AR Show with Jason McDowall

Yi Xu is the director of XR Technology at OPPO, a leading Android smartphone company that's innovating in AR with their Air Glass product line.

Prior to OPPO, Yi received a PhD in computer science, specializing in computer vision. He utilized these skills as computer scientist and engineer at GE Global Research and CapsoVision, working on a number of projects revolving around 3D computer vision. He then worked as a technical leader at JD. com, shaping the roadmap for their mobile augmented reality research.

Yi then joined OPPO in 2019 as the lab manager of Mixed Reality Lab, and quickly rose to be the company wide director of XR Technology. In this role, Yi remains close to the product and technology as he leads the development of Oppo's AR and MR product lines.

In this conversation, Yi describes his early interest in 3D and computer vision, and how this led to a passion for XR. Yi goes on to describe why OPPO, a major Android OEM, is so interested in developing smart glasses and similar technology as well as the use cases that he sees as killer apps for consumer smart glasses.

Yi stresses OPPO’s focus on design, so we go in depth on comfort, aesthetics, and requirements for smart glasses that consumers will actually wear. We also take a tangent to discuss how generative AI, both textual and visual, might help form the future of AR interfaces. Yi also discusses the massive technical challenges in the way of achieving this vision, and how OPPO is tackling those challenges.

Links From The Episode

Review: [The Oppo Air Glass 2 are the first AR glasses I could see myself using](https://www.trustedreviews.com/opinion/the-oppo-air-glass-2-are-the-first-ar-glasses-i-could-see-myself-using-4305360) by Lewis Painter for Trusted Reviews

Article: [The OPPO Air Glass 2 Is Easily the Most Fashionable Sleek AR Wearable on Display at MWC 2023](https://www.yankodesign.com/2023/02/28/the-oppo-air-glass-2-is-easily-the-most-fashionably-sleek-ar-wearable-on-display-at-mwc-2023/) by Sarang Sheth for Yanko Design

Article: [OPPO pursues tech-augmented reality via MR & Health Science](https://www.ungeek.ph/2023/12/oppos-pursues-tech-augmented-reality-via-mr-health-science/) by Colin Chan for UnGeek

Press Release: [OPPO Empowers Collaborative XR Innovation with the Launch of OPPO MR Glass Developer Edition for Snapdragon SpacesTM XR Developers Platform at AWE 2023](https://www.oppo.com/en/newsroom/press/oppo-mr-glass-developer-edition-launch-at-awe-2023/)

Blog Post: [Introducing Smart Glass | AIR GLASS 2](https://communityin.oppo.com/thread/1222179266759491585)

Press Release: [OPPO Introduces Air Glass, Featuring Creative Cicada Wing Design and Self-designed Spark Micro Projector](https://www.oppo.com/en/newsroom/press/oppo-air-glass/) - about the original Air Glass

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Dominic Collins is the co-founder and CEO of Darabase, a platform to manage and monetize AR permissions on the physical world.

Prior to Darabase, Dominic was the general manager of international for Jaunt, which was a content capture technology company and studio focused on VR and later AR. He has also been the CEO or Director of Digital across a number of telecom companies, including Sky, Orange Digital, and T-Mobile, as well as the Chief Marketing Officer of financial services company, Legal & General.

In this conversation, we talk about the perspective that led Dominic to work with major property owners to help them control how digital content appears on their physical buildings.

He shares the strategy at Darabase for taking the best of traditional Out-of-Home advertising, and applying it to the complex arena of property rights within augmented reality.

He goes on to describe his entrepreneurial perspective on creating an augmented reality technology company, including some insight into his approach to building a business that is viable both today and for years to come.

Dominic also shares some lessons learned from his time at Jaunt, an early immersive content company for VR & AR.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Chi Xu is the founder and CEO of Nreal, a company devoted to making consumer-facing mixed reality wearables available to all.

After earning a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Chi spent time at both Nvidia and Magic Leap before leaving to join another startup. From there, he conceived and founded Nreal.

Since its founding in 2017, Nreal has been aggressively iterating on their hardware and software, and received a lot of press and awards, including “Best Start-up” at CES and “Best in Show” at the Augmented World Expo (AWE).

In this conversation, Chi talks about the origins of the company and how his team is outpacing the competition. We talk about Nreal’s approach to making the glasses a complement to the smartphone and the path from wearable displays to fully featured AR smartglasses.

He shares his perspectives on alternative approaches to the market and the high barrier for any product to achieve.

We go on to talk about the copycat products we saw at this year’s CES as well as the lawsuit that Magic Leap has thrown his way.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Chen-Ping Yu is the Founder and CEO at Phiar, an early-stage startup seeking to revolutionize how people navigate and experience the world, through cutting-edge computer vision AI technology.

Phiar is creating an augmented reality navigation platform for driving, to enhance driving safety, facilitate more intuitive wayfinding, and connect drivers with their surrounding environments.

Prior to Phiar, Chen-Ping was on a path to become a professor focused on computer vision. After getting his masters at Penn State and his Ph.D. at Stony Brook, he was working on his post-doctoral research at Harvard. There he was investigating and developing neuro-inspired deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for modeling human visual information processing for image and object classification.

In this conversation, we dig into the origins of the company as well as their approach to ultra low-power computer vision that can run efficiently on smartphones in real time.

Chin-Ping shares his decision to pursue and attend Y Combinator, and his most harrowing moment while he was there. We talk about the challenges of augmenting the world through a mobile phone and how that applies to Phiar’s initial mobile AR product. We go on to discuss concerns around driver distraction and how navigation serves as the gateway to a broad and pervasive AR platform technology.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.

Phil Greenhalgh is the Chief Technical Officer at WaveOptics, a leading designer and manufacturer of diffractive waveguide optics. This is a key optical component many in this industry believe can deliver the sort of form factor that can enable the mass adoption of AR smartglasses.

After more than a decade as a professor of Electronic Engineering, Phil shifted his focus to the commercial world. He’s co-founded two technology companies, one of which was acquired by DAQRI for its expertise in Augmented Reality electronics and optics. He then served as the SVP of Engineering responsible for DAQRI’s research and development.

For the last year and a half, Phil has been the CTO of WaveOptics, focused on material sciences, and developing waveguides and projector systems with higher fields of view.

In this conversation, Phil shares his perspective on the importance of waveguides in creating eye-glass-thin smartglasses, and what sets the WaveOptics’ approach apart.

He talks about his background as an educator and some experiences as an entrepreneur. We also get into the science of combiner optics and the many technical trade-offs necessary to make a great experience in a head-worn device.

We go on to talk about his perspective on microdisplays that fit well with waveguide optics as well as his broader perspective on the market. He also gets into some of the successes and lessons learned at DAQRI.

Phil starts by sharing some exploits he had as an amateur pilot.

You can find all of the show notes at thearshow.com.