Raven Resonance founder Thomas Suarez demos AR glasses built in San Francisco — ambient computing under 8 figures

Speaker 3: Again forever. Of course.

Speaker 1: Great to have you.

Speaker 2: Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. So we'll bring in Thomas Suarez from Raven Renaissance. He's the founder, CEO, and CTO. Boom. What you got on your face? Introduce yourself. Tell us about what you're building. I'm very excited for this.

Speaker 9: Cool. Hey, guys. Yeah. It's great to be here. Yeah. So I'm Tom, the founder of Raven Resonance. We're a team of engineers and designers who have been building and wearing customized AR devices for years and decades. So we're working on Raven Prism which is the first ambient computer in the form of glasses.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: Did you launch did you launch this on Monday knowing that the specs announcement was happening? Was that was that somewhat intentional or just kind of random?

Speaker 9: So it was actually more of a preview. So we are doing our full launch later this year but we were gonna be at the conference anyway and we figured it would, you know, show some show some of our hardware and software.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Because it's augmented world. It's a conference for augmented reality generally. Do you like that term or is that term getting stale at this point?

Speaker 9: I think it's it's interesting. Augmented reality is kind of a a loaded term in some ways because there have been so many devices over the years. But I think for us, the term ambient computing feels really right because it's about, you know, technology being there when you need it and gone out of the way when you don't. And I think that's kind of what this device is is for. Yeah. I I wore Google Glass for many years and, you know, of course, there there's a lot of baggage that comes with that, but there are lots of wearable computers that have tried these sorts of things over years. And I think finally, the industry is starting to converge on something that that makes a lot of sense for daily wear.

Speaker 2: Yeah. How are you positioning the product? What are the key stats that you're particularly proud of? Everyone talks about price, weight.

Speaker 1: Well, maybe even before that, like, I wanna know about your product, but like in your view over the last few years as you've been using these products, developing them, like what is what is the ideal product? What does it do? What are is like should we be thinking we were debating earlier just like, do we need to be thinking about like killer use cases, like specific things that people do every day or do, you know, a lot of the the specs demos. There were some some of the things that were being demoed. I was like, okay, that would be cool. Like, I'd maybe do that once a year. Right? Like measuring like a room, like how a piece of furniture would fit in. That alone is like even if it's 10 times better than using like a measuring tape or something like that, that's not gonna get me to like, you know, be a daily user or something like this. So like, how have you been thinking about like what is the ideal product? Because I assume that's what you're building towards.

Speaker 9: Exactly. Yeah. So as someone who wore this for over twelve years, I can say that or not not this particular product but, of course, you know, wearables in general.

Speaker 2: Time traveler. I wish.

Speaker 9: I wish. The there are two main categories of of use cases that I think are really relevant. The first is microinteractions. So this is something where you're in and out of the display within five to ten seconds. So this is things like next navigation direction, a notification that comes in, which sounds really distracting, it's actually really nice to not have to pull your phone out of your pocket. You know, changing your music, all that sort of stuff. Even next cooking instruction, whatever, those are micro interactions, in and out in five, ten seconds or less. The other one is reference material. And so this is where you can AirPlay your phone screen up. You can pin up reference, contextually relevant information. So if you have something that you're working on hands free or with your hands, you want something that is hands free that's gonna give you that information and ideally, you can ask an LM or ask an AI to help you with that task. So those are the two categories of experience that we think about as being really necessary. There's also kind of a third one which is spatial experiences, which is what we've seen from Specs. And I think, I mean, certainly there's a lot of spatial work that we want to do in the future as well. But I think right now, it's kinda like you wanna build toward, you know, what is the iPod of AR before you build the iPhone? And we really need to get something out that, you know, is a nice form factor, that's lightweight, that people are going to actually want to wear.

Speaker 2: How do you think about field of view? I'm sort of split on it. I used to be FOV maxer. I used the hollow lens and was like, this is unacceptable. Tried the Apple Vision Pro. It's much better. But then when I think about the Call of Duty HUD, the meta Ray Ban displays, I'm like, actually, for a lot of those micro interactions, next turn direction, next cooking instructions, something like that, just put the information right there. It's fine. It's hands free. I'm actually maybe fine with a smaller FOV if everything's designed around that constraint from and it's not trying to be omnipresent.

Speaker 9: Yeah. So, field of view is an interesting one because there's a couple different ways to think of field of view. One is in, you know, the absolute number of degrees diagonal on your vision. Typically, these devices are, if go to the really big VR headsets, you're going be closer to 100 degrees. Something like this, this is actually 30 degrees but that's actually a lot of space. That is equivalent to a 16 inches MacBook at arm's length, which is a lot of space, especially if you have a high PPD. We find that it's actually field of view and pixels per degree.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 9: And if you have a high pixels per degree, you have high resolution. Yeah. Which means that if have a high pixels per degree but a low FOV, then you actually end up with something that is akin to a laptop in front of you. And so, when we think about, like this device is Linux based, It allows you to SSH in. You can run pretty much any application that will run on ARM 64

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 9: Which is, of course, the same architecture as Mac. And and so you can you can run, you know, properly as a computer.

Speaker 2: Okay. World locked versus head locked. I feel like one of the problems with the HoloLens was that everything was world locked and you turn your head and the narrow FOV would clip the sphere that you put there and all of a sudden you're looking at a half sphere and it it draws your attention as opposed to if it's just headlocked, like the screen stays where it's put and it leans in and it does the best that it can with limited FOV.

Speaker 9: Yeah. So that also it also depends on I think the world lock makes sense for those facial experiences. Again, you need a large field of view. Yeah. For something like a head up display, I don't think world lock makes much sense. Yeah. You really just need something that there's all sorts of tricks that you can do in the human computer interaction.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: For example, if you have edges on the screen, then it's obvious that you're clipping. If you allow some padding, any pixels that are black are actually rendered as transparent. So any black pixels around your icons and things like that are going to appear, know, in screen spaces as transparent, is the way we think about it.

Speaker 1: How much is capital a constraint? Because you're competing with companies that are willing to throw billions of dollars at this problem, and so far, I don't necessarily think it's getting them that much closer than It used to

Speaker 2: be for any hardware company. It was like, oh, you'll need $5,000,000 to do that. And now it's like, oh, yeah. Like, no problem. All the toolings have cheap and stuff. Yeah. And you can outsource the whole supply chain if you need

Speaker 1: Also, it's never been easier to raise $5,000,000.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like, even a big number, oh, we're gonna get a 100,000,000. It's like, yeah, there's gonna be 20 of those raises this month.

Speaker 9: So it's interesting. When we started this company, a lot of investors told us that it was gonna cost, you know, it's going to be over $100,000,000 to bring this product from idea to design, you know, early design, EBT, DVT, PBT, whatever, all the validation stages and up to mass production. We're going to be shipping later this summer to the first batches and then we're launching later this year officially. But, yeah, we've done it with under 8 figures.

Speaker 7: Wow.

Speaker 9: And actually, there are a lot of smart glasses. We consider it as kind a different category than ambient computing, but there are a lot of smart glass companies that will go to kind of an ODM, typically in China or somewhere else, and they'll take a reference design. That's not what we've done. We've actually we're manufacturing in The US. We do source components from all over, of course. But we do all design in our lab in San Francisco. We build the batches. This unit was actually built in our lab in San Francisco, assembled. We think that's really important, especially for rapid iteration. That is one of the ways that we've been able to, the very small team, iterate quickly and get to a product that we're really proud of.

Speaker 2: How are you thinking of marketing messaging? Sort of to bring it back to that idea of, like, the killer use case, it feels like a lot of these pitches that we see for VR, XR, AR headsets, like they get a little scattered and all of a sudden they're trying to be 25 different things. A lot of the demos don't if you're not a golfer, do you care about the golf thing? But I imagine that you get some of that flexibility for free by layering on top of AI. Because if you're a front door to AI and everyone knows, oh yeah, AI can do knowledge retrieval, it can also write code, it can also generate images, Then you're like, oh, we don't need to explain that. You can just say this is a better way to interface with any AI front door or any AI system. But how are you thinking about, like, the marketing messaging focusing that in? Or is it more valuable to pitch, like, broad developer platform? Like, who who is the core customer?

Speaker 9: Yeah. So I I think there there have been plenty of devices that have tried, you know, pitching the developer. At least this is dev kit. Dev kit. Kit. And that's not really that useful because Yeah. You get developers who who get it and and they they play with it. They might go on a shelf for the next few years. Really, in order for a device like this, even a dev kit, to be useful, there has to be something in it, like some killer app. People ask this all the time, What's the killer app of AR? You know, there's a that's an interesting question because what was the killer app of the iPhone?

Speaker 2: The phone.

Speaker 9: It actually is dependent on

Speaker 1: The beer app.

Speaker 9: True. But it's dependent on

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, my take on the iPhone is that is that when Steve Jobs introduced it, it was a phone, an iPod and an Internet communicator, basically a web browser. And that was the killer app. Then the App Store came in the future revisions and then you got Uber and DoorDash and all the games and stuff. But it was enough on day one that you were like, well, I I've been carrying a phone. This is a sleeker looking phone. I'll replace it. And so whenever I go to VR, AR, I'm always like, this should be a replacement for my my, you know, 24 inch monitor that I plug my laptop into. Or it should be a replacement for a home theater or a 65 inch TV or another screen because in many ways, it is just another screen. So are you replacing the smartwatch? Are you replacing the phone? Are you replacing the iPad? Like, you got to sort of laser in instead of just trying to be something that's like entirely net new. It's hard like like the AirPods were headphones first, you know.

Speaker 1: The other thing with glasses that's interesting is just how many how many hundreds of millions or billions of people like already rely on on glasses to see. Yeah. So that's a market where Yeah. It's much less of a you're not actually selling them a new device. You're selling them the same thing that they rely on plus a computer built into it. Yeah. It's

Speaker 2: like I think a lot of people like the Metairie band display specifically to use for phone calls and for just music. Like, they'll just, oh, yeah. I'm going for a walk in the park, and I'll just take these and and play music on these instead of headphones. And and and it's like then you can get into the, you know, meta Ray Ban displays and like interfacing with AI and all that other stuff. But I would imagine the majority of the time is spent like taking a couple photos, pretty basic. Everyone has a phone, but this is a little bit easier. And listening to calls and and listening to music. But yeah.

Speaker 9: Yeah. There's there's certainly I mean there's there's a lot of use cases tech for particularly for technical creatives.

Speaker 4: So Sure.

Speaker 9: Certainly developers, engineers, but also musicians and filmmakers and there's there's that kind of niche is what we're going after at first And then, of course, it kind of becomes more mass market consumer after that. We also have enterprises that are interested and we have some enterprise customers as well because we design for a very strict set of design constraints than consumer and then, you know, translates to enterprise. But one of the there's a couple other things that we, you know, we really care really deeply about. Not only Linux architecture, we're, to our knowledge, the only ones kind of with this type of device doing that, but also all day power. So we have these guys on the back. This is called Raven Prism and then these are the Raven Wings. The Raven Wings just come off. And this is actually an expansion port not only for the hot swappable battery system where you can take both batteries off and you can get all day power, but also for future modules. So we're gonna release an HDK later this year Mhmm. So people can actually start building their own hardware modules on it. And then the other thing is privacy. I think one of the one of the challenges that this industry has faced is particularly around the camera

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 9: But as but also with just user data in general. I think it's easy for us, you know, we're in San Francisco to remember, oh, yeah. Yeah. Know, everyone's gonna be okay with this. But people are often not okay with all of the privacy implications of this, and we're seeing a lot of backlash on certain devices. So a couple of things that we do is we actually have a physical camera cover on here. So you have to kind of take that off in order to use the camera. And it allows you to have this basically, to alert other people around you when the camera is in use. And then there's lot of advanced cryptography that we do kind of at the lowest levels of the stack as well and make sure that user data is protected. And we've had a pretty positive response to that so far.

Speaker 2: That's

Speaker 1: great. How many years until a billion AR or augment what what did you call it?

Speaker 2: What was it? Billion DAUs of glasses.

Speaker 1: Smart glasses.

Speaker 9: It's hard to predict. There's an industry saying that, you know, AR has been two years away every year for the past thirty years. Yeah. And it's kind of true. Yeah. So I I I don't think I could fully predict it. I think it's reasonable, I mean, Meta has been shipping a ton of devices. It's kind of growing the industry, is really nice. I think it's reasonable to say that we'll at least be in the kind of millions per year, or we are in millions per year, but I think we'll be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions per year in about four or five years. And then a billion daily active users you know, could be ten years away, it could be less. It's it's really, you know, it's hard to say. But I

Speaker 1: think a fantastic that start. I can you're running the just from the short conversation that you're running the company to make sure that you are in business with a fantastic product like when that moment happens. Like I was looking at the the, you know, the specs just looking at the reaction to the specs launch and like Spiegel and Snapchat are in a unique position and that they can kind of just ignore what shareholders, you know, think about their their where they invest. But that being said, like, it's hard to think about them spending another 3 and a half billion dollars, you know, on this effort or or just just given how I expect these the the product to be received in its current form. So I think if you're set up to like, you know, keep keep burn low, really really keep iterating, actually using the product all day long, which like, you must be you must have used a product you must have used like AR glasses more than anyone else on the planet. I imagine, like, don't know anyone. Oh. We know a lot of people that love technology. I don't know anyone that's been like a sort of like DAU for for this long. Yeah. But I think that's like what it's gonna take to to make a product that that people actually use every day.

Speaker 2: For sure. Yeah.

Speaker 9: Yeah. It it really You need the the first hand experience because it's there's a, you know, there's a lot of design decisions that happen for mobile that are not clear Mhmm. For, you know, for this type of device. Mhmm. And so it there's no replacement for just, you know, using it every day and to there's, yeah, it's it's very important.

Speaker 2: How on earth can you do eye tracking in those? You really do eye tracking in those?

Speaker 9: Yeah. So actually, so this this device that I'm wearing, this is this is these are the same kind of form factors. It's just kind of final materials, right? But there's actually two little cameras in there.

Speaker 7: That's

Speaker 9: great. There's one there and there's one there. And those are hooked up to a separate kind of coprocessor, which is on the other side, which is also for privacy. Yeah. So that the main SOC never sees the the raw camera images. Mhmm. But that coprocessor, yeah, takes in the data from from the eyes and then we have some some models that give a a gaze vector over to the SOC.

Speaker 2: That's remarkable. I I was convinced that that anything with internal eye tracking like that was going to weigh, you know, 600 grams, a thousand grams for a really long time.

Speaker 9: Not anymore.

Speaker 1: Not anymore.

Speaker 4: Congrats on We're doubling down on it. I love it.

Speaker 9: Yeah. We're we're pretty excited for people to try it because it's quite a magical experience.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. We're very excited for you to Really

Speaker 1: great to meet you. Time. And come back on whenever you want it whenever whenever you have stuff to talk about.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 9: Yeah. Absolutely. We're we're gonna be doing doing a launch in San Francisco next few months.