Chen-Ping Yu (Phiar) on the Future of AR Navigation and Experience at YC

02/18/20 • 73 min

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.

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.

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.

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

Previous Episode

Phil Greenhalgh (WaveOptics) on the Art and Science of Designing Waveguide Optics for Wearable Displays

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.

Next Episode

Edward Tang (Avegant) on How Our Eyes & Brains Deceive Us and Making Displays to Match

Edward Tang is the co-founder and CEO of Avegant, a company building next-generation display technologies for augmented reality experiences.

Prior to Avegant, Ed spent nearly 15 years working in microfabrication and MEMs technologies, including 5 years focused on applying MEMs to brain-control interfaces. (MEMs stands for micro-electromechanical system, which is basically a teeny tiny machine that has both mechanical and electronic components.)

The startup Avegant has been around for several years and initially came to prominence with their Glyph product, which was a head-worn display that served as a portable second screen.

Recently Ed and his team have been focused on the underlying display technology. He comes at it from the perspective of trying to match the quirks of the human visual system.

In this conversation, Ed helps us appreciate some of the surprising ways our eyes and brain work to stitch together our perception of reality based on some limited and sporadic data. Ed and his team are using this insight to guide them in creating better displays for smartglasses.

Avegant’s is creating a new type of foveated display, which enables a high-quality visual experience over a wide field of view in a way that doesn’t require a lot of pixels or compute power. They’re also creating the software development and rendering pipeline to match.

This is a fascinating conversation with try-at-home experiments to understand how our brains work.

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