AR Show with Jason McDowall

Maryam Sabour is the General Manager and Head of Business for the AR Headsets group at Niantic, where the goal is to enable everyday adventures and real-life social interaction through location-based augmented reality. Maryam studied law and business at university, going on to earn a Juris Doctorate at McGill University. Early in her career, she was drawn to entrepreneurship, having founded an e-c...

Ohto Pentikäinen and Jamin Hu are the co-founders of Doublepoint, a company creating human-computer interaction technologies which are initially focused on detecting the moment of touching an object. Ohto is a serial entrepreneur having been a co-founder and CEO twice by the age of 20 before co-founding Doublepoint. His earliest venture was reimagining the high school learning experience by creati...

Stan Larroque is the CEO and co-founder of Lynx, a company creating the first all-in-one mixed reality headset. The Lynx R1 offers a unique VR device with good video-passthrough of the real world to create mixed reality experiences. Stan was inspired by the early Oculus device, the DK2, but wanted a better connection to the real world. As he finished his university education, he embarked on the jo...

David Jiang is the CEO and founder of VITURE, a company creating a smartglasses solution for video gaming and streaming content. After studying human computer interaction and industrial design at university in China, David continued his studies into human computer interaction at Harvard, where he fell in love with the Boston Celtics basketball team. David joined Google in the early years of their...

Cayden Pierce describes himself as a transhumanist hacker working to enhance our intelligence using AI, smartglasses, and eventually, neurotech. Cayden posts regularly about the current state of smartglasses and is actively developing open source smartglasses hardware and middleware solutions. To support those efforts and to facilitate insights between end users and smartglass makers, he recently...

Ari Grobman is the CEO of Lumus, a company developing a novel optics solution for AR glasses.  Before going any further, let me provide a little perspective up front: When I consider the biggest hurdles to delivering consumer-grade AR, optics and displays are at the top of the list. The display and the combiner optics are two separate, but intimately connected, engineering challenges. Lumus s...

Damir First is the co-founder and CCO of Matterless, a company creating genre-defining experiences in shared augmented reality—emphasis on “shared.” Early in his career, Damir earned a Master of Arts in both Sociology and Art History before pursuing his Ph. D. in Anthropology. He has been a lecturer for a number of courses spanning design, history, architecture, and art, and he has since worked in...

Today I am kicking off 2023 with another annual monologue. I hope you and your family were able to have a safe and relaxing holiday, even in the face of another arctic blast and spate of viral diseases. This is the sixth such annual kickoff episode, and when looking back at my notes from last year, the big surprise from 2022 was the resounding commitment shown by Meta and others to continued inves...

Chen Zhang and Matt Udvari are co-founders of Aquifer, a company that has developed a SaaS platform to enable creators and teams create studio-level animated video without studios. Matt is a polymath who has persistently pursued education and work experiences across computer science, music, and storytelling. His career has spanned video game design, executive creative director, CTO at a mobile Saa...

David King Lassman is the founder of GigXR, a global provider of immersive 3D training solutions that transform collaborative learning, with an initial focus on healthcare. David is a serial entrepreneur who grew up with a passion for music, and has since started 6 companies. His companies have spanned education technology, advertising technology, online content, and social media. He’s also raised...

Eric Marcellin-Dibon is the Co-founder and CEO of MicroOLED, and Mark Prince is the General Manager for ENGO product line. MicroOLED is a company that develops high-performance OLED microdisplays for near-to-eye applications. Power efficiency and brightness are two areas where they excel, and the company is bringing that display technology to life through the ENGO Eyewear product line. Eric studie...

Kyle Jackson is the co-founder and CEO of Talespin, a company making immersive learning a reality for the future of work. Kyle is a serial entrepreneur who has worked at the intersection of technology and storytelling for over 20 years. After studying interactive multimedia design and then earning an BFA from the School of Cinema-Television at USC, Kyle has persistently been solving the hard probl...

Glenn Snyder is the co-founder and CTO of Red 6, a company that has developed an Augmented Reality solution to allow real pilots flying real aircraft to see simulated threats and other training scenarios. The AR solution works outdoors, in the bright sun and within high speed, dynamic environments. Glenn has long held a passion for aircraft, technology, and visual effects. After gaining acceptance...

Today’s conversation is a continuation of my discussion with Matt Miesnieks about LivingCities. Joining us for part 2 are co-founders John Gaeta and Dennis Crowley. John won an Oscar for his visual effects work on The Matrix movies, and after many additional creative and visual effects projects, including Speed Racer, he went on to co-found ILMxLAB as part of Lucusfilm. He then served as the SVP o...

Matt Miesnieks is currently the CEO and co-founder of LivingCities, a company reimagining social engagement in the era of the Metaverse. Many of you know Matt as a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on Augmented Reality. Matt was previously the CEO and co-founder of 6D.ai, a company that built tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences....

Mike Wiemer is the CTO and co-founder of Mojo Vision, a company enabling invisible computing with their AR contact lenses. Mike is a brilliant and accomplished technologist who is unafraid of tackling hard problems…and he and his team have solved many on their way to successfully demonstrating their wearable contact lens—working inside somebody’s eye—earlier this summer. Prior to Mojo Vision, Mike...

Dave Haynes is a founding partner at FOV Ventures, an investment firm backing the founders who are building the Metaverse. FOV Ventures is a new fund with a focus on European-based startups at the pre-seed and seed stage. Dave previously led HTC’s $100 million Vive X fund in EMEA and was part of the investment team at Seedcamp (Fund III). Prior to investing, Dave founded two startups in the music...

Jonathan Rodriguez Cefalu is the co-founder and CEO of Preamble, a company on a mission to provide ethical guardrails for AI systems by creating an AI-as-a-Service with a focus on ethics and safety.  Jon earned a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he discovered a passion for the coming age of VR and AR technologies. He went on to co-found Vergence Labs, which had ambitious...

Neil Sarkar is the CEO and co-founder of AdHawk Microsystems, a company creating the first camera-free eye tracking solution that offers unprecedented speed, data quality and power efficiency. Prior to AdHawk, Neil was a co-founder at ICSPI, which develops scanning probe instruments on a CMOS-MEMS technology platform. They are commercializing the world's first Single-Chip Atomic Force Microscope....

Alon Grinshpoon is the Co-founder and CEO of echo3D, a 3D-ready cloud platform that helps manage & deliver 3D, AR, and VR content to apps & devices everywhere. echo3D recently closed a $4M round of funding to feed continued growth after seeing a tremendous amount of momentum over the past year. Alon started his career in the Isrealli Intelligence Service, working on encryption and cloud te...

Susan Cummings is the Managing Director of Tiny Rebel Games and a founder of Fictioneers. Susan and her team were awarded a major UK grant for Augmented Reality storytelling, which led to "Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up." This effort was followed by the release this summer of "Wallace & Gromit: Fix Up the City", an ambitious city-scale AR game that takes place in San Francisco, Bristol,...

Paul Travers is the Founder and CEO of Vuzix, a leading supplier of Smart Glasses and Augmented Reality technologies and products for the consumer and enterprise markets. Prior to Vuzix, Paul was an engineer at Eastman Kodak, innovating the future of digital cameras. He went on to become a serial entrepreneur, having started multiple hardware technology companies, including in sound cards for PCs...

Nils Pihl is the CEO and co-founder of Auki Labs, a company solving the limitations of GPS to accurately position virtual content, particularly for shared experiences. Nils and the team at Auki are building advanced, peer-to-peer positioning protocols and AR cloud infrastructure to enable a new era of spatial computing. Nils is also the CEO of Matterless Studios, a venture-backed startup creating...

Tomas Sluka is the CEO and co-founder of CREAL, a Swiss technology startup that developed and commercializes a radically new type of display that brings natural focal depth to a truly 3D visual experience within Augmented Reality. The inspiration for CREAL originated with the first commercial VR and AR headsets back in 2014. Like many others, Tomas suffered from very strong eye-strain and lack of...

Kai Ströder is the co-founder and CEO of tooz, a company on a mission to develop cost-effective smartglasses for consumers. Early in his career, Kai was a research fellow at the University of Stuttgart, where he also earned a Ph. D. in Strategic Management. Over the next decade, he worked across various groups at Carl Zeiss, the world’s leading, high-end optics company. Among other projects, Kai h...