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Paul Travers has been in the XR\nbusiness long enough to remember the early headsets, which were not\nexactly elegant in design \u2013 he describes one of his early models as a\nfootball helmet. But today, Vuzix has managed to shrink a ton of XR\npotential into sleek, sexy sunglasses that would look good on any\ngoth noir vampire slayer. He chats with Alan about the advantages of\nsvelte headsets, from military applications to making driving safer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Welcome to the XR for\nBusiness Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today\u2019s guest is Paul\nTravers. Paul is the founder of Vuzix and has served as the president\nand chief executive officer since 1997. Prior to the formation of\nVuzix, Mr. Travers founded both e-Tek Labs and Forte Technologies\nInc. He has been a driving force towards the development of products\nin the consumer market. With more than 25 years experience in\nconsumer electronics field and 15 years experience in virtual reality\nand virtual display fields, he is a nationally recognized industry\nexpert. He\u2019s joined by Vuzix\u2019s head of business development, Matt\nMargolis. If you want to learn more about the Vuzix platform and\ntheir headsets, you can visit vuzix.com.\nPaul and Matt, welcome to the show, guys.\n\n\n\nPaul: Hey, Alan. Thanks for\nhaving us.\n\n\n\nAlan: It\u2019s my absolute honor.\nYou guys are making augmented reality headsets that people actually\nwill want to wear. And I think it\u2019s amazing, your Blade glasses look\nlike a pair of awesome sunglasses. They\u2019re lightweight. They\u2019re\nwireless. They\u2019re every\u2013 they\u2019re all the things. How long has it\ntaken you guys to get there? I mean, you started in 1997. You must\nhave gone through massive iterations along the way.\n\n\n\nPaul: Yeah, Alan. I mean, we\u2019ve\nmade all the big stuff, the crazy things. They really started in \u201993\nor \u201994 when we started shipping our very first VR headset, the VFX-1.\nAnd if you look it up, you\u2019ll see VFX-1, it\u2019s a football helmet sized\ngizmo. And then in \u201997, actually I bought out all the outside\nshareholders and started Vuzix. A little bit of history there, we\nstarted in the defense space. We were making thermal weapons sight\nengines that go in the back of the light/medium/heavy thermal weapons\ntype programs for DRS and Raytheon. And doing that, we got an\nopportunity to work with the special forces guys. And if you think\nabout it, these guys are carrying around 300 pounds of gear. They got\ntheir laptop. They\u2019re basically the ultimate mobile wearable tech\nguy. And at night, they would light up like a Christmas tree. So they\nput a poncho over their head. They had all this gear on and they came\nto Vuzix and said, look, could you guys make a pair of Oakley style\nsunglasses? They called it the Oakley Gate. And they said, if we\ncould do that, half the military would buy these things. And so even\nall the way back then \u2014 it was \u201997 to 2000 \u2014 these Special Forces\nguys wanted cool. They wanted lightweight. They wanted it truly\nfunctional. And so over the years, we\u2019ve come out with a lot of\ndifferent devices and each iteration we\u2019ve been pushing on, making\nthem smaller and lighter. We were talking a little bit earlier about\nthe top-down versus bottom-up approach. I mean, there\u2019s some really\ncool technology that\u2019s out there that\u2019s doing all spatial computing\nand the likes, but it\u2019s big. And for Vuzix, we\u2019re taking the\nlightweight, trim, wearable all day side of it, but highly\nfunctional. When you\u2019re looking for streaming video applications\nwhere you\u2019re doing see-what-I-see for maintenance, repair, and\noverhaul, or you\u2019re in a warehouse all day long taking stuff out of\nthat warehouse. You don\u2019t want a great big, heavy thing. You want a\nsupe