines that go in the back of the light/medium/heavy thermal weapons

type programs for DRS and Raytheon. And doing that, we got an

opportunity to work with the special forces guys. And if you think

about it, these guys are carrying around 300 pounds of gear. They got

their laptop. They're basically the ultimate mobile wearable tech

guy. And at night, they would light up like a Christmas tree. So they

put a poncho over their head. They had all this gear on and they came

to Vuzix and said, look, could you guys make a pair of Oakley style

sunglasses? They called it the Oakley Gate. And they said, if we

could do that, half the military would buy these things. And so even

all the way back then -- it was '97 to 2000 -- these Special Forces

guys wanted cool. They wanted lightweight. They wanted it truly

functional. And so over the years, we've come out with a lot of

different devices and each iteration we've been pushing on, making

them smaller and lighter. We were talking a little bit earlier about

the top-down versus bottom-up approach. I mean, there's some really

cool technology that's out there that's doing all spatial computing

and the likes, but it's big. And for Vuzix, we're taking the

lightweight, trim, wearable all day side of it, but highly

functional. When you're looking for streaming video applications

where you're doing see-what-I-see for maintenance, repair, and

overhaul, or you're in a warehouse all day long taking stuff out of

that warehouse. You don't want a great big, heavy thing. You want a

super lightweight device that you can wear all day long. So at the

end of the day, you don't have headaches from just sporting the

stupid thing.

Alan: I can totally r