Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) AdHawk Microsystems

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

You can learn more about AdHawk Microsystems. But especially learn more about the MindLink Air. And the link to the YouTube version of this interview is here if you want to watch the demo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Ride Home. This is a portfolio profile episode. This is from the Ride Home Fund.

So it's not an AI company, but, man, is this some really interesting, exciting tech? We're going to talk to a company called Ad Hoc Micro Systems. We're talking to one of the founders, Neil Sarkar. Neil, Neil, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So we like to start off with basically, give me the five-minute elevator pitch about what AdHoc does and what this really cool technology is. Sounds good. Yeah, so AdHoc delivers a full-stack eye-tracking solution. So we really needed to rethink the entire system architecture of eye-trackers from the ground up to make it practical to put this type of technology in wearables that you can put on your face.

and use all day. So the first thing we had to do is drop the cameras and the image processing, which really makes conventional eye trackers quite unwieldy. And so now that we've accomplished that, we really want to get this tech in front of billions of eyeballs because we think that all-day eye tracking can serve as a fitness tracker for brain health and really has the potential to address some massive societal challenges. And so we just unveiled this product called the MindLink Air, and we're excited to broadcast its availability.

Well, I'm going to have you demo that for us here in a second. But first, I think folks are familiar with the whole XR space, AR or VR, and the sense that eye tracking, which is usually done with cameras, Because it's a key technology because for VR, if you can see where people are looking, then you don't have to render the whole field of view. But also, like, you know, it's useful in terms of understanding what the wearer is looking at so that you can present information to them. I also use it as a control mechanism and things like that. So you're saying that your technology is not a camera. So explain to me how this tech is different. Yeah, yeah. So we've actually created our own custom silicon solution just for eye tracking.

So we build these chips. We can fit like 10,000 of them on a wafer. And the chips have tiny little micro mirrors in them. But they also in the same package have a light source and some micro-optics. And so we can sweep a beam of light across the eye thousands of times per second. And any time that beam reflects off of your cornea onto one of our photodiodes, we can pick up a pulse. And anytime that beam crosses the threshold between the iris and the pupil, we see a big drop in diffuse reflection also pick up the pulse. And because we're capturing thousands of pulses per second per eye, we're able to build a full 3D model of the human eye and tell you what that pupil size is, which way it's pointing, you know, how long blinks are down to the millisecond. You really capture all of the dynamics of eye movements very precisely this way. And because we're not shuttling, you know,

megabits per second to video through the frames and trying to do image processing, we can do all of this in a very lightweight microcontroller. So, you know, this is a gel pack that has sort of the family of chips that we've developed over the years, starting from the biggest one to the smallest one. And there's actually some chips in there that you cannot resolve on a webcam.

They're like 100 microns on the side. So yeah, that's, that's, that's, kind of the difference between the approach we take and cameras. I'm going to have announced this at the beginning of the episode, but I want to remind people that there is a YouTube video that you can see what he's going to be demoing for us. But so again, those are tiny chips. So, as opposed to like, you know, the VR device that I own is the MetaQuest 2, and it's got those inward facing, I believe the Vision Pro has inward facing cameras, but what you're saying is that You don't need those cameras.

You need these just teeny tiny fit on the head of or the back of a pin sort of chips. That's correct. Yeah. And I think you point out something pretty interesting, which is that the reason why eye tracking has become more well known is that some of these VR headsets like the PSVR 2 and the exciting announcement about the Applevision Pro have camera-based eye trackers in them. But the idea of having an eye tracker on you all day, every day in a 35 grand product, while not compromising on data quality, that's something that you just can't do with cameras. It's kind of the reason why the Applevision Pro is plugged into a battery pack and the Sony PlayStation VR2 is plugged into a gaming console.

Lightweight all-day wearables just haven't had eye tracking yet. Right, right. So let's get to why you're coming on the show now. you all have just announced the Mindlink Air, which again, he's going to demo for us in a second, so listeners you'll want to find this video. But essentially, this is, you know, we always say, oh, eventually, especially AR glasses, will just be regular glasses. They won't be these things that need battery packs.

They won't be heavy. They'll just be regular eyeglasses. These are, to my eyes, regular eyeglasses. and essentially what the Mindlink air is, is, I would argue, a fitness tracker for your eyes, which means eyes window to the soul, but windows to the brain maybe is a fitness tracker for your brain, I guess. Absolutely, yeah. That's a great way to think about them.

We actually do think about it as the first fitness tracker for brain health. The important thing here is that if you want people to wear something all day, It has to be frictionless and it has to be invisible, but you can't properly compromise on the data quality. So these glasses that I'm wearing here are prototypes of the MindLink Air. They're intended to come into in various different frame styles. They weigh less than 40 grams. And they're just capturing all of the most subtle movements that your eyes make throughout

the day. So it might be worth taking a little detour and talking about why is it that the eyes tracking eyes serves as a fitness tracker for the brain. So, you know, the eyes are, in my opinion, the most practical and information-rich neural interface that can go into wearables because of a couple of reasons. So, you know, humans are visual creatures and the eyes are the highest bandwidth input into our brains. That's kind of the reason why we're surrounded by these screens that just keep getting bigger. And in the case of AR and VR, they're getting closer and closer to your eyes because we know that that's how you get information into a human brain.

But it turns out that the eyes are actually a very information-rich output from the brain across the entire hierarchy of neurological function. So from a physiological perspective, if you're passed out and a paramedic shows up, the first thing they're going to do is stick a flashlight in your eye to check for your pupil response to determine your brain's vitals. And then if you get hit in the head, the first thing they tell you to do is go get your eyes checked. So concussions can be screened using eye. eye tracking, actually there's an FDA cleared protocol for that. But even like things like dizziness,

you show up to a hospital and you're dizzy, and you can tell based on a type of eye movement called mastagnus, whether that dizziness is because you've had a stroke and you better stay in the hospital or if it's because, you know, you have vertigo and they'll send you home. So those are some of the low level brain function you can probe with the eyes. But then there's the psychology as well. So lots of studies around depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, that correlate eye tracking data and the performance of humans with visually guided tests with those conditions. And then finally, I think this is the area that's most relevant for the mind-link air product

is in the area of human behavior. So really, I think when it comes to cognitive load, so how hard are you thinking, focus, mental fatigue, and eye strain, those are all things that have very robust signals in eye movements and in pupilometry that we capture within all day. wearable. So, you know, as humans, everything we do, we just lead with our eyes. And because we're a startup, we've got to focus on trying to, trying to address the, cast the widest possible net, and address some massive, you know, societal issues. So that's what we're hoping to do with the 9-Lic air. So the air tracks blink activity, pupil dilation, gaze behavior, all this

stuff. In aid of, like you said, you know, if you wear it all throughout the day and it's sending information to an app on your smartphone, you can do things like, okay, it's time to step away from your screen, your suffering eye strain, but also what I find fascinating is you can maybe over time while wearing this, get a sense of when you're at your cognitive best in the day. So when you're doing your best thinking, your best work in theory. So in the same way that, you know, fitness trackers that we're familiar with like wearing on our wrist or whatever, give you a sense of like, you know, recovery from activity and things like that. This gives you a sense of like achieving peak

performance mentally. Absolutely. Yeah. So it turns out that, you know, you're probably at your most productive when you're in a flow state. And there's some, some books and papers on the subject of flow state. But what's interesting about flow state is that it's a combination of being focused and having the right amount of cognitive load. So in the 60s, we learned that pupilometry serves as a robust indicator of cognitive load and working memory. So how hard are you thinking? And then focus is also tied to visual signals.

So if you can combine the right amount of focus and cognitive load, you're not being distracted, you're not confused, you're not thinking too hard, but it's also not effortless, then you get into that flow state. product like this, you know, can sort of coach you into getting into flow state by measuring those things, measuring the matters. And I think that's a huge societal problem, right? Because we have people who are overworked and are potentially going to burn out who could probably get more done in less time if they could get into the flow state more easily. The other thing that, you know, eye tracking reveals is fatigue, mental fatigue. And so if you keep working until

you're tired, it's already too late. You've wasted the last couple of of maybe tens of minutes trying to work in a tired state. And that's, you know, one of the early indicators that you're going to burn out. And so knowing what to take breaks at the right amount of time and knowing how much work you can do is another, you know, I think a big problem and pain point that the glasses can address. And then eye health. You know, the myopia is now an epidemic. And dry eye and a bunch of other eye-related health concerns are things that we can measure. So there's this well-known 2020-20-20 rule. It's starting to get pretty clear that the reason why myopia is on the rise is that we spend so much time with our screens very close to ourselves.

And we can measure exactly how far you're looking and how much light is coming into your eyes and give you that, uh, that set of notifications that like, hey, if you don't want your myopia to progress, this is a good time to take 20 seconds and look at something 20 feet away. So it's two things like we said, fitness tracker, we're familiar with how this works. It learns when maybe you're at your peak helps you develop patterns in your day to get to that peak and stay there when you need it. But also it says, hey, stop. And it does this for fatigue mentally and fatigue with the eyes. And down the road, I mean, with other biomarkers and stuff, like, could this also be a thing that could, again, not maybe with this product, but down.

the road, detect changes in cognitive function that could have other neurological health implications? Yeah, and I think that's probably one of the most exciting things about getting a product like this on the market, is that we're going to be able to capture the largest data set of human neurological activity in the wild. And measuring, like, say, every day, even if you're only reading for like 20 minutes, knowledge workers, you know, spend about two or three hours a day reading, if we're able to track your, you know, reading speed, cognitive load while you're reading, and various other kind of metrics from your eyes, and we start to see changes in wearing the product for a year.

This has the potential to be the earliest warning system for the onset of neurodegenerative disease. And as we know, the earlier you can catch some of these neurodegenerative conditions, the more likely it is that intervention will be effective. But yeah, I mean, the range of things you can do with eye tracking, detecting absentechis in pediatric epilepsy, monitoring concussions, you know, looking for early onset symptoms. It's such a broad range that as a startup company, we don't really have the luxury to pursue each of those, even though they're very deep pain points. And that's why we're so excited that, you know, three years ago, we launched this research product called the MindLink, not the MindLink Air, but the MindLink, which, which we sold for tens of thousands of dollars to over 100 clinicians and academics around the world. They are producing results in all of these very important kind of fields of neuroscience.

But yeah, so the Mindlink air, I think, is the everyman glasses that I really think is going to broadly address problems that we all have. Right, especially because you don't have to do anything that you're just wearing glasses. and so there's no additional like friction to getting this amazing data. I've been remiss if people listening want to see this product, you can find out about it at Mindlinkaer.com, M-I-N-D-L-N-K-A-I-R, like you can think.com. But also, again, we shouldn't do this for too long because most people will probably listen to this. But can you show me some of the demo that you were showing me before we started recording? Happy to

So I'm putting on the glasses here And then I'm Launching the app on my iPad The app works on iOS as well as Android So you just bring your own device Yeah so what you're looking at in this video Is my eye movements being captured And then streamed to this iPad

And so I could look at the four corners of the screen You'll see my eyes move But what's remarkable about this is that if I move the glasses on my face and rotate them, I still look. So the reason that's important is that I want to be able to take my glasses off and then put them back on and then instantly be tracking again. I don't want to have to do calibrations. I don't want to have to do what academics have been doing for years.

And that's one of our learnings as a startup is that this thing has to be completely frictionless. But it's not just measuring my eye movements approximately. It's actually capturing them with millisecond resolution. So every time I blink, a new point is added onto this graph. And if I do a long blink, you see a big spike that shows up. That's the longer blinks. My average blink duration in the afternoons looks like it's at about 160 milliseconds today. And then, you know, there's a whole bunch of models that take all of these inputs to measure things like cognitive load and focus and fatigue.

So this is another thing that's measuring in real time. How far am I looking? So are my screens too close? I spend enough time looking at something far away. So if I look at my finger and I bring it in closer and further, you'll see that my fixation depth is being recorded. But then if I look out into the parking lot into the distance, you'll see an even bigger spike, right?

So that's the fixation plot. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff happening under the hood. We're measuring the velocity of saccades. We're measuring the interblink intervals. We're measuring how much of your field of view are you actually looking at. And we're even know how random your eye movements are. So all of these real-time measurements get uploaded to our cloud services, and that's where we run the models to extract all the state information.

Again, I'm going to remind listeners that hopefully on the show notes, I will have a link to this video on YouTube so that you can see as not only he's describing that his eyes are react. On the iPad, it's reacting in real time to what his eyes are doing, but those little jumps on the graph. It's really fascinating stuff. A couple quick points about the product. What's like sort of the charging sort of battery life issue with this sort of thing? How every day is the usage of this? Yeah. So the current power consumption of these things is so insanely low that glasses.

So these are actually a prototype. They have a world camera in them. The product that we're shipping will not have a world camera. We think it's still a little too early. to ship a product that makes people uncomfortable. But, you know, hopefully we're seeing that trend start to pick up. But, yeah, these frame styles are intended to be more fashion forward. And, yeah, the last between 12 and 16 hours, that's where our benchmarks are out now.

Hopefully we can push that efficiency even higher with some power saving modes. But, yeah, so that, you know, without compromising on the eye-tracking data quality, we can get a full day of high-quality recordings. And if I wear it without my phone, I mean, who goes many places without their phone? But is it still recording and tracking data that then goes to the app? Yeah. I mean, in order to actually get the insights from the data, you do need to eventually upload to the cloud from your mobile device,

from the companion app. There is going to be some local storage in case you don't have a connection to your phone, Bluetooth drops for a while. but generally if you're for instance at the end of the day let's say you're not a big fan of getting alerts every so often to say hey you should take a break or hey you know you should flicker and blue light coming out of the if you're not a fan of that then you know we're we're going to be generating lighting reports and and you know reports for all the different types of measurements we've been talking about but you know i was just going to use the lighting one as an example you can just

wait till the end of the day, and it'll tell you, you know, every photon that went into your eyes from the moment that you woke up to the moment you went to bed, what was the intensity of light that hit your eyes, and what was the wavelength of light that hit your eyes? And you can make lifestyle changes based on that insight. Like, maybe you're not getting great sleep because of, you know, some factor that the glasses capture. This sounds like one of those things that, you know, a decade from now, maybe even less every pair of glasses would have tech like this. And let's step back for a second and tell me where this tech came from.

And to the degree that you want to, tell me about your own entrepreneurial story of bringing this tech and this company to life. Sure. Yeah. It's a little bit of a circuitous path that we took to get here, that I took to get here. So, you know, in grad school, I was working on something called a single-chip atomic force microscope. So we were able to take this tiny CMOS chip and put sensors on it that could pick up the forces between atoms and put actuators on it that can position these sensors with sub-nanameter resolution. Jesus. So you can take our chip and, yeah, take our chip, put it on a sample and you can get a ridiculously high-resolution image of things like butterfly wings

or, you know, even like other microchips. So all of that tech, you know, I think it was exciting to, you know, go to conferences and get some good recognition for the technology, write papers and kind of measure your success by looking at the impact factor or, you know, like citation indices. And we rolled all of that into our eye tracking chip set. So we were using similar kinds of ultra-precise mechatronic systems on chips to do eye-tracking. Now, you know, the reason why we decided to start a company has to do a little bit with the academic receptivity of the technology. So we were enjoying, you know, some good traction on like, hey, you can measure where somebody's eyeballs pointing using these mem sensors. That's very exciting. So we thought, hey, maybe we should try to commercialize this. And that's when we started to learn all kinds of lessons.

Our motivation was that, like, hey, I don't want the impact factor of my life's work to be measured in how many people read some papers or, you know, how many, you know, presentations I gave at conferences. I want these to actually get in front of other humans as eyeballs and improve their health. And you're not going to do that by, you know, doing academic research. So in fact, a lot of our co-founders were, you know, PhDs from the University of Waterloo. and we decided, hey, let's try to have an impact on society in a different way. So that's what started it, but also very quickly we got punched in the face when we realized that academic success does not equal commercial success. Can you, again, to the degree that you are willing to get personal punched in the face,

go into that a bit. Because of your academic background, you were maybe ill-prepared for the sort of startup life? Yeah, I mean, I'll give you a good example. with eye trackers, right, which have really found their initial foothold was in academic institutions and clinicians were using eye tracking to diagnose concussions. You needed a PhD to operate these eye trackers. And it was okay if you had to put somebody's head in a chin rest to try to get the best quality data so that you can publish your paper. Now, the amount of kind of fiddling around you had to do with software and hardware to get solid eye tracking data was something that the academic

community was willing to do. But if you tried to get this into a consumer product, you know, what we found was that it was hard to fit the device onto people so that you get a strong signal. And then eventually we realized that it's not enough just to get eye tracking when the glasses are sitting perfectly. You need to be able to move the glasses around like you just saw before and still know exactly where somebody is looking. And then there's the human factors concerns. So it's not enough to say everybody in our office can do great eye tracking. You got to I put this across the entire sort of variation of human factors in the human species by putting it on hundreds and hundreds of people and finding out how it goes wrong on fixing it.

Sorry to interrupt, but this is a hardware play. This is, I mean, this is a wearable, this is a device, but like, not to be dismissive, but oh, jitting up a good software idea is one thing, but like, there's so many factors for something that, as you said, you wanted it to be. a consumer product in the real world. There's way more factors to have to control for. Yeah, yeah. One of the early learnings when we were, you know, shipping these eval kits to OEMs to, you know,

try to get integrated into their products was that, hey, if one percent of our devices gets returned, if someone goes to Best Buy, buys these glasses, puts them on, and they don't work perfectly, and they return them, you know, a 1% return rate is very, very costly. Whereas I think when I was doing my PhD, I would make 10 devices and if one of them worked, I got a paper out of it. That's a different success rate by almost orders of magnitude.

What have you learned? Again, you mentioned that this is your first consumer product. The mine link was the original mine link was for, clinical use and like research use. So even what can you tell me about that? Designing a product that is used in a professional-ish setting versus this is something that should be designed, that should be usable by someone like my mom, right? What what what how do you have to think in designing a product differently,

even almost philosophically how do you have to think differently about that? Yeah. So, you know, the, the lead of our software team. has had this mantra that we talk about at every all-hands meeting, which is just hashtag just works. So it used to be the case that you put the glasses on, you had to do a tuning step, and then you had to look at an arrooko marker, and then you had to just do all types of calibration before gaze marker even was present. All of those little friction points were things that we were happy to do, and we thought

anybody else would be happy to do. But this is just not the way it works with consumer electronics. you might be able to convince somebody to do a fitting the first time that they put their glasses on. Like when you first buy an iPhone and you calibrate the face ID. And, you know, people who wear glasses, they'll see an optician to make some little tweaks to make sure that their frames are fitting properly. You can do that once. And you can calibrate once.

But that's it. For the rest of, you know, your ownership of this product, it just has to work every time you put it off. Do you have to design, again, I don't want to be pejority? You're saying it just works, but do you also have to design to be, pejorative would be dumber, but let's use the term, do you have to design softer? You have to design or be thinking in a way of you can be forgiving for fail cases, essentially. Like, when you're going the consumer route and you want to go to scale with a consumer product,

does that mean that it's almost like what you put in the market? market is the lowest common than not. We could be so much more complicated, except for the fact that then it wouldn't be successful at scale because there would be too many other vectors for failure. Do you see what I'm trying to poke at here? Like, philosophically, if you design a product for the masses, are those sort of like the tradeoffs that you have to make? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a, you can think of it as a balancing act in terms of of like, hey, if I want to get, you know, 99.9% on time, I have to learn how to fail gracefully in cases where I'm not getting signal, right? But, you know, if you take that to the extreme,

you can just make a really poor eye tracker out of just, you know, some detectors and some illuminators and just say like, hey, I could detect blinks. I can sort of generally tell where someone's looking. But I can't be really accurate across a really large range of people across a really large range of glasses shift. The problem with delivering a product that makes those compromises on data quality is that if you're really trying to capture somebody's cognitive load or trying to determine whether somebody is anxious or confused or is focused, you need to have both highly accurate data and also very high bandwidth data, very high sampling rate.

And so, you know, you might be able to make a very low sampling rate inaccurate system that lasts all day using cameras. But, you know, what I think is important here is that we didn't make those compromises. I still think that the quality of the data coming out of these wireless glasses is on par with research-grade systems that people pay $50,000 plus for, which I think is the step change that you achieve when instead of just waiting for Moore's Law to catch up, you redesign the system from the ground up to get order of magnitude improvements across lots of specifications. Right. I always think to myself, like, you know, Johnny I've had like my iPhone, my dream iPhone 10 years ago because, you know, his prototypes that he was walking around with would have, you know, multi-week battery life because, you know, they were bigger and had more robust batteries and like screens that we wouldn't see for, you know, years. And so, like, designing a product to hit, it's not like, I mean, there's all sorts of. of considerations in terms of like, well, eventually the cost for that will come down, so we'll add it or whatever. What have you learned in terms of making decisions like that? All right, we could do this, but the time isn't right. Either Moore's Law or, you know, manufacturing costs will cut, whatever

it is. We can do this now. We should do this because it's the bare minimum, or we should do this because it's as good as we can do without compromising on costs and things like that. Like, have you learned anything about making decisions like that for a product? Yeah. So I think that, yeah, you bring up a good point, which is that, you know, if you compare a research product like the Mind Link that you plug into a phone and you have a camera feed and you're streaming every pulse that's captured from the eye and so that, you know, after your recording is done,

you can reprocess it and look at it in different ways, compared to something that is, you know, a Bluetooth device, you don't want to be streaming that much data. But you do want to be capturing eye movement events at those rates. So there's a good example of a compromise. We're not streaming 500 hertz data to a phone or even like, you know, the kilohertz pulse data to a phone. Instead, we're computing locally. When did the saccade start? When did it end?

What was its velocity? How long was the blink? What was the pupil size? So the pupil size is an example of something. human pupils don't change that fast, so you can do it at like 60 hertz. But yeah, those types of things get computed on the glasses, and then we only transmit the stuff that's important for our models. And you even mentioned, you know, the prototype had a camera in it,

but you're not ready for that yet. One more question, almost on the philosophy of product. This is a new product category. This is sort of your going to be out there to defapeut. find a potential market. What have you learned about thinking about that? Now, you have the benefit of, like we started by saying, this is a fitness tracker, but that you wear on your face.

And it's a fitness tracker, but for your mind. So people have, it's like the old Uber for X joke, you know? Like people have the concept of, yeah, die hard, but on a summary, you know, like, so people at least, you have the benefit that there's an analogy that people understand. But at the same time, like this is defining a new category. So how, what is your thinking been in terms of doing a product where it's like we are going to hopefully break new ground here and define this category for the first time? Yeah, that's a good question. I guess there's a couple of different angles.

Like the first thing you want to do is, you know, acknowledge that rings and watches and glasses are amongst the oldest wearables that humans, you know, have embraced before there was ever any technology in them. And I think with glasses in particular, they're solving a really important pain point already. Like you can't see unless you wear them for people who require prescription glasses. So there's definitely a stickiness to them. And so when we were thinking about, you know, this new product category, we realized that it can't feel any different from the glasses that people wear all day. It has to be that light. It has to, the tech has to be completely hidden away. And I think, you know, I have to give kudos to the folks at Ura, who pulled it off with rings. You know, you don't want to have, you know, an obtrusive ring that calls attention to people.

It really needs to be invisible. So I think that's the, I would say that's kind of one of the important guiding principles of the product. And then in terms of like, you know, a new category, I think the truth is that this whole concept of quantified self, people initially were just, you know, counting their steps, but now they're measuring their sleep. I think that that has paid off in terms of people's cardiovascular fitness and, you know, physiological health being guided by measurements. And I think that, you know, the brain has never been tracked. and having, you know, longitudinal data that is personalized to just you, that tells you about the stuff that's just as important as, you know, heart rate variability is for your heart. You know, cognitive load variability gives you a good measure of your brain health.

I think we're lucky to be entering this space at a time where people already understand and embrace the benefits of measuring other parts of your body. and I think the brain is the one that actually is, in my opinion, measurements are poised to have big societal impacts. One last thing, and then we can wrap. Because eye tracking has been something that could go into AR and VR. So you're at least adjacent to or have obviously been doing research in a space that is related to the AR and VR space. Do you have any thoughts on,

I said on the show recently that like, well, you know, it's ebbed and flowed sort of the modern AR, VR, VR, XR sort of moment, like, you know, the Oculus and MetaQuest and things like that. But now we have, the latest reporting is in January, you know, the full rollout of the Vision Pro is going to happen. Do you have any thoughts on this space of AR and VR in terms of do you feel that there's an inflection point happening or is it still one of those things that like 10 years away, five years away or something like that? Yeah, that's something I could probably talk about at length. But let me try to summarize my thoughts.

So back in 2017, when Intel Capital led our first financing round, there was a lot of hype around AR and VR, specifically, probably more around VR at the time. But HoloLens was coming at. People got super excited about it. Gartner had ridiculous predictions of market size. So, you know, we really thought that the design ins were going to come. But if you look at today, all of the ecosystem of products in this space, very few of them have eye tracking. And so I think that was something that took us, it took a lot of patience for us and a lot of mental resilience to kind of ride through the ups and downs. But it's really exciting that, you know, Apple, which I think popularized capacitive touch as an interface for cell phones, which was a magical interface.

Even a baby can reach out and tap on an iPad is doing the same thing now in mixed reality, where you can use your eyes, which are even more of an intuitive way to select objects and point in. at things because usually you'd have to look at something first and then point at it with your finger now you just have to look at it. I think this is going to be another magical interface and it's finally going to be the case that people are going to want to use this in the UI. So I think that's super exciting and I think it's worth the wait and super excited to try the product when it comes out. But then there's this new emerging category of smart classes that have AI assistance integrated into them. Right. Oh, the AI angle, yes. Yeah. And the interesting thing about this is that if you want to have an AI assistant that's like the one in the movie

her, you really want them to kind of not only be aware of your context, which requires perhaps a world camera and an IMU and GPS, but it also needs to be aware of how the human is perceiving that concept, that context. It has to be perception aware because humans, again, we're visual creatures. We take in three degrees of our field of view at a time. And so if the AI knows what you're looking at when you ask the question, what's this? It can provide a much more relevant answer. And we've been doing some experiments with our research product, which are getting us pretty excited about our tech being the eyes and ears of AI assistance in glasses. So that's another category that you should look out for. But yeah, first thing you got to do is get mind

like airs on enough people that you can create these models of what a person's thinking. Are they confused? Are they interested? Are they aroused? Are they fatigued? To provide that kind of contextual information to an AI. Again, something, something, the eyes are the windows to something, something. So I'm going to remind people, first of all, the company is ad hoc microsystems, hashtag, proud investor with the Ride Home Rolling Fund. You can find out more about them at ad hoc microsystems.com. But the actual MindLink Air, this category defining new product, smart glasses, fitness tracker for your brain. You can find out more at Mindlinkair.com.

Also, I'm assuming we're recording mid-December, I'm assuming y'all are going to be at CES and listen. A ton of folks listening to the show right now are going to be at CES. So should they look up your booth? Yes, please do. So you can follow us at Mindlinked air, which is our handle on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. It's also our URL for our website. It's the best way to learn more is to sign up for an email list. And we'll have a booth in the Venetian.

So yeah, this would be great to meet some of the listeners in person. Yeah, if you head to the booth, tell them Brian sent you or the tech meme right home. But also, unless I'm stepping on this, I should have asked you ahead of time, what would be the timeline? You said I can sign up for updates and emails. What would be the timeline for me being able to purchase one of these and put them on my big, fat Irish head? Yeah. Well, so we're doing a Kickstarter campaign in the first half of next year, Q1, Q2 timeframe, and then we're hoping to be able to ship our glasses in the back half of 2024.

So, yeah, that's the way to purchase them at the probably early bird discount. And then, you know, if the Kickstarter campaign is successful, we'll be able to sell them through our website. Awesome. As I put my dumb glasses on, hey, this is the term. Dumb phones versus smartphones, dumb glasses versus smart glasses. Listen, Neil, thank you for coming on and telling us about this really interesting tech and really interesting new category. I'm super excited about what y'all are doing. Is there any, if anybody else is in the meantime, even before CS, if there's anything, if people are interested, want to get involved, are there any asks for the audience that you have before I let you go?

Yeah, so aside from trying to join our community, you know, which the best way to do that, is just to go to the website and sign up. I think one relevant thing that's happening in the next couple of months is that we're in the middle of raising some funds for a convertible note. And again, best way to engage on that if you're interested in investing in the company is to sign up on our website and indicate that you're interested in investment. Or if you're listening and you know me and we've interacted, hit me up and I will personally intro you as well.

Um, Mind Link Air is the main thing, but also ad hoc microsystems. Neil, uh, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling us about this. It's so, it's super exciting stuff. Thanks, Brian. It's been a pleasure.