And I'm happy to say those things are. Blade for first responders and security, I'll get into that a bit more. That's kinda scratching the surface. I mean, there's a that's a big pile of opportunity there, and you're only gonna see a piece of it that's that's obviously something that's happening at Jesus because we put some press releases around it. Blade for consumers, there's a subset of that.
Getting into the marketplace, if you look at the opportunity to be a seriously connected accessory to a phone. The wireless industry is looking for devices just like this. When you have an ecosystem, and you can supply it and modify it and tweak it so it can work in in different localities and the like, and it solves all the problems to generate revenues and offer content, etcetera, for your customers, it's a it's a great platform to start from, and we're seeing lots of incredible opportunity around that. And then finally, we've built an amazing pilot technology of Vuzix, 150 to 70 patents and patents pending, something like that, a bunch more being filed. And that technology has so many places that can be operated in, and we're now seeing this OEM business that's evolving out of that, which has significant NRE opportunities and then long term product revenues at the same time.
So let me take a step back here for a minute. Everybody has seen these crazy numbers. This is gonna be multibillion billion dollar change of the world kind of stuff, and it is. It's taking time. The fact of the matter is you will start seeing more and more and more rollouts and real programs, revenue generating that do end up being with these kinds of size numbers.
The question is when does all that happen? I'm here to say that if you look at the mix of products that Vuzix has got coming and you look at these revenue generating boxes that they're fitting in, you begin to see why these numbers make sense. So first of all, let's talk a bit about our enterprise based products. We have the m 300 x l, which is in many, many pilots and in some programs that are rolling out today. Very shortly, the m 400 is gonna start shipping.
I'll talk a bit about that more in a bit. We have the m 300 c, which is in a partnership with Dynabook. And then finally, the m 300 ATEX certified glasses. This is a series of products that roll into this whole augmented reality for enterprise business. Look, we've got multiple tender awards that Vuzix has recently been awarded.
We haven't gone out and publicly made those available to folks because they're not public yet. But I'm telling you, there's lots of business that we've that we've responded to RFQs for, and the business is there, and we're just waiting to share. There's an opportunity that we have with Coca Cola in Europe, which you'll be hearing more about shortly. We have rollouts with multiple pharma companies that are in process. We have rollouts expected soon from large retail brick and mortar customers that are trying to address some of their competition that is Internet based.
We're expanding sales channels with partners like Verizon sorry, guys, Eaton, and the likes. And we're expecting continuing commercial rollouts from all of these companies, many of the companies we've talked about in the past that are using our products. And finally, in the same category, we have these OEM partnerships with the Dynabooks, the Eatons, and those others that are in process. So there's a there's a big bank of opportunity here, and Vuzix is expecting literally tens of millions of dollars worth of business out of this piece of what we do. The Verizon relationship, we started with them in their in their b two b side of the business.
We've signed. We're we're now they're authorized resellers. They buy directly from users. We're in their system. And we've been going through onboarding.
We call it onboarding of them because we're training them about our products. We're teaching their salespeople. We're delivering sales assets for them so that they have the tools that they need to easily go out and address their market. Now they already sell to many of the companies that I've talked about over the years. And so the cool thing is there's already a great connection.
And in this month, we've actually started making some great progress with them on that side. And and as we have built that business a bit, we've been introduced to other parts of the Verizon organization. The public sector side of it, there's opportunities and growth that are starting to happen between us and Verizon. The consumer and the five g technology side of it, which is where Neil comes from, I think you'll see some exciting opportunities that are happening around that with us, with him also. So, excuse me, what Verizon is selling from Vuzix is not just what we make.
We we we make the m 300 x l, the m 400 coming shortly. These are all products that they'll sell and reselling the Blade, same thing. But they're putting that together with software applications that offer this cookie cutter solution. There are sales guys. It's really hard to walk into x y z company and say, oh, here's a great augmented reality headset.
Good luck. You need software to make that work. And Vuzix has all these relationships on the software side, and so it's a package that ultimately is end up getting sold by the software excuse me, the sales team within Verizon. The other piece is the mobile device management requirements. So I get this headset sitting here, and there's a thousand of them in my fleet now.
The IT departments wanna be able to manage these devices in the field. And in order to do that, you need what's called mobile device management. And the Verizon mobile device management software now is preloaded at the users. So these things ship with that piece of software. So it makes it very easy for these IT departments to log in, shut them off, turn them on, upload, put new information on them, whatever they need to so you don't have to, every morning, hit those thousand devices back, plug them into the USB slot on your computer, and reprogram them.
It's a critical part of managing a large number of these devices in the field. Verizon's also using our glasses internally for onboarding purposes and training and the likes. And I'll leave it to that for now because I bet you that Fraser will talk a little bit about that at the same time. So these are just some examples of some of the sales tools. These are these are quick flipbooks effectively that in field service, you got a connected workforce.
These are all the advantages of having these devices and sales tools to help the sales guys just walk in and say, hey. This is an easy fit. Manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, there's a a few of these that are assets that Verizon team is using to help sell. Of course, Vuzix is using those same assets. It's nice to have put them together for Verizon as part of this, but they're great sales tools.
So the bottom line is why? Why would anybody wanna use these glasses? And it's it's been found time after time. This is an example of a use UVMax program they've done with Vuzix with Veccon Dixon, and you can see 60% faster machine repairs. Well, that in its own right is a good reason why you would want these tools.
It reduces travel costs. Uptime is key. You got a guy in the field. He's in front of a piece of equipment that puts out a million dollars worth of product a day. But for various reasons, he can't change anything unless he's got the work instructions to make those changes.
And using the kinds of software that we're working on with our partners at Verizon, they can make those changes in the field within minutes because a person can remote in to see what's going on and push the work instructions there. So these are the kinds of things that give these things the value that they have. And the m 300 x l and the m 300 do a really good job of delivering this experience, but it's kind of older technology already. It's running with the Intel app processor. Not to put the processor under the bus, but it's only running Android five or six.
The m 400 now runs with our partner Qualcomm CPU. It's the s x r one, which is the super fast one. It's got eight core compared to some other competitors that have much lower and much lower processing speeds. This guy is designed to run, and it runs the latest version of Android at the same time. When you stream video with this and you go like this, you're getting 30 frames a second at seven twenty p.
So it's it's beautiful. Like, bah, as they say. And it's not just there. It's in so many applications where if you're doing things just simple things like barcode scanning, this guy will scan a barcode from two meters away that's inch and a half square. So it's a little tiny barcode twice as far away as what our current products will do.
Everything's faster. If you're just doing things like the quick barcode scans and stuff, the power consumption of this device is a fraction of the power consumption that's on the m 300 XL. So this is the same kind of thing that happens in the phone industry. You go from an iPhone one to a two to a here we are to a 10. But we're at the very early part of that curve, so each jump that we make is a big step forward.
The iPhone 10, a lot of people think the iPhone eight runs just as fast. We're starting to use that higher end silicon on and against devices today that are much older. And so this thing is a huge improvement in performance across every metric that we have. It's got better Wi Fi. It's got better cameras, and we expect it to start shipping here in q three.
This is not a year away kind of a device. We have assets. They're in the field, and production product will be coming into Vuzix's office within the next month or two. So it's it's right around the corner. And it's an exciting product for Vuzix.
Many of our key accounts and customers are like, when can I get my hands on it? So we've also got an intrinsically safe partner today. Eaton Kaushines is a it's a very large company. They're right down the road here, actually, in Syracuse corporate headquarters. And what an ATEC certified device is is a device that allows you to go into environments where there's flammable materials.
Maybe it's a mine. Maybe it's on a an oil rig. Maybe it's in a place where they're grinding flour and there's lots of dust in the air. Those are all volatile environments. This device is designed with a battery now that Eaton has done all the design work on.
And with this battery, you can run a full day's worth of operation. It's I p 64 dustproof and waterproof. It's plug and play, but you can use it in environments where many of the early adopters are trying to go first. If you're got all these oil rigs, you need a device like this. You can't use the other style devices that aren't ATEC certified.
And CrowdSigns has thousands of salespeople. We've been to several trade shows with them already. Super excited. And this guy, also, we expect to start shipping here '3 this year. Which is why I put in this box of, like, revenue generator contributions to what you will see in 2019 at Vuzix.
All of these guys are in that boat. Our partners at Dynabook now, we've sold them a bunch of first round product. We've we've now shipped fully second round product in orders with them. We're looking at this business to continue to grow with them. Just like everybody else in this space, it's been a little bit slow, but it's picking up for them now.
And they really like the product that we have now. We see that continuing, but they've also come to us and said, you have all these other really cool devices. And we built universal USB type c solutions out of them. For example, we have a USB c blade today. So you can take our blade and plug it into this TuffBug, and it just works.
Excuse me. Dynavox. There's a few other products that fit in that same box. And so we're in discussions again with these gentlemen about kind of moving forward again with some of our next generation products as part of their bundles. So it's an exciting time with them.
So the Blade Smart Glasses. All of that stuff I just talked about is normally what I talk about when I sit in front of everybody and say, hey. Look at where our business is going. The Blade has finally gotten to the point where we're building them. They've matured the software, the OS build.
This thing is very stable. In fact, I would say for the number of years it took us to get the m 300 out and actually this stable, I think there's even some things today that this thing way outperforms on an m 300. So this guy is starting to get deployed, and it's positioned for adoption across multiple key markets. And it has a very unique form factor. You put the glasses on, and I'm I'm sure many of you have test built this, and the field of view is it's wide open.
It's like putting on a regular pair of glasses. And it's a form factor that is very much like a conventional pair of glasses. Because of that, it opens up doors and business opportunities that there's not another pair of smart glasses out there that can deliver against. And this is just our first one. That said, many of our VIPs already support this product.
Their software runs on it across the board. Sorry, folks. We're using them for many of the very same kinds of applications. From streaming video services, to getting work instructions, and the like. The problem is in many of the environments that these guys are running in, they have to have safety glasses.
So Vuzix is working on the fix for that piece of it. We've got numerous first responder and security applications that have also just started for this, which I'm gonna elaborate on in just a minute. And in the telco space, because of some of the things that we're doing about how this operates, connects, and the ecosystem we've built, is generating a significant amount of interest, which I will describe further also. So safety glasses. The Vuzix Blade has already been certified.
Excuse me. All the testing is done. We're just waiting for the final paperwork to get the certs. This guy will be in production in the July time frame. So you need safety glasses certified.
We've got it. There's a pair two pair over there, I think, on the table. You'll notice they're all labeled appropriately to start cranking them out the door. And this resolves the issues associated with trying to deploy on a plant floor where you have to have safety glasses and multiple other kinds of environments where it's a must. In the first responder marketplace, it's a new sector for musics.
A lot of you probably saw the press release we put out end of last year or so, maybe November, October, where we renegotiated an agreement that we have with six fifty and our partners in the defense space. And we're now in a position where we can sell directly into the security first responder marketplaces. And since then, we've made great progress. Of course, the Blade has come along to a point to where it works well. And the cool thing about it is it has this look and feel that you can't get anywhere else.
Yes. There are some headsets that come with USB c c connections where you gotta have a phone and you got cables sticking out all over the place, and they still stick out on your forehead. And when you look at the person wearing it, you can see from the horizon line down, they can see through it, but from there up, all the imagery is blocked. These things are wide open, regular looking sunglasses, and they plug and play in these security markets. And you'll get a feel for it here in just a few minutes why.
We've already got multiple partners that are addressing this space in a very short period of time. We're shipping production product to them and a few of them are shipping production solutions at the same time. So we expect this business to continue to grow throughout this year and we expect it to significantly accelerate into 2020. We're talking about tens of thousands of units potential in this marketplace. And blade right now is one of the only form factors that can solve the problem here.
And, again, as I said, blade is cool. Blade tube's even cooler. So we're racing to make sure that we stay in front of that that the look and feel and that whole comfort and sex appeal that goes into glasses that people really wanna wear. So we announced a while ago here, but maybe it was right around CES, I think, that SD Engineering out of Singapore, they're again a very, large organization in Asia that has developed a pile of biometric and facial scanning software, etcetera, for airports and large venue security operations, etcetera. And this works with music to glasses.
They have not yet deployed in a bigger way, but it's operational and it's part of their systems and they're getting ready to. We've mentioned two, three weeks ago a company called Sword. They have a device that's designed to work with an iPhone. It's kind of a package that you put together. They're using infrared thermal cameras from FLIR Corporation.
They have facial recognition software components that are from their firm partner, Face First, which is a a large supplier of that kind of software. Verizon is also a partner with SORT. And what you need here is a way to see what the Sword is seeing without going like this in front of the crowd because nobody likes to think that the guy's standing there that way, number one. And number two, it it it makes you stick out as a security person. But to be able to have access to the feed as people are walking by and seeing people of interest, it can be a very valuable tool.
If you think about this as it relates to your children at school, it'd be great to know that folks that you knew were problems because they were dealing drugs and they're really etcetera, and you'd rather not have them in the school. And so just keeping them out of the school is a good first step towards safety at school. All of these companies are very cognizant of this whole issue associated with people's privacy. That's not what this is about. This is about people's rights as an individual who's sitting at a at a school desk, and the guy comes in and shoots him.
So it's about safety, and it's about promoting that aspect of this. So Sword's a really good partner. They're shipping, they tell us, this fall, and Vuzix is part of that operation. And they have a very large number of clients at this point in time already that want their first systems. And then we've got our partners NMTC.
So think about this. We thanks, Matt. We just have been able to work in this space. In in a very short six month period of time or so, Vuzix has built these business opportunities, and there's more behind it. These guys already are shipping.
They've got 50 systems. They're out. They're deployed. People are using them today. Their first deliveries were in the Dubai area.
The their production ramp starts here also in q three of this year, and there's a little video here that shows how this works. What's cool about it is you don't need an Internet connection for this guy. So you can be in Internet cloud denied service areas, places where there's no cellular service, places where there's no connection to a Wi Fi device. And with these guys here, because they keep the database with them, they can operate. And they operate actually really fast.
Within a frame of video, there's 15 faces they can detect within a minute excuse me, a second out of a million faces in the database. And this little video shows a bit about that.
Well, we did think 12,000 basic admission solution. It's fully autonomous, and it consists of lightweight model. Lightweight is very powerful. We really bring sensor out of this side And now we will see our product in live version. The database can hold up to 1,000,000 spaces in the database.
And now let's get to see
the graph. Let's look around.
And just like this, you see the terms of the business and make.
It's an
I guess I'm gonna play it at the end. It's an interesting video. And the idea here is if a person's in the database, they usually come up as a person of interest. It doesn't necessarily mean you would instantly arrest them just because this picture was here. But the idea is police today, security forces today are given a book, and they're said told, look at the pictures in this book.
K? Think about this for a minute. There's a 150 known sort of folks that you probably don't want at the concert venue for one reason or another. And we're asking these gentlemen and gals to remember those faces so that when they show up, you know enough to say, hey, Frank. Sorry.
But, you know, you can't come in. You know you can't come in. They just said that there's no way the human mind can do that. So it's very helpful to support our security folks and the guys that are taking care of us to make sure we're not our rights aren't violated to have this kind of a tool. So security first responders and many other places, Vuzix is starting to see the blade really take off from the perspective of that's the one we wanna use.
Because it does have this look and feel that no other headset has today. I said, we've also been working on the ecosystem for the Blade. We're turning this thing into what's required to actually deliver to almost any environment solutions that you can get content, you can get applications for, and it's highly integrated within the phone system so that you can deliver something that and practically, on the environment and even in the consumer space, a solution that will really turn people's cranks and provide them things that they've always wanted to do or things they never knew they wanted to do until they get a pair of these glasses to do it. And I have to say, we have a really talented team of people at Vuzix. If you think about what we've done at Vuzix compared to what might happen at Google with their Android Wear, I guess, is what they call that, Greg.
Right? They probably got a thousand people working on Android Wear. And what it allows you to do is tie it to your watch, link to your watch, put notifications, and run a few apps on this thing, and sell apps and stuff in a store. My team, little tiny team here in Rochester, New York, has done all of that. And I'm gonna give them an opportunity now.
Greg, do you mind stepping up? We're gonna give you all a demo of how cool this ecosystem and what we've built is. If all Vuzix has done over the years we've been in business was to create this, the tools, the store, the connectivity, the companion apps, runs on Android, runs on iPhone. This is a multibillion dollar company if this was what we were doing. This is Cornerstone we see though for across the board with our products.
You'll see the same capability coming out shortly for our enterprise series products also because this connectivity to the wireless phone device has some amazing capabilities, which we'll show you here shortly. Now I'm I should just let Greg talk, but I can't help myself. I wanna make sure everybody understands what they're seeing here. So, Greg, I'll
let you stop. Alright. Thanks, Paul. So as Paul said, Vuzix is evolving for more than just hardware supplier. Now we're providing an entire ecosystem of products that work together to provide a cohesive experience for the end user.
I wanna give you a demo of that right now. Obviously, I'm wearing the Blade, and you can see up on the screen, what I'm seeing in my Blade. And on the right hand side, you can also see what I'm seeing on my phone right now. So my Blade is linked and connected to the Basics Blade companion app that is running on my Android phone, also available for iPhone. So from the companion app, I can do several things.
I can see the current status of my blade.
Just one second. Yep. I the difference actually between what you're seeing up there and what Greg sees is Greg is seeing you also. Right? This is the heads up display.
So he could be walking in New York City down the street, and this kind of information, it wouldn't be a black box you'd see through. Right? You'd you'd be integrated in any part of the world around you. So these optical waveguide's views as a bill or just like that what you might have in your car, allowing you to be in the real world while you're having experiences that are being served from the cloud.
Sorry. Go ahead. Yeah. No problem. I'm sure a lot of you have seen the blade before.
So what you see up here on the screen in black, what I see is fully transparent. So I really really see the green box around all of you right now. So back to the companion app. So I can see the general status of my Blade. You can connect to Wi Fi.
I can see my battery status. I can switch over to photos tab, and I can manage the photos that have been taken. Here's actually one that was taken as we were signed up for this event. I could share this photo right now on social media if I wanted to.
So to be clear, that's coming over the blade in real time over to the phone. So he's literally playing with his blade and those are the images and stuff that exist on the blade itself.
And all wirelessly. So you're gonna see wires attached here right now. That's just so that you can see what I'm seeing. But, normally, this would operate completely wirelessly over Bluetooth and Wi Fi. Yeah.
So I can also switch over to the settings tab, and I can manage settings on my Blade. I can switch over to the apps tab. This is where I can manage the apps that are installed on my Blade right now. Now if I want to install new apps on my Blade, Vuzix does have an app store on our website. But the great thing about the companion app is I can also use that app store right from here.
So at the top, there's the Vuzix Blade store header. I can tap on that. And you can see I am now browsing the apps that are available in our abuser's app store. From here, I can tap on one and I can get more information about it along with screenshots. I can also choose to install an app right from here.
I just tap the install button. And if our Wi Fi crop cooperates Maybe not. But, fortunately, I do have some apps already preinstalled in here.
The Wi Fi in this facility is not the best.
Says I am connected, but okay. So let's give you a couple examples. So one example of an app that you can get from our App Store right now is Google Assistant. As far as I know, Vuzix Blade is the only smart glasses to offer Google Assistant that I'm aware of. So if you launch the app to access your assistant, you can just tap okay Google.
This the hospital just went
to sleep. It kinda went to sleep. Yeah.
Sam here? Can you come here, Sam, please? Folks, give us just a minute. Wi Fi connection here went to sleep. It's worth taking just a moment to see this.
It's pretty outstanding.
There
we go. What's the date today?
Maybe.
Let me try that again. What's on my calendar today?
Pretty impressive. Right, folks? I am very confident that this is because there's the a link between the two that probably got host here.
Let me so I will show you another demo of the companion app. Let me come over here, and I'm gonna toggle my Wi Fi on and off and see on the blade and see if that helps. So I don't have to do it from here. Can do it right from the companion app. Alright.
We're back up. What's on my calendar today?
You can see most all of this is related to the poor Wi Fi support here. This normally flies.
And I also have no audio. But, pretend you can hear the audio. So I'm gonna show you a couple of the ways that we can trigger Google Assistant as well. So not only with your voice, but we also have presets available. All customizable by the companion app, by the way, so you can you can put in your own custom, presets.
So if we want to tell me a joke,
try that again.
Yeah. I think we're still having connectivity problems.
You wanna try to back out of it, reset this, and connect Oh,
there we are.
So
we've also integrated Google Assistant into the into the base OS itself. So if I, don't wanna trigger it manually, by going into the app, I can also hold three fingers on the side of the touch pad. How's the weather today? And you see I get the result. And finally, I can also let Google search it with my voice using our onboard speech recognition.
So I can say, hello, Vuzix. Get assistant.
To have a an assistant available at the touch of a button to get almost any kind of information you want is very reminiscent of some sci fi movies that open up the world, and this is the beginnings of that. Single touch, you got the whole wide world web to ask and get information and do the things in your life to improve it. And we'll be talking a little bit about five g shortly here. Some of these little performance issues that we're having, it will be absolutely nonexistent with five g kinds of service. Google
Assistant was an example of an app that was built specifically for the Blade. But there are some apps out there that were not built for the Blade, and they're built for devices that have a touch screen. Those have been a challenge for us. But we saw that using a new feature in our companion app, which we call our virtual trackpad. So for example, I have Amazon Video installed on my Blade.
So if I launch it and I switch over to the companion apps for our new input tab, with my finger, I can drag it along the virtual trackpad, and you'll see I get a mouse pointer on my glasses that I can control.
So we're on the same page here. This application is the standard app that is Amazon Prime Video. And in order to use this typically with your phone, it requires you to touch the surface of the phone because it was built for a UI that was touch. And we get around that now by using the phone as a mouse trackpad and keyboard. So it allows instant access and easy access to these kinds of applications.
And you'll see there's a large number of them now that just work on the Vuzix Blade.
So I could do things if I want to. I can move the mouse around. I can also drag the mouse by pressing and holding and dragging up, and I can also do scrolling too with two fingers. Let's play a video.
Assuming the Wi Fi channel will let us.
There we go. So I'm now watching Amazon Prime Video in my glasses.
Yay. Guys, green. This would be where the room full of people at the I
Oh, look. I just got a text message too from Connor while I'm watching. Thank you, Connor.
Send him another one.
This is the cool bit about
the companion app. It manages all of this kind of information back and forth from the phone to the glasses. Literally, once you get this thing going, phone's in your pocket.
So if I'm watching video on my glasses and my phone's in my pocket, I might be missing I might be missing all these fabulous text messages I'm getting from my coworkers. But they they are coming in now, and I can still see them while I'm watching this video.
And you can address them if you wanted to also. Again, the home the home page of the in fact, could you go to that, Greg, or am I pushing the envelope here? This home page, if you tap on it, you can scroll through those text messages. You can respond to them, etcetera. So they're all staged, stored up, ready to go.
Like I said, this is a this is a complete communication system. It's as good as what you might see on almost any watch, etcetera. And we will soon have voice input so you can speak. And he could have said, thanks. Or, yeah, let's meet at the bar after.
And boom. And it would put that in the message and respond back. Good. Thanks, Greg. Appreciate that.
Yeah. Live demos like that are always a little bit difficult to pull off. Wi Fi is what it is. The audio is amazing at the same time with this device, and I think there was probably just another Bluetooth connection issue back to this speaker. Yep.
Yeah. So things went to sleep. Okay. Can we perfect. So let me get rid of this.
This is to make the point. Two days ago, we hadn't released this software. Nobody could use many of these applications on this page. Today, every single one of the apps, and this is just a sampling of them, work with the Blade. So it's an amazing upgrade for the Blade.
People that enjoy their applications suddenly have a mean pile of opportunity to use this device and deploy it with the things that they like to do. And, again, like I said, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what's going to be available, which is why Vuzix also just recently launched a special promotion for Father's Day, dads and grads kind of a thing, plus a summer's free. We have a growing number of native apps that just work with the device now. The functionality between the companion app and the glasses is it's practically world class at this point in time. Media controls, notifications, messaging, email, browsing the web, all of these things just work on the glasses now.
I call it legacy support. I know some people might think of legacy support as older. The reality of it is what I mean here is this is the latest and greatest applications that people wanna play with and wanna use, and they're using them on their phones, but now they work on the glasses too. The Jesus plate can also be ordered with prescriptions, so you don't have to wear glasses on top of glasses. And many of the competitors that are out there today, that's the requirement.
If you have glasses, which is probably 50% of the population today, you got the blade on, and
then underneath the blade, you
got another pair of glasses. Not the blade. All the competition. With the blade, you just get them with your scripts. And we have an active and steadily growing developer community.
I mentioned this already, the dads and grads program. What's nice here is we have product differentiation with the consumer side of our business versus the enterprise. The enterprise needs to have safety glasses certified devices. So we have a there's a step function difference in price between the two. Currently, we are selling direct from Vuzix, and so we still have great margin at this price point even for the Blade.
So there's a few key points about smart glasses today and what you need in order to be successful with them. And I have to say there's a lot of stuff out there like Magic Leap and HoloLens and the like. And not throwing people under the bus, but I think it's kind of obvious. Those are great big devices. It's not something you'd wear walking down the street.
They weren't designed for that. Maybe for gaming a little bit, but the Magic Leap is a $3,000 or so headset. And you do look like a box of rocks when you wear it. So most people won't wear it. So you gotta have something people will put on.
You people don't want wires. And you got something in your pocket with a battery and a cable coming up. That's like for the most part, people just reject that idea. One size fits all. We have competitors.
Again, not to throw people under the bus, but the reality of it is you have to go get fitted. And weeks later, your glasses finally come. And when they do, there's a little tiny pupil hole that you gotta look through, like looking through the door to see who's on the other side of the the peephole. And if your eye isn't lined up with that thing just right, you don't see the image. I just don't know how that can possibly work.
I mean, consumer if you just think about the turnaround time and then the the dissatisfaction from the consumer when they get and they're walking down the street and as they walk, they lose the image. I mean, it's it's just not acceptable. You need larger fields of view to support things like video streaming and stuff, but not so big that it fills your field of view. Watching the Netflix piece or the the prime movie. Can You imagine if that was a 90 degree field of view, that would fill your vision, and you wouldn't be able to use these things walking down the street.
These glasses are designed as a HUD, heads up display, to be used with your phone so you can keep your phone in your pocket but still be in the real world. Critical, and this is part of the reason why the Blade works as well as it does, and it's part of the reason why people, even in the security industry, want these glasses. They're not 90 degree fields of view. They give you the information that you want, and, again, you don't look really odd when you're wearing them. Integration of voice and voice assistance.
It's an amazing step forward. Augmented reality and artificial intelligence is going to, together, be just game changing in this space. Both of those, by the way, will get better and better and better with five g performance and faster access to the cloud and the likes. You need sticky consumer applications, and our device works with many of them out of the box, and you need an ecosystem to deliver it. And Vuzix has built and is delivering on almost all of those points.
You might think we pick and chose them, but we didn't. That's the reality of it. This marketplace needs certain things to be successful, and they're the things that are on that page. So we built a consumer facing architecture and infrastructure for the device. Much like a modern smartphone with a watch, all of the features that you see in those kinds of devices are available with the Blade now, with our own App Store, the companion apps, Android and iOS both supported.
The App Store supports paid monthly sort of re upping on a on a rental basis for the applications and or free applications. It's a simple login process now. You you saw Greg click and go sort of a thing. Keyboard functionality, trackpad. And what's good is we've designed it so it could be localized to different countries.
And we're working with folks in Europe, and we're working with folks in Asia, and they each need to have this localization done for Japanese or Chinese or whatever. And I'm not saying it's simple, but it's not that difficult for us to do that because our team is really good at writing this stuff, and they designed it so that you could just change the text strings appropriately to work within one country to the next to the next. We've also got a fantastic toolkit, developer tools, the likes. I've never seen the team get so many kudos from people when they start playing with our thing, and it's like, this is so easy to do. And we've most recently launched the developer contest.
Maybe this is three weeks old, Matt, something like that. There's over 70 folks that have signed up to develop apps as part of this contest, and it's just getting started. The contest doesn't end until the end of summer. We're getting all kinds of excited people kinda diving in to write the apps for it. These will be apps that are designed not as a legacy style app.
These are apps order to qualify. They have to be designed to work natively on the glasses. So we're really excited in just a very short amount of time. There's a fair number of folks that have signed up to support the Blade. In some cases, it's actually some corporations even that are excited about doing some of their enterprise stuff that they would like to put in around this.
So there's also a few categories. As you can see, there's personal business and gaming and entertainment. So the interesting thing about a device like this is, you know, it's selling selling it in the consumer channel makes a lot of sense. You know, there's a lot of Internet sales done today, and that's where we're starting with this product. But at the same time, because of the way it's designed and it's such a great accessory to a phone, you can see how this device would be sold really well in the carrier marketplace, in the wireless industry.
And we have conversations going with multiple companies that are looking at putting this in their sales channels and on the consumer side of the business. So that's gonna be an exciting thing for Vuzix. We're just getting started with it. This thing has really only gotten this level of capabilities in the last week or so. We have been showing it behind closed doors a little bit, and folks are pretty excited about the fact that this thing is as far along as it is.
Guys are saying, wow. I had no idea that the Vuzix Blade or any smart glasses actually were to a point where they have an ecosystem like this. So it's a big advantage for Vuzix so far. I think we're ahead of most everybody because it's not just about a waveguide, and it's not just about really cool small displays. It's about building an entire solution, soup to nuts, and Vuzix has it today.
We're also working on next generation products, Plessy Corporation. I hope Mike is gonna be able to join us here at some point. Mike Lee, he he was flying in last night and his plane caught fire. Actually, the cockpit was all smoke and stuff. So he's been I think he is gonna join us by phone, though.
Plus he makes these really cool micro LEDs. And on the table on the table over there after I can show you, the display engine shrinks down to something that's like the size of my pinky straight up kind of a thing. It's this little tiny thing. And the question with our waveguides and our next generation thin waveguides, we're gonna make these things that look like ultimately kingsman style glasses, and we have a great relationship with the Qualcomm folks and the XR one and their next generation series of products at the same time that we're integrating into these devices. And, ultimately, they will have cellular support right on out to five g.
And not leaving this up long, this is just a quick sneak peek of, you know, where this stuff is going in the short run. Yay. You can see it has this look and feel that's significantly more like a conventional pair of glasses. Not that the blade's bad, mind you, but these things are designed around acetate frames, technology that can easily be modified to go with different colors, tortoise shell, white. You pick your poison, and it's easy to scale these from a size perspective.
I can't say you didn't see that. I want everybody focused on the blade today in our customer base, but I am saying that I thought it would be worth giving you guys a feel for the direction we're heading. That's a good one, but it it will get even smaller than that by far as the next couple, three years unfold. It's so much fun doing this side of the business. Frankly, I'm a technology guy, and these are the things that really turn my crank.
I have to admit, I have I really hardly ever get to do that anymore. I spend an awful lot of time with some of the crap that goes on and on Wall Street. I probably shouldn't have said it quite like that, but in any event, this is really exciting for Vuzix, and my team is just bringing it home for us. So at Vuzix, there's another category that's been unfolding for some time now. But quite frankly, there's an industry side of this business that is picking up faster than what the consumer average Joe's side is.
And the big companies that deliver into those spaces, many of them are trying to figure it out. They don't wanna do the next Magic Leap or the next Google Glass, and so they're all, like, working their way through the the bushes as it were. In these markets here, these are about ROIs. They're about making products that if you build it, they need it. We have folks in the automotive industry that we're building product for today, in the defense industry, aviation, courier services, think aircraft kinds of courier services.
Some stuff in the consumer side, which we talked a little bit about in the past, and some of our technology actually fits really well in spaces that have nothing to do with even wearables. We have some folks that are working on some three d direct view viewing systems. They use wavefront optic systems in them, and it's it's quite amazing. And these are programs that Vuzix has responded to and or continues to respond to, request for quotes. We've been winning some of those.
You've seen a few press releases. You should see more. And it's potential for millions lower in the millions, tens of millions possibly in the NRE side. It takes it takes time to build these devices. But once they're built and you get deployed in an aircraft, let's say, and it's a critical part of a safety system in an aircraft, it can represent tens and hundreds of million dollars worth of business opportunity.
We don't have all of this yet. I can tell you that we've responded to a very large amount of this. That number that that 10 number, we we have RFQs out greater than that right now responding to requests for how can we take Vuzix technology and put it in our box. So this is gonna be another, I think, win for Vuzix. And what's nice about it is it's cash that comes in for engineering fees upfront.
So it also helps with cash flows and those kinds of things. So my goal was to try to give everybody a feel for the fact that revenue generation of Vuzix is gonna be coming from multiple different areas. I wanted to make sure you all knew that we had products that are ready to go and or shipping today that are delivering in these areas. And with all of this put together, Usage is in an exciting spot, and we're seeing accelerating growth. And despite what you might hear, to the contrary, when you get on some of the boards that are negative just because they're shorting or whatever around Vuzix, it's not the case.
Things are exciting. It's the best time it's been for Vuzix. We've got a great pile of business in front of us, and we're just here to execute. So I'd like to take a few questions if you have them now. I don't wanna go too long because I we have some of our guests here, and I can take more after that possibly.
Any questions? Yes, sir.
How important
do engineering work?
In the long run in the long run, it's not a big piece of Usich's business, quite frankly. The reason why we would do any of those engineering programs is not for the engineering. We would do it because there's programs on the backside of it that we would be delivering product against. In fact, I I don't think, yeah, we're not an engineering services company, so I've not seen anything that we've quoted on that is, oh, let's get this piece of work kind of a thing. It's it's all pointed at long term revenues.
Yes. Thank you for your presentation. By which year do you think Vuzix will become EBITDA, like, breakeven or neutral?
The CFO of the company has been over their board. Glad I am answering that one.
Well, as soon as we're selling enough product and have enough gross margin to do so. But I mean, realistically, 2019 is not going to be a overall for the year, we're not expecting to report positive EBITDA, but it's still our goal for 2020. And potentially, as early as Q4, we might get to turn that corner. So that's really all we can say at this time.
Once you've pioneered the space, what's your plan for retaining the space from people like, Alphabet or Atmison?
We got a good race in front of us, frankly. I mean, that's part of the run here. We're ahead, I believe, from all of those guys just yet. You could imagine at some point that one of those companies might wanna step up in in the particular space they play in, have an asset like Vuzix that could possibly happen at some point in time. But our plan right now is just to execute, own it, and develop that technology for the future of it.
Have two more questions.
Thanks. So if memory serves, I think your production lines on your blade are around $2,000 a month. Where do you see kind of the top end of that scale? Based on your presentation, it sounds like you probably need a little bit more than that. So the reason why we're not having this meeting in the facility is because we've been rebuilding the facility and expanding the production floor.
If any of you would have been here last year when you come over, you'll notice that area where we gave the presentation, that area is not there anymore effectively. It's kind of half of it at least turned into production floor space. And the backside, which was over more towards the the cafeteria, the lunchroom side of it, that's also getting moved in and kind of opened up a little bit for more production purposes. That said, the equipment that we need, the long pole in attempt to produce today is the waveguide production side of it. We're getting really good at that.
We're getting turn times that are quite fast and yields that are significantly better than they've ever been, But it's not that difficult to replicate that equipment. We have space on the floor to do it, to double, triple, etcetera, our production rates. We're preparing for that. Good question, by the way.
Paul, for your bulky competitor, we've those all headsets. Do they
does does their size allow them any capabilities that you can't put into the the Blade? That's a very good question. If you look if you watch Apple's I think it was the keynote that they did they they did a big presentation here just over the last week, and they were taking a single camera on the phone, a single camera, they were doing all of the kinds of things that you would see in a Magic Leap headset, let's say, that requires that bulky array of technology that's in the front. It's true. They do have some spatial mapping stuff that they put in so they can use hand gestures and those kinds of things.
But people are doing that with a camera today too. Software, sensor integration, all that stuff is coming. It's you know, that is on a path. The the silicon shrinking, shrinking, shrinking performance going up, and the ability to put MIPs, processor power on the raw feeds out of those devices are enabling much, much smaller solutions around that. I give HoloLens and Magic Leap a lot of credit.
Their products are tour de force gizmos. You put them on, and you can do some really cool stuff with them. But you have to ask yourself where the real market is. And, you know, this is a little music saying this, but I'm telling you that if you look at where Magic Leap is getting deployed today, it's not an enterprise. It doesn't work there.
It's too expensive for the consumer marketplace in gaming, but it is an amazing product. It needs to evolve. I think what you'll see in the end is the direction they're going, they're gonna try to make it smaller. And from us, we're gonna try to make it smaller, but give it more capabilities at the same time. So these things ultimately will will, I think, collide on top of each other to when you finally get to the ultimate style devices that you want.
From our perspective, from the very beginning, we learned that if it's big, it's bulky, and it hurts to wear, you've already failed. So we're working on small, lightweight trim and giving it useful capabilities. Yes. It's not whales jumping out of floors. Again, I'm not picking on Magic Leap.
It's just what their device kinda can do. Ours is more about useful information that can make your day more productive. Okay? Fantastic. So I'd like to turn the floor over to Neil here.
But before I do, I just would like to give a little bit of my perspective. Neil's gonna blow my perspective out of the water, but it's it's sort of the way I see five g and the ability to to deliver what he can do and make our devices a whole lot smaller in the process. If you think about it, Neil first of all, Neil's from Verizon, and he's a very senior guy there that's responsible for relationships and a lot of it around the five g environment. I'll let him kinda describe the rest of that. But continuing here, as you all know, we have a strategic relationship with Verizon.
It started not actually with Neil. Neil learned about music through coming to some meetings and stuff, and Neil's
part of
a group that actually fosters kinda new technology efforts and stuff. And five g from our perspective is going to allow augmented reality glasses to get smaller and smaller in size is you don't need to have all the processing power in the glasses anymore. And I won't again, I don't wanna take the thunder here, but you can run NVIDIA high end graphics processing in the cloud and deliver it in sub at least millisecond kinds of time frames. So it's like having these high end engines in the cloud running zero CPU load in the glasses. So when you talk about getting to the point when whales are jumping out of floors and high end rendering and all that stuff, This is where Verizon's gonna make a lot of money because they're gonna sell access to all of that kinds of information, that high speed rendering, etcetera.
And they're gonna deliver it in devices, which are a lot like what Vuzix builds today. So what excites us about the Vuzix Verizon relationship, yes, it's fantastic to be part of their sales team and all this other, but it's we see also it's part of our future road map, quite frankly. And this is an example. So one. Got it.
So one of the first things that you could imagine doing here would be some of the things like language services and translations and stuff. And this is where I feel I'm probably taking more of Neil's thunder, but I wanted you to see this little video. They had done a presentation. They're using Vuzix's glasses, another partner's software, putting it together through some of their cloud services to do real time language translation, and I think the video.
Yesterday, the technology and product development team posted a tech day to show some employees many of the current and future use cases for five g. Some of the highlights of the show here were new digital signage displays that run on our four g LTE network today and an AR application that can break down
What's cool about that? We're not talking about whales jumping out of floors. We're not talking about great big giant things. We're talking about very useful applications that can be delivered today and be delivered even better as future network start to come online. And then now, Neil, you can have the mic.
And your slide deck, I just attached it. So yeah.
Hey, guys. So I think, Paul kinda summarized most of the stuff that we have been doing. Essentially, what makes us really interesting working with a partner like Vuzix. I think Paul mentioned this. I didn't engage Vuzix from day one.
We had other teams that were more focused on some of these enterprise level applications, and we already saw some of the slides mentioned that and some of the things that are still going on. So my role in Verizon is primarily to look at some of the emerging technologies that might benefit from the deployment of five g that is happening behind the scenes. And in more and more cities, Verizon is deploying this five g. But the core problem that we're all facing, not only Verizon, other operators also, what does five g bring in new that that that essentially allows people to adopt that technology into new phones, new devices that are going to come up for leveraging that. And and that's a struggle.
And so we are looking into different verticals on the enterprise side, different experiences on the consumer side, and seeking partners like Vuzix who are not only looking at just the coolest factor, but some of the like Paul said, some of the applicable applications that are real right now that can leverage the technologies that are there right now to give value to that particular experience that people are looking for. So I'll I'll just start kinda going through some of the basics of five g so that I mean, hopefully, people get a sense of where where we are coming from. So Verizon has already, like, been deploying five g pretty much and wants to be the leader on that. Not only on The US space, this is happening worldwide also. We did, like, in October, five g deployments at home, which is basically you can think as, like, your cable service or fire service that is already there, but nobody has to dig a tunnel next to your home and it just gets the connectivity through wireless to your home.
And but it brings in all the values of five g high bandwidth connectivity, like, at gig one gig speed, essentially, and latencies like crazy latencies that allows for, like, totally new quality of services and sir like, applications that might bring in. So we have been also expanding on the mobility aspect and some of the new devices are Moto z three, Samsung s 10, LG, and some hotspots that allows devices like Vuzix to adopt five g even though it doesn't have the five g chips built in yet. I mean, we are planning to go towards that direction, but for now, this is what is available. There's deployments in Chicago and Minneapolis right now, which is already live for five g mobility solutions. And I think this was announced publicly.
There are 20 more cities that will be done by end of twenty nineteen, and things are more more and more things are coming forward. So these are basically the locations that we already have live coverage. And you can see there's a strong density of solutions on the East Coast Side and a few on the West Coast Side where we are trying to connect, like, innovation coming from different startups, different innovation centers, even big players like Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, and try to see and bring in technologies into Verizon's labs essentially. So where you can play with these technologies and kinda showcase how this is going to evolve. These are kinda pictures of the towers that might show up if you're fortunate to be in one of those cities.
You might be seeing this coming up in your light poles or even telephone towers or anything like that. Like, I mean, it will be fairly smaller weight like a bread box size device, but it it brings in total totally different type of innovations, leveraging the infrastructural changes that are happening behind the scenes. Yeah. So we have four items here. I just want to highlight, like, five g, even though you might be consuming it as a extremely fat work on the back end side of things.
So whereas, we have a network that forms the in, like like, technologies that are going to need that bandwidth. And one of the problems is we cannot just drop everything that is happening on four g and say, okay. We'll all go to five g. Then how are you going to get the revenue out of it? Right?
So what we're doing is there's a gradual transition, like a transition plan, and we leverage the core competencies of four g, make it more powerful because of this bandwidth that is coming into those nodes also. And at the same time as these newer cities evolve, we bring in five g in gradual progression, essentially. Spectrum is a big thing. I think one of the gentlemen asked me about how does five g fit into inside a room. Paul gave a really strong challenge of getting a amazing connectivity in here.
But one of the issues with five g is because we are trying to fit in more bits into the pipe, we had to basically go into a spectrum that is like a microwave range. And microwave doesn't penetrate deep into the rooms like this. So what we are doing is we're kinda, like I mean, as two g kinda goes away, we cook some of the spectrum. So we take the potential benefits of innovations coming from five g and fit into one of those spectrums also. And those radio waves, as you can see, you can get coverage here on four g also, can get the five g connectivity even inside the home.
You're getting there. And and there are some subtle things that are happening behind the scenes, which are more and more software defined networks being deployed. And I'll go into a little bit details on that. Aspect of the thinner glasses that Paul mentioned. Even
though
you want thinner glasses and you have a strong connectivity, you need to bring some of the complicated intelligence to the edge of the network. So the glass glass like devices and the edge of the network where all these big compute is happening can work together and give you the experiences that actually right now are in this HoloLens or Magic Leap, but at a much, like, realistic, like my glasses that I'm wearing. Like, I think you mentioned the Kingsman model. Right? That's where we are passionate about.
We that's why we kind of partnered with Fuzix because they share the same passion, And we are going towards a direction not in a big jump without giving any tangible output, but we go through progression and learn it in the way and go towards a business that will thrive. Okay. Yeah. Verizon is kinda talking a lot on this one. These are, like, some of the PR thing that Verizon talks about from a different currencies and capabilities of five g.
But at a very crux of the matter is, like, you are getting an amazing speed and throughput. The latencies are shrunk down significantly. I think four g gives you, like, fifty to sixty millisecond latencies and five g, we are kinda hitting towards, like, ten millisecond, which is, like, almost, like, lightning speed compared to what we have right now. Obviously, the energy efficiencies are going to go away, like, some of the deficiencies. Some of the problems with four g is, like, you need to light up a signal like a candle.
You're sending signals and power all across the spectrum forever. Like, I mean, you're just not focused on a particular location. But if I had five g, what will happen is you can beam that small narrow energy in a specific direction onto that particular device which will be getting it. So you're not wasting a lot of power radiating energy to the space. And that brings in two fold improvements.
One is that you can run with lesser power, and the other benefit is, essentially, you can control the power that is hitting your body, essentially. So it it's a very you can think it like a very, like, a focused beam of light that I can point versus, a big floodlight that is lighting up this whole room, essentially. So that's a big benefit that people don't get it, but that's going to look really be helpful for our management and green deployments also. And obviously, which is not relevant to maybe the wearable space, but you can think in that various IoTs that are being showing up in this industrial manufacturing units, basically, will be connected with small devices that are all connected with five g. So, like, millions of devices connected, gaining their intelligence back to the cloud.
And devices like Vuzix can be worn by the foreman or people who are in that field and see those digital information, like, contextualize and comp or compacted and visualized and absorb that energy without going through, like, 10 contagious of slides that they have to go through to generate right now, look at a report or anything like that. So what is happening is, essentially, I just want to highlight that. It's not just there's a just a core technology in one space that is just evolving. What is happening, we're in a really fortunate time where bunch of other technologies including big data analytics, machine learning, AI, computer vision, are all collecting together. And the glasses like these are allowing to absorb that energy and all that information very quickly without I mean, the difference between phone and a glass, like, I I know you know it very well, is that you're hands free.
You can continue doing what you're doing and have that thing show up as the inclusions show up in your field of view and do the work. In a phone, you have to point it like this, your hands get tired and all that. So even though that is what we have right now, we're looking at these kind of variables to evolve and make the jobs much easier. And people don't worry about the technology that much. They just get the the solutions out of it.
I'll probably skip this one. There's a lot of data here to talk about. We don't have that much time. So Verizon five g partnership trial, Vuzix is one partner. And Paul, you mentioned already ZoeyMate.
So what we are trying to do is as we bring in partners and we try to hone on quickly I have a pretty long history of technical background at Cisco and other companies. And so what I try to do is understand the core partners competency in a technology space and try to see how can we fit that in along with other partners to get a useful solution out of it and at least showcase that technology so that others can understand how the technology is going to evolve, how all these partnerships going to kinda come along and create the best experience possible without looking like too much cool. Right? It has to be valuable right now. So we basically go through initial contacts.
We do NDAs with the partners. We did the same thing with Vuzix. We have bunch of discussions. And after a lot of five g testing, we already done that, we try to see what we learn from that information. All the KPIs that are coming out of those case cases, right, helps us evolve our decisions and plan for next engagement in the future.
So there is no one partner touch point and then Verizon team is saying, I don't want to work with these guys anymore. It's not like that. It's just a multi touch engagement. So as the partners grow in that space, we also learn from the partner. And at the same time, we can collect a bunch of other partnerships together and hopefully, as a broader team, evolve this technology that is coming in and make it more useful for common people on the consumer side or enterprise side.
So it's lot of learning together and showcasing information that is going to help people on, like, decision makers in big companies or other markets that are kinda staying on the sideline. Say, okay. This is ready. We can move forward with investments in this space. Okay.
This is this is a little bit important. So, hopefully, I can get the point across. So traditional way of cellular mobility is you think about devices like phones, wearables, glasses, and then there is a cell tower, which is kinda your connectivity or hotspot. And in five g, we really got that numbers down to extremely low number. That that is like the RF side of things, like, a millisecond speed.
But, obviously, we need a little bit more time to process the data coming in, sending it to the cloud, getting it processed, and come back to the intelligence on the device itself. As we saw in the demo, sometimes when it was working, it was like lightning quick. The the request goes out and it comes back right away. But if it's not, it's not the device that is at fault or it's not the connectivity that is at fault. What is happening is the other end of the spectrum where the cloud is having that service going, even if it's like a voice recognition engine or maybe a picture that you have taken and the analysis is happening on the cloud side.
If that latency is not low, what happens to your overall experience on the glass is not so great or on the phone also. It's the same problem. It's nothing to do with the particular glass itself. So what we started thinking about is once we have that, can we put something like a like a close to the edge of the tower, a compute platform that can help at least accelerate or make it deterministic some of the engagements which need extreme low latency and interactions with the intelligence on the edge. So that edge is not necessarily going to replace what we have in the cloud right now.
What it will do is bring that intelligence closer to the the devices, which are these phones and the augmented reality classes so that the overall experience from a user's perspective is, like, kinda at a low latency in this box bounding box, if you might think in this way. So if you take the cellular tower out of the picture, just to make it simple, you are kinda hitting a number of, like, five millisecond latency, which is, like, amazing. And I cannot just believe how many people at Verizon and other operators they have been Even companies like Qualcomm that have created this five g ecosystem that has made this possible. What it opens up, essentially, Paul, you touched base on that, essentially, is that you are not thinking the glass like devices as a singular device.
You're thinking it is working in tandem with a huge intelligence on the edge of the network. It can be a visual intelligence, like you mentioned, Paul, which enhances the quality of the images that are being shown. So instead of, like, a cube, it would be, like, extremely high quality rendering of a cube with textures, lightning, all those things happening, which the glass might not be able to do. Doesn't mean that it has to be a must. But as you get into the consumer space, because consumers don't really care about how the technology behaves, they want to just have an experience.
So if they see an experience happening on even though it's a higher price point device, they want to have that same experience here also. So what I am thinking is what we are thinking in the Verizon perspective is if we can kinda marry these two technologies together, the connectivity on these glasses and the intelligence of the edge are going to work together to create devices that are at a lower price point, but at the same time can give the same benefit as you could might be getting for, like, devices that are $2,000 worth, essentially. And obviously, this is going to evolve. We are just scratching the surface. We're just playing with some of the aspects of visual fidelity.
But at the same time, there is a AI engine that can see, which we saw a demo of, like, identifying a person doing a amazing fast, image lookup and pulling up whether there's a threat or not. All those things become very fluid thing to develop as long as we the developer system kinda adapts to this kind of model. So this is something Verizon and other operators are pushing for so that, developer ecosystem kinda understands that and expands their capability on these classes with little bit on the compute so that these classes become extremely powerful. So this is what we kinda did in a very short time. I mean, I'm just amazed by the partner Vuzix brought in.
These guys are in Netherlands,
I think.
Right? Yeah. So so that guy, his name is Nick, and he has a location where this is a constant problem. And I've seen this problem also. I go to a different country.
I go to seminars. And even though they do show translation happening on the side, that's just a track that is following the conversation in the audience that they are not participating in. So if I'm talking to somebody on to my next. Right? I don't understand what his language is.
Right? And it becomes a, like, a dictionary for communication and collaboration. And the the ZoeyMeet guys, which are working with us, right, they solve that problem and essentially created a service and solution primarily geared towards meetings where the meetings and stuff became becoming like hour long meeting, where half the time is spent from actual discussion and half the time is spent for translation. That is not efficient. I mean, if you count the number of people in those meetings and you just figure out how much lost time is happening, it's not effective at all.
So what they solve is they created a transition layer so that meetings becomes very efficient. So half an hour meeting is half an hour. It doesn't take more than that. And I think Matt and I kinda talked to them and we saw how can we incorporate that into the glasses itself. And within, like, a month turnaround time, it was like I I that's why I I love music, essentially, working.
You guys are really, really fast in turning in and have the passion to get engaging. We actually created the transition version that you saw that showed up in that video demo. So I'm just simplifying it for you guys just to keep it, like, not too technology focused. But the idea is that somebody is speaking here, this example shows in Spanish, and the glass picks it up. It basically instead of processing in the device, it it goes to the cloud, and the cloud interprets what that actual speech is, right, into some kind of a transcription service.
And then there's a translation that converts it to the target device, which might be another glass where the pod the consumer can see the translated version of the text and they can respond back. And it is, like, an it's not really a cool thing to do, like, in a sense. Like, it's very visually not very attractive. And we had a hard time, to be frank, Paul, when we were showing it in Verizon. Both people are looking at attractive things.
They're like, oh, this is so cool that and this is like, what is this? This is some glasses, some text showing up. What is what is important about that? When they put on that glass and there's no connectivity, nothing, they just wear it and I'm speaking in English and they speak in Spanish, their mind was blown. That's the core technology that we'll need to bridge the gap from what we are comfortable with on the phone side into the wearable side also.
That's something that the industry has to adopt and that's how the consumer and some of the enterprise folks will adopt also. Not something that is amazing to look at or, like, why am I not getting that? But what is the value am I getting out of it, right, immediately? And you can imagine this same technology. Some core aspects of this technology can be used for a person who's hearing impaired and they get a transcription going on and they see what's going on.
Mean, you already have those devices in if you go to a movie theater, they give you some of those devices. But having a and I've shared that, Paul. You guys opened up the ecosystem of developers. And the developers will create these building blocks and connect these building blocks together to create experiences that we haven't talked to before. And that's what we are passionate about.
And that's why we are trying to work with industry partners like Vuzix to see where we are going towards. And this this is just growing, guys. I mean, this is not nothing has started yet. And that's about it.
Fraser, I'm a man. Come on up, please. Fraser, I'm not gonna at all take his thunder other than to say that he he used to be a Verizon gentleman. He's now started his own business. He's an expert in this field in many of his own ways, and he's gonna share a little bit about his perspective and how it might relate to Vuzix and the rest of the industry.
Thank you, Fraser. Nice to hear.
Thank you. So yeah. So let me move on. So I'll I'll talk a little bit about augmented reality in the enterprise. But before I get started, I just wanna say the update to to be able to watch videos on the Blade was really fantastic.
I actually was sitting at the airport on the way here playing around with it, and I downloaded two episodes of Tin Man, I think it is, on Amazon Prime. So I was able to watch it off the plane, and it it was just it was great. It's you know, the you see see all these airlines now handing out VR headsets or trying to you know, so you can get entertainment on that. This was nice. No one knew what I was doing.
I was just sitting there watching my my show. So anyway so real quick about me. I I'm an independent consultant at this point. I I deployed AR and VR for Verizon in their their field techs. I was in corporate learning for about ten years, so I was really focused on how could we improve learning and performance that way.
I have a background in advertising and and user experience as well, so I'm all about the user, and I wanna make sure that that these folks are comfortable. So I'll talk a little bit about how how they responded to this tech. And, you know, I'm just passionate about technology. Anything I can and can do, I I will do and try to to not do technology for technology's sakes, but if there is if there is a challenge or a problem, you know, how how can technology help that? So real quick, I mean, the the AR and the enterprise is real.
It's here today where, you know, these are some predictions. Deloitte predicting 80,000,000 devices sold by 2025 a year, a $120,000,000,000 market. Right? Forrester is saying US workers alone, there'll be 14,000,000 of them wearing headsets, by 2025. You know?
So it's here. We're seeing the likes of Coca Cola and Boeing and Porsche expand this and and deploy this at a at a scalable rate with with large deployments because they are seeing this. So so I was at AWE, is a conference on the wearable side of things. And and, you know, three, four years ago when I was looking into this, it was trying to explain what augmented reality was. It's now all these enterprises just trying to figure out how can I get there faster because they they're seeing all these great use cases?
So, you know, typically, the benefits that are discussed, right, are are, productivity and safety and error reductions. So these are a couple of, things that that that were done at GE. They saw 25%, gains in productivity, and and zero errors. Right? So the ability for a first time user now with with their instructions, in their field of view, they're they're not making the mistakes compared to to others that are making five, ten, 15 mistakes because they're looking doing the swivel chair, looking around, that sort of thing.
So these are all great metrics. Right? These are hardcore metrics. The productivity one sometimes is a little difficult to get by the CFO because, you know, if you're doing 25% stuff more productive, then why do I need an extra 25% of the staff? So there's there's sometimes that one's a little more difficult, but it is true hardcore numbers.
But when we looked at it, we looked at it you know, when I look at it, I look at it in in different ways as well. So it's you know, coming from a training background, the ability for me to give and I'll give an example here of of, let's say, how you stack a pallet with boxes. Right? So imagine you get to a point where you're grabbing the box off. Today, a a food manufacturer may teach them how to do it in the classroom.
Right? So every box goes these different ways. This is how you stack it and all that. And then it gets to the point where they're out on the floor and they're doing it and they're doing it wrong and people have to reconfigure. Imagine you get to the point where you're wearing something like the blade and it recognizes the package and it recognizes the palette and exactly where to put it.
Right? So now you're building the palette correctly, but also I no longer need to teach that. I can take that four hours, eight hours, whatever it is to teach that out of the classroom because I'm giving them real time learning. Right? So so another thing that is really a you know, training costs are are fairly expensive, You know, it can be upwards of, you know, 500, a thousand dollars a day because you have travel and all that sort of stuff.
So being able to reduce that sort of training stuff. You know, travel expenses, obviously. The other big one for us was, in some of our trials, was speech competency. So imagine an apprentice, an electrical apprentice. Right?
So they have to go out on a job. You know, there's a job to go fix something, so they go out. Well, they're apprentice, so there's two of them that are going out. The company's only charging for the electrician, not for the apprentice. So they're paying double the wage for for these people.
So imagine if that six week or eight week apprenticeship gets down to three because you're able to give them their instructions and their stuff sooner, faster, quicker. That's hard cost that they can they can make back. So those are some of the things. And then the other one is is the elimination that needs to redeploy, resources. So one of the things is every every company, whether they're whether they're every service company, right, when they do service calls, they have repeat calls.
Right? So within a certain amount of time, whether it's three days, a week, thirty days, whatever it is, if somebody picks up the phone and calls back for the same issue, that's costing them. Right? So I've heard things from it cost them $200 just to roll the truck out the door. Right?
So imagine that of if with the see what I see. Right? So you need the expert or you you have the glasses on and you get there and you fix the thing. Right? It's it's the old Windows problem.
Right? I was not let's just reinstall Windows. Right? First, reboot and then you reinstall and then you hope it fixes it. And three weeks later, it's it's having the same problem.
So the ability to have those instructions, maybe the maintenance records, like, hey. Here are the five things that were done before, so do this. All that in your glasses as you're working hands free will solve those repeat calls. And and those are huge. You know?
Verizon has, you know, millions of calls a year, and a certain percentage of those are repeat calls. So if you can reduce those, that's a huge savings. And so then, again, I mentioned earlier that I am I am all about the user. I I I did a lot of user experience and advertising background, so it's always connecting with the user. So in the trials that I've done, this is the the responses that we were getting from the users.
Right? So it's not just about, hey, throwing them a device and making them put it on and hope they they do it. Right? It is about making sure that they're comfortable, that they feel it's the right thing and all that. So here are some of the responses we got.
You know, the idea that it would insist in completing the task faster, 86% truly believed it would, and saw some of those results. And these aren't folks that are that are millennials or new to, you know, new to the workforce that are that are, you know, used to all technology. I mean, these were folks that were ten, twenty, thirty years on the line. So these were folks that that that are maybe a little less into what's the latest and greatest, and they're really seeing how some of this stuff really helps them and and what they need to do. So that's really all I had.
I will tell you, you know, being in this this industry for the last three or four years, it is unbelievable where it was to where it is today and where it's going, but I am just amazed at how these people are how these industries and these enterprises just wanna do it. And three or four years ago, it was they didn't know what it meant or how it was doing. And it's just it's it's slowly becoming less pilots and more actual full blown implementation. So yeah. So that's
I have to say it's nice to hear from others that this industry is kicking up, and we say the same thing. It is. So this next gentleman, do we have him? Fantastic. We've been building a relationship with a firm out of The UK.
They make these little micro LEDs. And, again, I won't take his thunder, just make the point. If you can have a display that you don't have to light up with a flashlight and you can pick every single pixel whether you want it on or off, you can really shrink the size of a display engine, and you can really shrink the power profiles. Because one of the things I think you probably all noticed when Greg was given this little demo here, most of it was black. You can see through it.
There's the outline, the thing. There's an arrow, you know, that sort of thing. Now granted when you're watching a movie, you probably got about 40% of the screen lit up. Point is, if you can only turn on the ones you want to, you can get significant reduction in power consumption. And if you don't have to use a flashlight to light it up, you get a significant reduction in power for that also and size.
And our friends at Plessy are doing exactly that with Vuzix, making some really cool next generation lifestyle for us. And I'd like to introduce to you Mike Lee from Plessy. Assuming
Hi, guys. Can you hear me?
With the flames coming out of his tail.
Hi. Can you hear me?
Oh, boy. Perfect. Hello?
Can you guys hear me over there?
Oh, great.
Hey. Paul, can
you hear me? Just a sec, folks. Alright. I'm here too. We're late.
I saw this happen.
Can you hear me now, Paul? Can you guys hear me now?
Hello?
Can you guys hear me now? Hello? Can you
hear me there?
Very sorry, guys. Perfect. Hi. I'm very sorry. Okay.
Okay, guys. Are we are you gonna give it one last shot? Are we gonna k. Unfortunately, probably a lot like the Wi Fi connection we had earlier issues. We're having something similar here.
So let me just say, Plessy's a great partner. They're making some amazing stuff. You would love Mike if you met him in person. And he was going to bring with his some really cool demos that would help answer some of your questions about how far away is it. But in any event, we're not gonna be able to do it, unfortunately.
I apologize, and I'm sure Mike is bumming here too. It's been a bit of a fiasco for the poor guy. I mean, the plane that he was on on the way in here literally had smoke in the cockpit. They had to force it to land, and he's been trying to recover from that since. So in any event, sorry, everybody.
I think we're gonna call it a meeting. Thank you very much for coming. Yes? Sure. We can we can handle a few right now.
I mean, problem is I've also got a board meeting. I have to
I just, again, this has been a great educational opportunity to see what you're really doing. Very much appreciate all the work of the Verizon people and others come in. The presentation today prompts one question for me, and that is or two questions. One is, what do you see is the percentage of the future markets relative to our business in the consumer versus the manufacturing other business applications?
The enterprise the enterprise applications are so much better margin and less work and less resources required to play in them. And it's safer waters to be in. And so Vuzix does have a big effort on that side of our business. It's interesting to note though, we we you go to CES and all these very large consumer wireless carriers and kinds of guys are coming to you saying, you know, we really like your stuff. It could be a good play here.
And the closer we get to the consumer side, so finished solutions, the more opportunity it looks like that's there. I I will say Vuzix is gonna pretty be pretty cautious about that side of the marketplace. It's easy to get sideways. But when you have the right partners that you're doing it with, you can generally sail through the storm as it were. I agree.
But it is true. The enterprise side is it's better margins.
Right.
It's not nearly as big, frankly, but it's still really big. This the enterprise business is in the billions. Right.
The other follow-up then is how do we what what battle are you fighting to get the investment community to not look at Vuzix as in the consumer side of the business? Because right now, if you look up Vuzix, they say, well, this is a consumer related hardware company.
Yeah. We're looking that that has probably come from a legacy of where we were a long time ago. It used to be we did supply a lot of consumer products. And so the team the team here over reviews us is looking at changing the way some of those filings are that have us as that, because today, we are not a consumer company. Now I'd said this blade promotion program is really cool, and it's nice to see the level of response we're getting on the website, etcetera, around it.
But our focus is really more on the enterprise side.
I think, finally, the whole idea with the Verizon folks and the effectively five g hands free is just really a great buzz. Thanks. It's gonna change everything.
Just a short request. Perhaps citations to the Plessy material would be appreciated. Anything, websites, papers?
So I will talk with Mike because he had prepared some slides also, and I'll see if I can figure out a way to include them in the deck that we published after. Okay? Hey. Thank you very much, everybody. We appreciate you coming in again and being loyal shareholders of Usix.