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Making any sort of head-mounted AR display has been a challenge, both on the technology front, and from an adaptation standpoint. But Stefan Alexander from North challenged himself even further - by making them look chic, to boot.\n\n\xa0\n\n\xa0\n\n\xa0\n\n\xa0\n\nAlan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Stefan Alexander, vice president of Advanced R&D for North, the company this created Focals, the world's first consumer AR glasses. And of course, they're also a Canadian company. And we're really excited to talk about their new product, North Focals 2. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Stefan, welcome to the show.\n\n\xa0\n\nStefan: Thanks, it's great to be here.\n\n\xa0\n\nAlan: It's my absolute pleasure. As you know, I have had a pair of North glasses for almost-- actually over a year now. I was one of the first 100 people to be lucky enough to get these. I went in for my fitting in Toronto, got these wonderful glasses, I got my little ring. And I proceeded to try all sorts of different things. And super excited to have you on the call and really learn more about what's coming up next for North.\n\n\xa0\n\nStefan: Yeah, great.\n\n\xa0\n\nAlan: Maybe you can just describe the North glasses to the listeners, and how they came about.\n\n\xa0\n\nStefan: So, I can give you a kind of brief history of how this whole thing started. So originally when North was founded, it was actually called Thalmic Labs, and the product was a gesture control armband. So this kind of went on your upper forearm. You could make motions with your hand and it would detect your muscle movements and you could control computers, music, do presentation control. But one of the things that they were really passionate about was controlling heads-up displays like Google Glass, which had just come out at the time. I was actually the first person hired to not work on the Myo, that was this armband. And about a year before it came out, they hired me and they said, "Stefan, we think that the control of smart glasses and the control of head mounted displays is really important. But we're not sure if anybody's going to make exactly what we have in mind, what we think is gonna be so big, which is glasses that look exactly like regular glasses. And we don't know the tech to do this, and I don't think it exists yet. But can we work on a way to do these type of smart glasses?" So I had a display background. I was working at OLED displays. And so I started this research program, that turned into the first generation of Focals. And eventually it got so good that it really just took over the company, and we stopped doing the gesture control and we've just kind of went all in on smart glasses and changed our name to North. And that's kind of how we ended up where we are.\n\n\xa0\n\nAlan: That's fantastic. I wonder-- you started off life as a gesture armband. And it's funny, because I remember this. I was part of the Ryerson Digital Media Zone at the time. And I went to Communitech, which is where North was founded, or I guess Thalmic Labs at the time.\n\n\xa0\n\nStefan: Yeah, yeah.\n\n\xa0\n\nAlan: And I remember going into this tiny little lab with I think there was probably 10 people at the time, and they said, "Hey, try this thing on your forearm." And it was this kind of stretchy, almost like a bracelet with a bunch of black sensors on it. And after that, I went on to create The Emulator, which was the see-through touchscreen DJ controller. And we worked-- we ended up working with Armin Van Buren, who w