 Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be back talking to the KDE folks again. Like it's it's pretty amazing it was fun coming and talking to the Academy you know group that was super fun talk and you know I hear that it was you know super well received even though you know I like to use one of my friends terms that he uses for ham radio he calls calls himself a appliance operator and I kind of feel like I'm an appliance operator when it comes to Linux systems you know I use them quite a bit throughout my daily life but you know I'm not the Uber you know Linux nerd that can you know get really down in there and configure things but I'm glad you guys like the story stories before you really get going here should we open up the shared notes to questions so maybe before we all log off today if anyone has some burning questions for you we can maybe get some of those answered I'm happy to answer questions I'd be great great so everyone if as Jerry's going along you have any questions please throw those in the shared notes Jerry I'll leave you on stage to tell us all your tales of engineering and yeah stories war stories yeah I had regrets about sending that title title over because war sucks I changed my title you know for the presentation you know it's kind of fun about this picture that's on the slide right now I was going through my phone looking for pictures for the presentation and this is literally a picture of me ripping apart a Rubik's Cube not too many weeks or months ago just because I wanted it to you know have all the colors on the right side and I think that's maybe really good illustration for how I approach things differently like in and try to just get things done fast you know much of my career people have criticized me for not doing things the right way but you know sometimes it really works out like if you have an end goal to just just get it done you know do it the way that's the quickest and so that's why I chose this picture I thought it was great for something that are joining I was saying earlier you know since I spoke at the last at the the conference Academy I'm sorry I told a lot of stories about my childhood and rambled on a quite a bit I think it's important that I share some some of the similar stories again but I'm not gonna bore you with the same same stories I hope but you know some are gonna sound familiar but I'm gonna try to double-click a little deeper into each of these stories so that it kind of frames you know how I think about problems and and ultimately at the end of the presentation we'll get to my current startup tilt five where we're making these amazing augmented reality glasses that you know this magical world springs out of the table and you can play video games with all your friends so I was you know just start when I was a kid I was a very curious kid I was raised by my father by himself and I would take apart all my toys which was super frustrating for him and so my father was constantly trying to divert me away from dismantling my toys and ruining all these things that he spent hard money on so he would do things like bring me old light bulbs from the gas station that he worked at he owned and taught me how to hook them up and to batteries and light them up and do things like that he also he put a box out in front of his gas station with a sign like bring your junk electronics and he would bring it to me and just let me rip things apart it was like heaven you know I just had endless supply of little bits and things that I could take apart and explore because I just I have to know how everything works it's just for whatever reason that's how I am and I lived in this really small town and there wasn't a lot of resources available to me to do electronics so I spent a lot of time just trying to figure this stuff out on my own and I started to learn a little bit things like you know components are soldered together and you know I didn't have tools to work on you know soldering and stuff I found like creative ways to to get around that doing things like taking resistors and hooking them up to wall transformers so that they glowed cherry red and hot enough that I could solder components you know of course this was very scary for my father and he quickly figured out that I was doing these really sketchy dangerous things and you know guided me away from that got me things like soldering irons at a super early age I can't remember how young I was when I got a soldering iron that it was was you know stupidly young I think that maybe it would be child neglect these days to let a kid play with a hot soldering iron like that but I loved it I got other like neat gadgets when I was a kid that helped me grow and start to learn on my own and like this electronics kit that you could get from Radio Shack at the time was really amazing taught me a lot about electronics I spent hours and hours playing with this and started to develop this in to to feel about how electronics works because you know there was no one there to teach me the right way to understand electronics when I got a little bit older I in my teens and early teens I ran into some local ham radio operators that were very much like me but you know much older they you know are adults and they took me under their wing and they had shops that look like this which were amazing and they taught me more about electronics what was really interesting about these ham radio operators that I started hanging out with is you know ham radio is all about being prepared and working with what you've got and that was really cool you know sometimes I would go to them and say like well I don't have this connector to do the certain thing or this certain component and they're like well just go figure out a different way to do it you know you know how to cut a piece of wood make a connector out of wood you know doesn't have to be plastic or I wanted to make an antenna I didn't have like the right wire they're like well you know go get a clothes hanger and and untwist it and use that for your antenna and so I feel really fortunate that I had mentors like this when I was younger that you know taught me that you know there isn't necessarily a strict way to do everything and that's been so beneficial I also got into early 8-bit computers which were amazing my first computer was the Commodore 64 I spent you know ungodly amounts of time you know plunking away on this and programming it and eventually started interfacing electronics to it wrote BBS's you know did all kinds of really neat things with it I progressed through a bunch of other 8-bit computers and 16-bit computers at the time and kind of learned the basics of like working with computers and this was super early you know it was you know mid 80s you know it was kind of also fun at the time too because not too many people had computers at the time and you know I show people my computer prowess and they thought that I was a genius and kind of made me feel good even though I don't don't think I'm a genius at all I'm just really stubborn and and like to explore by B remiss not to tell the story of when I first got my Commodore 64 I had so little understanding of how electronics and read only memories and all these things that go into computers was that I did some really silly things to these these computers for instance my father bought some game cartridges for us and they were really cool but I wanted more game cartridges but I didn't understand how they worked I just thought it was wires connecting inside of them so I would take forks and knives and plug into the cartridge doors port and kind of short things out and beautiful colors would come up on the screen and I ended up burning up a quite a few Commodore 64's doing that you know blowing out chips eventually my father you know was I was doing this without telling my father he he was convinced that the Commodore 64 was super unreliable and that it actually probably benefited me because I got you know new or better computers in my teens I got into doing race cars I was a wild child I was like this picked on kid at school but I found that you know the more wild I was the more people left me alone and I'd always liked cars and we had a lot of local tracks around there and I got obsessed with wanting to build a car my I was working with my father at his gas station at this point and I was begging my father like build me a race car and he's like there's no way I'm gonna do that for you it's just way too dangerous and I just pastored him and pastored him and eventually he said you know the only way you're gonna get a race car is if you build it yourself and so very driven to do this and so I went out found some mentors and people to help me taught me how to weld I started working with them on the weekends and their machine shops and built my first race car did terrible I didn't know how to set the car up you know I didn't know how to really build them but you know I reached out to folks started learning more learning how race cars worked and this was my first adventure in engineering real engineering because you could buy blueprints for race cars but you know it was never really wanting to just follow the rules so I was constantly tinkering with these race cars as I built them and trying different you know suspension techniques I created this really clever suspension that brought all the shocks in board kind of like an indie car you know how it goes through push rods and things like that and that has some great benefits I started taking my skills with electronics and applying it to the race cars so I built a traction control system that was based off the old 6502 processor so I would measure the front wheel rotation from a magnetic sensor up front and then I would measure the engine RPM and I had a simple little program that would trick my rev limiter in the car to go into over rev mode and it would cut the engine power so I couldn't spin the tires and it gave me this huge advantage it was pretty interesting you know I was constantly tinkering it was kind of one of these things it was would frustrate my father at this point who had gotten behind me and was really excited that I was racing and starting to do something with my life instead of being a screw-up in school that I would take a perfectly good car that was fast and then I would change it and make it worse but that was the joy of it I would go out I would try things sometimes it was worse sometimes it would be kind of a leap forward and I did all kinds of things like this just constantly tinkering with the car you know there was a as you go to these different tracks they have different properties at the tracks like the dirt that you race on and it changes throughout the night and even throughout the race as it dries out and you know you could set your car up by adjusting these different suspension components you were always just trying to guess you know the perfect setting that would be like the best at the end of the night and I just thought that was unacceptable so I started putting motors on different suspension components so they could adjust them when I was racing the car and so I had all these dip switches in my car going out to these linear actuators and lever mechanisms that would change the load on coilovers and move torque arms around and things like that and you know a lot of these things I was adding in my car were also getting banned frequently because you know as I would start to dominate the track promoters kind of want equal racing they don't want some car or some driver running away with the race and ultimately I was telling Allison Allison is quite a motorhead also the final straw for me on my racing career is one night a supercharged Volkswagen car came out that was super lightweight and high horsepower and it just dominated the races and up to that point I hadn't really considered even a four-cylinder Volkswagen motorist like even a thing that you would put into a race car so my final year I started building a dual Volkswagen motor car one in the front one in the back with a synchronizer shaft between it synchronizing the carburetors and unfortunately just before the race season started they announced that there was going to be a minimum weight limit which kind of nullified all of this work that I put in this car and I just threw my hands up like okay I'm just tired of racing at this point there's not enough innovation for me I don't know if those were the exact words but that was basically what it was so a friend of mine we opened a computer store and it's a big long story you could go back to the academy talking here about it but you know there's lots of ups and downs when I was doing this computer store I learned a lot gained a lot of scar tissue learned how to like work really hard because you know I didn't know how to run a business it was really rough but eventually took off and the this the actual business side of it was really amazing it was a fun experience but during this time I really dove into electronics as a side project and put a lot of work into this all my spare time went into building various electronic things and there were these new chips that came out at the time called FPGAs that allow you to write some verilog code or VHDL code and it gets compiled into a simulation of what a real chip is and that's super powerful so instead of having to have like a chip that only does one thing you could have a chip that's reconfigurable and you can make it do all kinds of things and so I was doing tons of experimenting I would make video cards that plugged into a Commodore 64 and give it like 24-bit color or I'd make a synthesizer and I was just making all kinds of projects with these chips learning a lot about how to make circuit boards even at one point I made a little kind of limited run ATX motherboard that had a bunch of FPGAs on it which was the C1 reconfigurable computer I had like big ambitions back then it never really took off people had fun with it they got them but it was probably one of the points in my career engineering wise where I was growing extremely fast and during this time I had mentors but a lot of this time I was just exploring and not really stuck on following the rules like inside these chips there's like just the right way to program them but these early chips you could do some other interesting things with them that are not quite the right way and you could take a small chip that can't do much and you could kind of hack it to do more by you know using internal tri-state buses to hook things together which is usually a no-no to do and so that was super fun the computer stores were going good around 2000 the retail computer store market imploded and I found myself you know without a revenue stream and quickly running out of money so I made the bold move to go to Silicon Valley and brute force my way into startups oh I forgot to mention I dropped out of high school when I was racing cars I never went to college up to this point and you know it's funny every time like there was kind of an up and down in my you know the computer stores or the race cars and stuff like this people would be giving me friendly advice like you know you had a good run with those that race car thing you should go back to school or you had a good run with that computer store thing you should go back to school get your diploma and then go to college but I've always been too stubborn for that and so I went to Silicon Valley with no formal education and brute force my way into a bunch of startups and that was really difficult not very many startup founders or teams would take a chance on a high school dropout but I got some breaks you know one company took a chance on me it's not this company but you know it kind of got my foot in the door I did a really good job for them they were happy and that was a springboard but this is the part of the presentation where I want to kind of double-click a little bit deeper into various projects I worked on and kind of just discuss like unconventional thinking and how it can really benefit you know projects so this company still clean hired me the founder of the company a really amazing guy Bob he was very much like me he kind of bootstrapped himself he created this business that distributed cleaning solvent to local airports and gas stations to clean parts and he had this dream of making this machine that could take dirty solvent after you've cleaned a bunch of parts distillate and put it right back into your parts cleaner and so he had a small team that he put together to make this little still his first prototype of this still was this giant machine that had this big column in it to boil the solvent and then condense it out and then you get clean solvent that would dump out the other side and at the when he asked me to join and help out he had these industrial controllers that were really expensive like hundreds of dollars to control this thing so it wasn't something that he could sell profitably and it was too big and so I walked in the door and he's like well can you make a controller that can just do this simple thing like you know as cheaply as you can like run a heater for a few minutes turn it off let the solvent drain out and then just cycle through until this the cycle is done and so I did that it was a really short project I think I did the whole project for some crazy had like one chip it wasn't even a processor and it was like a couple dollars worth of electronics so he was super pleased and but they were having trouble actually getting the product out the door because this short column that they put inside of it was it was actually based off of a deep fryer for their first prototypes called a fry daddy and it would boil the solvent and the oil and gunk would collect in the bottom and the solvent would get thicker and thicker and then eventually it become very frothy and then it would boil over the top and it would contaminate your clean solvent so you know it was looking like they wouldn't be able to ship a product and so I went to the the founder of the company I'm like you know I have a bit of a mechanical background and you know I just I have some ideas I have these hunches you know can I like spend a couple weeks and just kind of play around with the distillation column you know this was also beneficial for me because you know work was kind of far and you you know in between so a little extra money was going to put food on the table too and so I went and started working with the other engineers and this was a very interesting situation where there was a lot of angst that I was there this you know uneducated person playing around in their space and it was I got a lot of grief for this but you know I worked after hours when a lot of people weren't there and just put a lot of work into this first thing is like well you know everyone is just guessing at what's going on inside this thing you know I want to actually see it and I just remember like our old oil tank on our gas our oils furnace at home had like the sight glass that you could look and see where the oil level was and it's like well maybe I could put one of those into this like vacuum system so I could just see what's going on so I did that I just bored a big hole in the top of this thing put it in and then like it takes like hours for this like solvent still to get to this point where it has this boil over a moment like I got to figure out how to make this happen faster and so I went to the founder of the company I'm like you know I really want to like speed up the cycle of like this boil over situation it's like what you do is you just put a little bit of water into the oil and it'll boil over instantly I'm like oh well that's interesting but I want to like change out oil and stuff and open this column up and stuff so I made a water injector into it and I could just iterate super fast faster than anybody else and it was amazing inject water in this hole a column would be bouncing around and boiling over and stuff and I just thought back to the days when my father took me out camping and he had this percolator coffee pot one time he forgot to put the kind of mechanism in there that takes the liquid to the top and showers it down through the coffee grounds and when he did that it just boiled over like out of control I'm like maybe the solution to solving this problem isn't like doing what everybody else is doing with like trying to put hot wires in there or little flapper things to smash up the foam maybe I should just make a percolator in there and so I did that I made a couple like percolator things welded them together and put them in there and it was kind of working but it wasn't to the kind of volume of solvent that they they wanted to go through this thing and so one day I was kind of frustrated like maybe I'm not going to solve this problem and injected water into this thing and the column bounced and this percolator thing like tipped over kind of sideways and I was sitting in there at an angle I'm like I eff it you know mad I just let it run and I came back and it's this thing's just producing solvent like crazy and I'm like wow and it's not boiling over and I look in there and I find out that it's just this because the base of the things like a solid plate it's just kind of tipped to the side and the solvents just kind of circulating on the bottom plate boom solve the problem I just put a solid plate in there and they were able to ship the product and that was really that was really cool it it also started to wake me up to you know I'm going to face a lot of resistance in the future you know there were other situations around the same time that I started to learn that there's certain language you can't use around some people in engineering you know I worked with these ham operators and had learned this intuitive feel so I'd often say things like I feel like the solution should be this I have an intuition that the solution should be that and that is for some people like the worst thing that you could say you know I remember instances I was in meetings where people were almost screaming at me because I said like I have an intuition or I have a feeling and so I'm super valuable having that kind of rough experience kind of early on in my engineering career sorry that was a little long-winded but I think it's important that also that kind of growth as a person I had to go through that in that particular instance so another exciting project I got to work on I done I worked at quite a few startups at this point but out of the blue toy company contacted me and they wanted me to they'd heard that I've done a bunch of things with Commodore 64 as a hobby and put them into these FPGA programmable chips and they they said you know we've been trying to make a Commodore joystick that has all of your favorite 1980s video games in it and that's nostalgic but we've been trying to emulate it with a processor and we've been failing maybe you can make a chip and at this point I'd never designed a chip I've only played around with these FPGA chips and they're they're like well can you make a custom ASIC for us that does this is super cheap that we can make a $19 toy and I had no clue how to do it I just took a big gulp and said like yep I can do that and so I got hooked up with a couple folks you know Robin who was heading up the software team and we we started working on this thing it was a crazy project I just didn't know how I was gonna pull it off we'd promised that we had to do it in like less than a year so I immediately start ripped apart a Commodore 64 started hooking these FPGAs up to the chips started trying to emulate these chips and make them as accurate as possible meanwhile I made like a board for the programmers to get started on the software because it had to not only be a Commodore 64 it had to load all these games and had to do it fast and be snappy and and all self contained so I quickly built this board sent it to them it didn't do anything when I sent it to them I'm like trust me in a couple months this board will do something and so the very first things that I got running on the board where these kind of unconventional like test builds of the FPGA to the right I just remembered doing this we were just trying to get the processor running but you know this is back in the early days early 2000s you didn't have like really high-speed JTAG interfaces that you could you look at things in real time so I would do dirty little hacks like I would take all the op codes and the bits in the processor and I just map them to the screen so you could see it in real time and we would do things where we I would make special builds FPGA that would just you know map different memory locations to pixels and we could just sit there and look at the the pixels fluttering around on the screen completely insane I don't know what we were thinking we there this was an impossible task but we eventually got the thing limping along we were like two weeks before the chip had to be taped out and I still didn't have composite color output so the the team was still working with black and white composite output and everyone's getting super super nervous like you got to get us like color soon and I'm like don't worry I'll figure it out I'll figure it out and you know that the chips that we were using were so small that I had to the custom chip I had to map it to that I just didn't have much logic in there to to do proper composite video generation so I had to do a bunch of things that a normal chip designer wouldn't normally do do asynchronous logic and thankfully you know four or five years earlier when I was dinking around at my computer store figuring out how to like manipulate you know tri-state buffers inside of a chip or or do latch-based logic you know with you know FPGAs and things like that I had that skill under my belt and I was able to get color composite output without having to add a bunch of you know external or blower budget on the actual chip itself what was amazing also about this project is it was a really fun crew we were having a lot of fun we were distributed this is you know you know a prototype of what the world with COVID is today like one guy was in Canada one was in Europe one was in Mexico one was in you know somewhere Midwest United States and we just did the whole project virtually and got it done somehow lots of late nights on IRC you know trying to debug things remotely so anyway we're like a couple weeks away from production we didn't have enough time to do any sample chips which was really unfortunate so we had to do this thing called a super hot lot which you push all the chips through without even testing them and so they pushed hundreds of thousands of these chips through this foundry and they sent them straight to China and they mounted them on the board you know we're already late at this point you know we had to get it out for the Christmas holiday and I get this angry phone call from the president of this this toy company yelling at the top of his voice like how I effed him over that this doesn't work and they spent millions of dollars on this and that I'm gonna get on a plane the next day and go to China and fix this problem probably one of the scariest moments in my entire career having to be on the other end of that phone line hearing that you know I joke but it was almost going through my mind that maybe I should run to Mexico and hide right I'd never screwed anything up that big before so I get to China I go there first time to China was really interesting experience get to the factory they open up the first prototype and they show me and the circuit board looked nothing like the circuit board that I had sent them as a reference and thankfully they had taken it on themselves to cost reduce it for me and they taken decoupling capacitors off and can ruin the electrical characteristics of the device and this goes back to this next part of the story goes back to unconventional like debugging these are things that I learned you know working with really creative engineers and ham radio operators and people that have this intuitive sense to do things the first thing I did is I put my finger right on the circuit board and started pushing on things that's something I learned from the ham radio guys like your finger is a great way to inject noise change capacitance change the circuit and sometimes you can intuitively infer what's going on put my finger on it boom the thing that springs to life and it's like we were able to fix it and get the product out other interesting things kind of along those lines this is not related to this particular story but a thing that I've used a quite a bit to kind of do intuitive debugging and understand what's going on in a system as I've used things like AM radios to listen to a circuit so all these circuits generate interference so if you put an AM radio next to a circuit that's misbehaving or crashing or locking up you can hear like these beautiful little you know it almost sounds like 8-bit music tweets and and noises and when things change you hear different tones that come out of it and you can use that to debug you know there's been many a time I've been debugging a complicated project with a client and they just think I'm insane and think I'm wasting time because I'm using things like an AM radio but it's it's super valuable stuff and you know you shouldn't you shouldn't lose that intuitive side or reject it you know I guess I should tell another funny part of this this project I think I talked about the City Academy but I saved the day kind of right but then when I was at the factory I dropped into the secret menu that we put into the joystick so the programmers had added a bunch of games they added pictures of them drinking beer with a famous programmer and stuff like that and one of the toy guys was there and spotted this and they were mad really mad so when I got back to the United States I had another phone call from the president of this company screaming that you know how dare I add anything extra to this well for us we were kind of all young and we were like we love the Commodore we love like the notion of this let's make it really special let's add things for the people that buy this and the uber nerds out there and we didn't think that people would get mad at us for doing that and so I was told like you're never gonna work with us again don't tell anyone about this your bra there's just so mad at me and so I was like hmm that's bummer right but I was talking I was dating a guy at the time who was really good at manipulating things on the web and creating kind of spoof sights and things like that and so I was telling him about this and like well I guess my career in toys is over at least with this company and he's like well why don't you just tell the world about this stuff anyway right if if it's over so he made this really cool blog site that was supposedly a worker at this factory who liked to hack on toys and things like that and then he had this whole backdated blog of hacks and things that this supposed person had done and the last entry was oh by the way I'm working at factory on this really cool toy that's super hackable you can hook a disk drive to it you can hook a keyboard to it and you can load your own games into it and you do all these other fun things with it and so he got it on the front page of the slash dot which was super popular at the time and I didn't know anything about viral marketing at the time this was not necessarily meant to be viral marketing but it just blew up and so this product was actually sold it was intentionally made for grandma and grandpa and it was going to be sold through QVC and they had this whole marketing campaign on this home shopping network that like was all around like you know your grandkids will be happy if they come over and they have these great colorful games they can play on the TV and they'll love you right kind of one of those types of advertising campaigns so they kick this this off on QVC it goes live and they just sell out immediately and I get this call from the president of the toy company he's like that was pretty amazing that's awesome like sorry I was so mean to you like you know let's really embrace this and they produce this thing over and over again they sold like close to a million units but what's so funny is they they lost the the concept of hidden Easter eggs like they wanted to document every Easter egg and put it in the manual and we had to like inform them like that is not an Easter egg don't put it in the manual so that was kind of funny so I went on did like dozens of toys and stuff like that and toys are one of the hardest industries to be in because the design cycle is so short you usually have a year to get the toy done and so you don't have time for any kind of mistakes and when you do you just have to solve it you know this is a toy I worked on it was a home arcade machine ultimately didn't sell very well the timing wasn't right the price wasn't right or whatever but we were trying to get this thing built in time again a very similar story we're working really hard to get this thing done and the person that did the circuit board layout had wired these chips wrong and so you know it would take like a week to get another circuit board and everyone had kind of decided well we'll just we'll just wait a week and this is horrible we're not going to ship on time I'm like no no no no like it may take hundreds of wires but I'm going to get this prototype working and so these are the kinds of things that you know sometimes you know if you haven't had a background or you have been too scared to like experiment and in work with doing crazy things like this you wouldn't think about doing so you know I wired up hundreds of wires to these sockets so we could arrange the pinouts so they matched and we got back on track on the same project there was you know a delay on like this whole module and this big arcade machine is heavy to ship they're like oh no we're gonna like there's different grades of like shipping boats that you can get on there's fast ships and slow ships and they were very concerned they were going to lose millions of dollars because they're gonna have to go on fast boats to get these things distributed around the world and I just out of the blue I'm like why don't we just take the electronics and make it a cartridge and for the first you know a couple shipments of these things you know at the 3PL Logistics Center we can just open the boxes and just drop this game cartridge looking thing in there and so we quickly turned it into a game cartridge and we were able to save the day this is kind of an interesting and fun toy that I worked on ultimately the toy the concept of it was these little cute pets were going to be connected by radios and they would sing various songs like who let the dogs out and they'd all have their own personality you could tap them on the head and they would switch to doing little riffs within these songs and they contain their own songs but they could sing along with each other I love the concept it was great we got it prototyped and working and this is kind of one of those things that you know sometimes you work on projects that break your heart so it became too expensive to have radios and all this communication and so the scope of the project changed from this really cool thing to less and less and ultimately it became a toy where it just kind of whimpered and cried all the time and it would kind of bob its head around I always loved the inside of it these various dogs had different like emotions some of them could bob their head some can wiggle their ears and stuff like that but the insides looked atrocious and scary but I love the reviews when this thing came out the reviews were things like I got this for my kid all it does is whimpering cry makes my kids cry I hate it so you know not everything is a huge success but it's a fun journey to get there another like fun interesting project I worked on in the toy space was this Bratz laptop and some variants of this thing but kind of a funny story around this and this is I just I want to emphasize like engineers like to have fun too and I like if you're management you need to remember that and so this was a great group that I was working with we built it was really tough it was a tight timeline got the prototypes built the software folks made the mistake of sending me all their source code so of course I decided that I would do a little trick and I said alright I recompiled the code with new audio in it instead of the Bratz audio I put you know belching and passing gas and all kinds of rude stuff in it and I contacted the software team that was remote and said like I mean the prototype is like 99% there but there's some audio artifacts you're gonna have to work on they're like oh my goodness so scary send us the prototype loaded up with software right away I'm like okay it's headed towards you it was great you know they thought it was super hilarious and fun and we all laughed about it had a great time not every place I've worked has been like that though which is really unfortunate so this is a particular project I worked on it was a reconfigurable processor like these days this kind of thing you know neural networks you know very common to have a an architecture like this but this is early 2000s we worked on this chip didn't get much traction in the marketplace but what was really special about this project and this is kind of a Linux story is we had the chip coming back from the foundry and then we had this FPGA board that was going to talk to it and we had an arm processor we were going to bring embedded Linux upon it and the embedded Linux was going to exercise the chip and then show off all these features like doing telephony and radar and all this stuff that you could do with this kind of neural network processor and the software team had been perpetually behind and I just sensed that they weren't going to be ready on time so before the chip came back and I had worked on this Commodore project before I took a stripped down version of the Commodore 64 joystick took everything unnecessary out of it downloaded it to the FPGA hooked up a couple wires so I could hook a keyboard up to it and a disk drive to it and started writing basic code to exercise all the registers and get this thing going and my managers were so mad at me they are you're like wasting time we're not paying you for this like I'm like trust me software team I just don't think they're going to be ready on time like I would just want to have a head start on this thing and sure enough you know I can't remember what it was called is the Lilo or something they couldn't get it going it was like a month late and you know by the time they got the embedded Linux going I had the complete chip up and going and tested so you know I know it's hard for management sometimes to know what's a waste of time and what's not but you know at this point in my career I start feeling confident and start pushing back really hard when folks would give me a hard time about doing some of these things this is another interesting project that I worked on so this was a very high-end video compression chip back in the early 2000s it was a two-year project we were a team of five or six people working on this chip and this is back when H.264 was like brand new and really hard to do and processors couldn't pull it off and we are working day and night one of my colleagues snapped this picture I'd been up all night for some big demo or something we had to do for an investor and I'd fallen asleep at my desk and so we're killing ourselves we're putting our blood sweat and tears into this this is a huge part of our life and you know we're about ready to tape the chip out and send it off to the foundry and so the team we're having a little bit of fun in the last days of this and we found kind of an empty space in the register set and we started putting little Easter eggs little like ASCII text messages kind of hidden inside of the the registers and management found out about this and brought the hammer down on us and just completely demotivated us and demoralized us at the last hours it was really sad you know I hate when this kind of thing happens like we were working on this chip that it ultimately went into the Tivo and you know had quite a good run but we're working on this thankless job you know where no one's going to see this thing that we're working on because it's buried inside of it a Tivo or something you know you should I am a believer we should always let people have engineers in particular have fun with what they're doing and so it got all stripped out and if someone ever reverse engineers the Tivo they're not going to have any little Easter eggs in there which is really sad so there's been some interesting evolutions in kind of my personal hacking that I never expected so I went to work for this company called New Tech they're famous for the video toaster back in the day it was great honor to go work with this team this team was amazing they're out of San Antonio Texas I was working on this product can't say that I contributed a ton to it but we got stuff done on it and just had a fantastic time with the team their office was fun had scooters had pinball machines it was just like this is like the perfect way to motivate employees but out of working on this video streaming box I started doing something in like I don't know it was maybe 2008 or so where a video streaming and YouTube was like super early and no one knew anything about it so I decided to take one of their streaming boxes and just put it in my home lab and just start streaming to the world you know nowadays like live streamers everyone's doing it back then I was just like I just kind of need to learn about this industry that I'm working in I'm going to do this weird thing and I felt really awkward about it because my colleagues were giving me a hard time but it was kind of fun and I wanted to do it and kind of opened up this whole like side thing that I still do today where I take on very difficult science challenges and I do them in my garage and I record them maybe sometimes I'll even live stream them and I just share it with the world it's kind of like I feel like it's my way that I give back and I do pretty fun things like I'm an electron microscope in the garage I have a full chip foundry in there where I can make a little very simple microchips and things like that sometimes I'll do an art project like a a guitar that's built out of the sound chip on the Commodore 64 and it's really satisfying to do that it allows me to be super playful and in fun with what I would do so this was a super fun project I know I'm rambling on I might go over I don't know if that's okay Alice then I'll check at the top of the hour but totally okay all right I try I won't keep you guys too long but at this rate I think I'm going to be a little over so I'm a little out of order in kind of the chronology of how all this went together like these projects but I just I wanted to share this one kind of at this point I had an opportunity a few years ago to build you know to work on rockets kind of it's been a dream of mine forever but at the time I had another project I was trying to bootstrap a startup and I really didn't have time to do this project and a friend of mine is the CEO of the company he's like we are in deep trouble the folks that were doing the flight computer in the telemetry for our rocket gauge quit or something I don't know the full details but they're not here anymore we're screwed you're the only person I can think of that can just come in and get this done I'm like no no I can't do it I can't do it and he's like please please you know we're up in Alameda it's right around you know where you're at just come up to our facility on Thursday but it's got to be Thursday I'm like okay I'll come visit I just want to get to you know see what you're up to so I walk in there's this giant rocket in the high bay like oh this is cool it's like totally legit looking and he's like taking me on a tour and there's like this awesome machine shop and people are really cool and he takes me down this corridor and there's like this test cell where they can test the rocket motors and he's like we're about ready to do a static fire of one of these motors you know do you want to participate I'm like yeah yeah it's like well come on in and like sit down and you know let you push buttons and stuff so this rocket motor fires off the ground shakes it's loud there's fire over watching this all on these video monitors I'm like gosh no I don't I can't do this now he's like please like I could probably do four months I don't know if that's enough to get it done for you but that's all I can give you he's like I'll take it and so I came in we started working on this flight computer and I found out you know day one after coming in that in two weeks the FAA and someone from the launch facility was going to come in with this telemetry receiver emulator and they needed to see that we could get telemetry coming off of the rocket and so that's not much time definitely no time to make a circuit board so I get the hot glue gone out I get some dev boards I start learning about this crazy protocol these on rockets called iRig and I just work day and night put this hot glued together emulation of what the flight computer is going to be and these like three kind of old guys come in from these facilities and the agencies and I come traipsing out with this piece of plastic with a bunch of hot glued parts on and their their eyes roll back in their head they're like what the heck is this I'm like trust me it's it's going to be fine the flight computer is going to be perfect don't worry I got this I turned on the charm I let them I convinced them to let me hook this up to their hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of test equipment fired it up I got enough of the protocol working they gave us approval oh my god yeah lots of interesting stories around this rocket company because they used embedded linux on it to control the rocket and there was such urgency to get things done and and this is something I've learned over the years is who is the stakeholders in your organization and what can you do to make their life easier and so there was a software team working on the navigation and the control of the rocket doing everything right and then there's other stakeholders in the company there's like operations folks and folks working on the communication of the rocket on the launch stand and they're completely blocked and they're not going to get their job done in time so I you know I'm not I can't program worth the dam so my code's super hacky but I'm like there is an urgent need like if they're going to launch this rocket in a few months for some test software so I write the jankiest linux applications that are just streaming out to the terminal doing horrific things like printing the screen with all this data and then just sending you know the clear screen character and then just doing it again and again and again flickering and looking horrible and folks doing the software and the company doing it right are just like snapping at me like errr like you I can't believe you're running such crappy software on the rocket and I'm like I don't care I'm sorry this is unblocking these folks well you know it's it was kind of amazing we got it done I actually had to work on this during vacation so I carried like all these emulators and stuff onto a cruise in the middle of the the ocean and finished up you know the gps navigation pieces of it and stuff but we got it done they uh launched the rocket it took off the pad like that was amazing and then promptly did this came back down blew a big hole in the ground but you know rockets are hard and they did this multiple times proud to say it wasn't anything that the software team or the the hardware did to cause this or computers did I should say it was all hardware problems as a keepsake they sent me one of the flight computers that was blown out of the rocket blown I don't know probably a mile away it was actually sticking out of the side of a building on a piece of like you know aluminum that it was mounted to which was really cool and they've been able to make it to space uh with it which is really cool and uh you know if you guys are interested if you look up astro rockets they just had another um kind of semi failure where the rocket took off and flew laterally because an engine failed but what was amazing about it is the rocket didn't tip over and explode which is a testament to the software team for doing it right so this brings me to um a point in the story where I started working at Valve software and so this is where I got the bug for augmented reality and it's what I've been working on for almost 12 years now so um I started getting these text messages on social media from just random people from this company called Valve and you know I'm I'm a gamer I like to game but I wasn't really putting like two and two together because I hadn't been much of a PC gamer in quite a few years and like what's this Valve company contacting me all the time you know wanting to talk to me and so finally they get a hold of me and the way they get a hold of me is I collect pinball machines they show up at this pinball conference and they're like hey and they're playing a pinball machine right next to me and they're like hey you're Jerry right and like yeah yeah hey we're from Valve you should come talk to us like we think you're amazing like ah you're Valve people again like no no I don't want to work for a software company that wants to get into hardware like it I just don't know if it's gonna work and so that didn't work at the pinball conference they show up at Maker Fair and they like order me at Maker Fair like please come up talk to us you're perfect like we love your youtube channel you're the perfect kind of creativity for our company I'm like no and finally I got a text a message on one of the social media sites from Gabe Newell the founder of the company he's like I really want to talk to you I'm going to fly down to Portland where I was living at the time I want to just take you out to lunch and so he he shows up and I'm given in the same line of like you know I've been here before working with companies that want to do software companies want to do hardware it's like sure you have the constitution to do this like it's way different than software he's like trying to convince me he's like just please we'll buy you a ticket in the next week to come up just come up for the afternoon let just meet the team it's not an interview which was a lie I got up to Valve they take me into a room and it was a panel interview basically because they probably were scared that I was going to run out the door or something I don't know there was probably I don't know 10 people and they just started grilling me it was actually super fun they were like so you're going to build a game controller how would you do it I'd be like oh I'd go to this company in China and we'd do this type of plastic and this and that and say we're going to make a game console what would you do and I'm like well this and that and I don't know Gabe Neil I think probably did like a no signal at some point like most of the people got up and left the the meeting and then Gabe took me around the building and he took me to the fourth floor and he's like fourth floor is all yours you know you have an unlimited budget bring all your best people in you know this is what I want you to do he's like we are catering to hardcore gamers we have Microsoft that's encroaching in on our business trying to push us off the platform and make their own marketplace and that's what valve does is they sell other people's games primarily and he's like this is an existential stress of talk today existential threat for us and what I want you to do is to expand our audience and get us into the living room I want grandma grandpa all the way down to the grandkids playing video games that's your mission what do you think and I'm like gosh it's I didn't expect to like be interested in this when I came up here and he's like come on you just stay overnight spend another day with us and like why didn't bring any toiletries or anything he's like don't worry we'll buy that stuff for you and so he he grabbed you know someone and they're like hey let's go to the swag room and we'll get you a shirt and then we can you know take you out and you know shop for any other pieces of clothing you want so anyway they did that for me hope put me up in a a motel and hotel and um I came back the next day wearing a valve shirt and it's like okay I guess I'm part of the team and and uh we we started it and started doing that and it was really cool I hired a lot of really great people we started doing a lot of experiments we were hooking electrodes to people's minds and feeding that back into games and like showing how we can have all these feedback loops to make games more fun we were doing a lot of AR and VR experiments we're just having fun it was a great team and there's something you need to know about valve it's a very um interesting culture where they pride themselves in not having a strict management structure so it's like they just have these mantras like do the right thing for the company be be the good guys when it comes to anything for the customer you know and and just do the right thing for the customer whenever possible so that that's uh gives you a lot of latitude to do things and also um can get you into a lot of trouble too which I found out uh one of the more comical things is yeah I was told the fourth floor was mine so you know I grabbed a rental truck and brought my a bunch of my pinball collection and started setting it up in the you know by the kitchen area and uh the facilities person really mad it's like it doesn't fit the aesthetic what are you doing get this stuff out of here I'm like like Gabe you said I could do anything I want you know kind of keep the pinball machines he's like I love it they stay already like you know a few weeks into it and I'm rocking the boat big time so you know we we were working hard like we were a crew that there was like the nine to fivers and then there was kind of like the uh the crew that was getting things done and it was like this core team of probably eight people and uh we would come rolling in around 10 o'clock pretty late and then we would be there until sometimes well into the morning working on on different projects because we were just so excited about it but we also had a lot of fun along the way which as I found out down the road like some of the folks that were a little bit more strict in the way that they operated it really rubbed them ruffled their feathers and we would do things like we're working on augmented reality and things like this and but we would thumb our nose at it also and just have a little bit of fun like this is just one of the little projects that we put together in like 30 minutes to have fun we were making a little promotional video about augmented reality at valve and for internal and we took a voltmeter and hooked it up to some like reflectors and stuff so you could view it when you were you know when the hat was on we called it the voltmeter hat and we made an infomercial about like thank you voltmeter hat yeah I couldn't do it without you which upset a bunch of people that we weren't taking you know this VRAR stuff serious but you know as a great crew we're having fun we decorated the space how we liked and then one day I got an email like come to Gabe's office and got the notification that I was part of like this big group that was getting fired and I was told that I was hard to work with and abrasive and so I was out so that was really unfortunate I found myself like I had this baby project there that I was pushing really hard for that you could do augmented reality in this really amazing way that solves all these fundamental problems and it was being killed so I think the so I knew I knew I was getting fired so when I got that email to come up to the Gabe's office I knew it was to be fired and so I walked in the door with all intentions to just chew Gabe out like you told me I could do whatever I want and yada yada yada and like you're killing my baby this amazing AR project and of course I walked in I said something like well this is how it's going to go and then immediately broke down into tears like I can't believe you're killing this AR project so good it's exactly what you told me to do it's like oh it's like brings the whole family together and you know he's tells me I'm everyone says I'm abrasive and I got to go and and the best thing that I ever did as I was walking out the door as I just swung around I'm like you should just sell me that technology and he's just like okay so $100 and a lot of legal paperwork I now had this really clever technology as my own so this is a very long story I've done a whole like probably almost hour and a half talk on like how my first attempt at getting this AR project going how it was just this huge roller coaster I'm not going to go into that right now but it it was a big learning experience like we left out we founded this company we didn't know how to run a startup at the time I was scared to run the startup as the CEO so I outsourced that to external CEOs which can't we had a lot of CEO cycling through we raised a bunch of money because AR and VR was really hot at the time but we blew a big crater in the ground by not running the the company correctly but we learned a lot you know and so a group of us after the first company imploded we got together and like we've really taken this project far and it's great people love it and now we kind of know what went wrong why don't we do it again and this was actually actually to back up a tiny bit it was Nolan Bushnell the founder of Atari who called me the day after the news broke that the company had to shut down and he just gave me a pep talk and he said like coming from a founder that's had a lot of failures just remember you know there's always a way if you want to make it happen just go find it and so a group of us got together and we started talking about it we're not reached out to my mentors and we figured out how to do it and so we went out raised a little bit of money we spent a lot of time thinking about like what went wrong and one of our problems was we were trying to boil the ocean we were AR glasses but we were going to be AR glasses for everyone in the world and it was going to do everything for everyone which is understandable considering kind of the marketing that was around a lot of AR companies at the time we were just following along but that was one of our biggest mistakes and so we thought about it and we're like we all love games we're all gamers this mission that Gabe originally gave me such a an amazing mission and game trends are heading in that direction right now like when I was at Valve like the statistics for people that played games together as a social event was about 50% of the people that played games the time that we founded tilt five my startup new startup it was approaching 70% and it's only grown people are going into games to socialize with each other more and more in fact kind of a funny side story one of my investors in tilt five big gamer suggested that we should jump into GTA 5 drive around in cars and just talk to each other on voice chat for our next meeting which is really cool and so that's happening more and more so we were convinced playing games together bringing the whole family together was a solid market that we could go into and it's turned out great we've had a lot of momentum these glasses you put them on this magical world springs out of the table you can directly interact with all these holograms that just you know just right there in front of you and it's the things that we've dreamed about since we were kids and what's also great about this system that we put together is that it also connects people over long distances so you don't have to necessarily be in the same room you can link game boards together and have that same feeling even if some of your friends are across the world and it solves some of these fundamental problems that we have in video games you know currently it's really hard to have a multiplayer game experience you usually have like one in television in your living room maybe you can have like a multiplayer game on that but it's only a certain type of game with our system allows you to play action games board games all kinds of games you can have your own view into the experience and you get your own private view into the experience you don't have to have three TVs three xboxes three playstations three switches to have a multiplayer game experience in your home so we've been working really hard on bringing content to our system and this is the breakdown of the content that we're bringing on onto the system for launch and launch is just a matter of weeks away so if if you've backed our Kickstarter campaign keep an eye out for our next update it'll be very meaningful but you know sometimes people look at this because it's kind of in a game board form factor that it's only good for board games but actually the the breakdown of their launch titles look like this there's some sandbox and creativity tools there's a lot of board games we have hundreds of available board games through some platforms that we've brought over to the system like tabletopia but we also have dozens and dozens of pure video games that range from action and puzzle and party and racing and just almost everything you can imagine flight simulators and stuff like that it's super exciting around the office right now we're so close to launching that and all this content's coming in we're doing these dog fooding sessions where we get to play on these games all right let's talk a little bit about the evolution of the product and double click down into that because that's kind of interesting and this kind of ties back to the valve story why didn't valve understand what i was trying to say at the time that this is such a good way to go in the upper left hand corner this is what i built at valve to do it this god awful helmet thing that you had put on with like these big projectors it was super limited didn't work very well but i could see you know the potential in it and i just couldn't convey like this is really going to be great once we evolve so after my departure from valve you know a group of us got together and i started working on miniaturizing the projection system so it looked more like glasses and this upper right hand corner this is a purely hand-built prototype that i built on my dining room table with hot glue and lenses that i pulled out of point shoot cameras you know i had no reason to believe that i could make projectors so small and and that would work but you know i just had to figure it out because i really wanted this project to survive and so we went out we showed this to a bunch of people people got excited because it worked really well and we started talking to manufacturers about various components like building these projectors it was hilarious when one of these companies that does custom projectors you know came in and took a look at this prototype they were just aghast at what i had done to put this together they couldn't believe it worked and so they're like we can do so much better i'm like great let's do that and so they run off and they're doing simulations and they're starting to build these projectors and they're sending the simulations over and how big the projectors would be and they were giant they were like just too big they were going to be like these big things on your head you couldn't make a sleek really nice pair of glasses out of these things i'm like this just isn't going to work if they're not small and they're like well to have performance it's got to be have all these lenses in it and like well do you mind sharing the prescriptions to all those lenses and can i play around and see if i can do anything and they're they didn't scoff or anything but they're like yes and they sent the the the prescriptions over i got some free academic optical simulation tool and started messing around and i just made this one observation probably because i'm not formally trained in optics and i shouldn't know that this is the wrong thing to do but you know the illumination comes in from one side goes through a little beam splitter turns a 90 degree and hits like an an l cos pounds like a little lcd screen and then goes back out to the projection lens but that beam splitter thing it was giant because it had to be giant and so the observation i made is like what if i just put a lens like on the illumination side and just kind of shrink the light down run it into a smaller beam splitter and then run it through another lens it blots it back out and then shrinks it back down runs it through the beam splitter and then back out the lens so i was able to like shrink the the projectors down really small but i didn't know if it would work so i put the simulation guy sent it over to the optics guys and they're like oh my goodness like we'd never considered doing that it's like again sometimes it's good to you know not be afraid to not do it the right way so the basics of how our system works and why it's so special optically is there's this real problem if you want to do augmented reality glasses you know if you want to put the light directly into your eyes that's a horrendously difficult problem and we've seen there's dozens of companies that have tried to do this and there's always like these really severe limitations to the experience it's usually a little tiny image it's very ghostly you can't draw blacks it's fixed focus so like your images have to be pretty far away or it starts giving you headaches and things like that the observation that i made at valve software on this technology originally was one day i was working in the lab and i had a projector and i was trying to put light directly into my eyes and just struggling like everybody else in the industry but i accidentally put a beam splitter in the wrong direction projected out into the room and one of my colleagues had a piece of this material called retro reflector hung up on the wall doing some kind of other experiment and i saw this beautiful image clear across the room i'm like wow that's weird didn't think much of it weeks went by you know i was probably in the shower and then all of a sudden i'm like wait a minute if we turn the optics inside out instead of just trying to put the light directly into your eye and having these limitations what if we just projected out to a game board because you're going to be playing on a table or and you're living in here anyway and that way i can generate an entire light field so the light rays are going the correct path as if your virtual object was a real object the light is actually coming from that location so i put that really giant prototype together tried it out and like oh my goodness it works you know of course the quality was horrible because i didn't you know fully understand everything yet and that that is how i discovered to turn the optics inside out to solve this problem it allows us to make systems that are lower cost wider field of view we can draw blacks we can have a comfortable experience that you can play for hours and it's all because of this magic material and this material is it's amazing it's like been around for a hundred years and you've probably seen it ten thousand times or a million times it's like on safety vest it's like the reflective material on safety vest it's on road signs it's like super common easy to get it comes in all kinds of different variances that you can tune for whatever properties you want so here's some of the features of the product you know massive field of view super lightweight it's got microphone and speakers built into it we have this tracking system that's built right into the headset that stabilizes the images so that they're running at 180 frames per second no matter how you move your head around it just plugs in through usb connections so you can hook to phones tablets pcs and another exciting device i'll uh share in a moment we have these cameras built in that we can do a bunch of different really cool machine vision things with like you can do you can track hands and objects through these machine vision cameras and then we also have our magic wand it's so funny people always give us a hard time about the the look of the wand it looks like a barbeque lighter it's like that is not a mistake you know everyone knows how to poke something with a stick everyone knows how to pull a trigger on things like hot glue guns or a a barbecue lighter um so it worked brilliantly um in this air experience so um for the more geeky folks in the crowd this is kind of conceptually how our system works so at the base we have plugins for unity and unreal and we also have a native sdk coming out so this is where your simulations or your games run so you create a game and so and you put our plug in into the game it's drag and drop we're super proud of how easy it is to develop for a system drag this into unity and you're almost up instantly so in the headset the cameras are figuring out where your head position is figuring out your your pose is what it's called and how the images need to be created in the game it passes those down over usb to the game engine it receives that the game engine creates a picture which is in the position as if it's on the game board or floating the game board wherever you want to put it in the game which is up to you and then um it sends it back up over usb three to the headset it lands in the headset but here's the the issue right you've moved your head after you've already told it where your head position is so the image won't line up so we have a really high speed processor with a bunch of dsp slices in it that is doing a thing called reprojection which is um realigning the image 180 times a second we have this really tight loop between the cameras and this inertial measurement unit to make sure that no matter how you move your head around it's predicting and moving the image into the correct place and that just makes the image just like solidly locked and super buttery smooth it also allows us to do something that's interesting so in virtual reality systems you're locked to a vertical sink you know an image is generated by the game engine vertical sink comes along it gets scanned up through a video connection like hdmi up to a headset or a monitor and if you miss that vertical sink you have to wait an entire frame period and that really makes a lot of visual artifacts so we've made that asynchronous so however um how long it takes for the image to be created by the game engine we just accept it and then we just reproject it into the crate um the correct location and uh oh i just noticed our slide says 240 it's actually 180 sorry about that folks um the um if there's an opportunity to slip it into one of these like microframes we just slip it in we reproject in the correct place and if there's a frame drop for instance like if you wanted to run this thing over a network or something instead of like a usb connection or receive your frame frames over say a 5g connection we can absorb all that latency and do this reprojection and reline the image and upscale any kind of frame drops sorry i'm getting a little geeky there i'll move on so we just received the steam deck which is super exciting and one of our team members in a matter of i don't know he probably messed around with it for i don't know an hour or two here and there um got our glasses working on the the steam deck which is super exciting and i think this is pretty interesting to this audience in particular because it has the plasma desktop um on it you know the first time you know uh just in our engineer uh shelled out to the desktop he's like oh this is interesting and then he tried to open up a console like console with a k he hadn't experienced it i'm like i know that i know our glasses already run on that desktop and sure enough you know it worked right out of the gate so it's pretty awesome you know there's some other nuances to it like um you know native um linux unity projects run on it um there might be a little bit of work we have to do with all of their windows emulation that they're doing time will tell but that's pretty exciting still love the folks at valve this is a really cool piece of hardware kind of a funny note about um what we were thinking back in the day about 12 years ago um the notion around valve was that portable gaming was dead you know 3ds was out it looked like it was waning um psp and some of these other devices weren't getting traction everyone's like you know phones have like killed it all tablets have killed it all it's never going to come back you know i'm gone out of valve and everything the switch comes out and just crushes the market so kind of interesting i'm i'm super happy valves done this so with that i probably should wrap up i'm really appreciate you know the kde crew for letting me go way over time i encourage you take a look at um our website take a look at what we're doing um you can go there buy a kit if you want to it's super developer friendly every every pair of glasses you get you get free access to all these tools and so anyone can mess around works on linux and should be pretty fun for a lot of folks in the audience thanks so much jerry i always enjoy listening to you and i'm sure the others have as well i hope that was okay i didn't repeat my uh too many stories did i no not at all not at all indeed we have a few questions from the audience um because we are running a little late and just in case some folks are located in europe um i'd love to ask you a few that are in the the share notes i have all the time in the world first of which is do you still play the bass oh i've had that you know okay the story of the base um so this might be a little long and rambling in junior high i wanted to sing i was super excited about singing we had a project where we had to sing in front of our classmates and they tease me and then i never i was like i'm never doing that again and so fast forward probably 30 years i'm like screw those people like i want to sing so i went out and found a vocal coach and started working on learning how to sing she was great she's like you have terrible timing like you just can't keep a beat for anything like you're probably the worst i've ever seen no but she said it nicely and uh she's like what i want you to do is go out and try to learn in instruments so you can kind of get the rhythm of you know and it's going to help your singing and so i didn't know what kind of instrument i wanted to play so i went out and got a bass guitar i got like one of these electronic drum sets and stuff and um yeah started kind of dinking around with that and um what was kind of funny is i've never gotten good at any of those instruments i don't know if my rhythm's gotten any better and unfortunately when i moved valve i moved away from my vocal coach and i haven't done any singing practice since but now i'm a little less afraid i want to do it for you guys today because i don't want to hurt your ears but the Commodore they might be talking about my Commodore bass that was just a gimmick that i put together i just like had a free afternoon and i had an old bass that was just junk and i like you know i bet i can put a piezo sensor under each one of these strings and measure the frequency when i strum it and then convert it into signals to go in or control into the regional sound chip that when it was in the Commodore 64 which you know old old chip tune folks just love the Commodore 64 sound because it's really i don't know i love it too and uh so i put this thing together pretty quickly had a little FPGA that was just frequency counting the notes and i could just drum it and get converted to SID music and i took it to Maker Faire i think it's the first place i showed it off i was wearing my roller skates with a little amplifier clip to my belt and and playing bass like plunking out you know a couple little tunes here and there and it became like people went pretty viral on that one people loved it what's really sad about it is at my previous startup we had a a game jam where we invited a bunch of people into our space to kind of play around with system and and build games and play with it and i had my my bass there and someone stole it you know no good D goes unpunished i guess and so who knows where that bass is and people keep asking me like well you should just build another one i'm like nope you know it would never be the same it wouldn't have the same kind of love associated with it so it's just a one-time thing what a bummer wow let's hope whoever gets what if you're watching karma karma karma um have another question kind of desktop application would be best suited to tell five oh that's a great question you know although we're focused on games board games action games and stuff like that i would say like i just kind of monitor our inbound on our dev rel probably a third of the folks that reach out to us can recognize that this works for non gaming applications so we're seeing all kinds of stuff which government uses and data visualization and oil and mining there's tons of people using it for different uses there's a company doing virtual cadavers it's like perfect for that you can use the one to like you know do dissections and things like that there's been a lot of talk about uh productivity tools so things like Maya or blender so there's folks that are waiting for our native sdk to like integrate into like some of these 3d modeling tools you know i can say those are gonna be amazing um our system already works real time with unity so when you're building your scene you can drag game objects in and you can be wearing the glasses and you just look over the game board and you can like drag them up and down with your mouse and they move instantly in 3d space so you can position things and it's it's far more effective to position things spatially when you're actually looking at them spatially and so i suspect um once we have some of these plugins for things like Maya it's going to be pretty amazing you'll probably be kind of a similar thing you may still work on your pc but you can look over and immediately see what the end result's going to look like just just like in star wars just sitting there right next to you that's incredible well i guess this kind of goes into another question are there any easter eggs until five tons uh since i'm the boss this time and the ceo i highly encourage it actually that brings me a point um you know i was just trying to express like different in work environments i was in you know some were really strict and you know we just have to do it the right way in some place where it's more playful um i found that more playful environments you know really causes a lot of buy-in from your personality just become emotionally attached to what they're working on even if you're doing fun things that aren't directly associated with the product and like our office right now we just moved into a bigger space and i have probably 25 pinball machines set up in there i'm i've been setting up almost a museum of old game consoles and computers i have like the first joystick for the odyssey game console and i have all these joysticks set out and stuff and it's really a for a company that's doing a lot of gaming focused right now it's really great to go look at all this hardware and say like you know here sega had an amazing platform the sega mega driver the sega genesis and then they kind of messed it up by like adding all these weird plugins that you could do and it's like let's not do that and so that's this creativity and like it deepens your thinking of how you're going to um you know approach the problem but as far as easter eggs yes there's lots of easter eggs um i want to caution people there's lots of easter eggs on the circuit boards but if you happen to open like our glasses these things get assembled they get calibrated they're optical systems if you open them up you're likely to throw off that optical calibration and not be able to get it back together the same way so if you do it you know just reach out to me i'll recalibrate your glasses for you the first time but the first time it's free the first one's free at least for the Kickstarter backers if it becomes a problem maybe uh we'll have to like clamp down and be too corporate yeah there's a lovely comment here it says i just want to say that i watched jerry's fantastic interview with tyler mcvicker a while back and this is a great companion to that review with non valve stories although valve stories are good i think that's lovely you definitely i think there's i can ramble like with the best of them so there's a lot of interviews that are quite long there's some really good interviews i encourage you to look up i think it was eev blog if you want to hear about the tragedy of cast a r my first startup i go into great detail um and in fact i i believe in being very transparent and just telling it how it is from my perspective i know everyone else has their own perspective but i just tell it from my perspective and uh i did this must have been an hour long or hour and a half long interview just talking about like everything that i did wrong and people you know just like how we did things wrong and people love it um my investors at the time were like what are you doing oh my gosh this is like you're you're talking about the flaws of the investment community and you know how they can run you off the rails in your company i'm like i don't care right if an investor is upset that i can't talk about the realities of venture capital then they're the wrong investors for us no that absolutely makes sense um i guess there aren't many questions left um but if we're on one let's let's choose this can we see the tilt five console work oh work um the best place to go take a look at it it's on our website tilt five dot com so we have through the lens footage that you can see there so a lot of companies that do ar they like do these like crazy things like whales jumping out of the uh the floor and things that aren't even possible so we try to be pretty honest about what it looks like like this picture on the screen here you know that's composited because we we wanted to like show a low angle and get everyone in there but this is really what it looks like for these three players that are looking down at that game board and as well we uh the lower right picture here that was shot straight through the glasses and a katon like game and oh i should also mention like we have struck some really exciting deals for content we can't announce them right now until we're a little further along but i am so excited the traction that we've got getting content because i remind the team almost on a weekly basis you know it's so easy to get um focused on like the plastic and the sensors and stuff that you're you're working with every day and forget what you're really selling and i want to give props to a previous ceo my previous startup he did one thing really amazing once well that's a little mean but he said one thing that was really amazing he says i'm selling fucking holograms and i we had shirts made up ready set effin holograms on the back just remind the team that's what we're selling we're selling games and holograms it's not the plastic it's not the sensors so you know all your decisions need to be like you know you focused on like how can we make that really great and and stay focused on getting lots of lots of content and in great games for the system or other applications too yeah that's awesome okay well i guess there's still things coming in i should also mention people are asking where where can you see um the system so we've started shipping to our kick starter backers we just finished up what we call our beta backers these are folks that paid extra money to get like the most prototype hardware so we did a couple runs in the factory things started looking good we sent them hardware and the feedback has been amazing um you know a lot of them hang out on our discord and tell us about all the things that they're doing on the system one gentleman took the glasses and went to a demo coding competition in europe so it's i love these things it's like where hardcore programmers go and show their prowess off and he won his category with our glasses he wowed people with it so these things are out in the wild you're going to be seeing more of them and in a matter of weeks a lot of them are going to be going out so that's super exciting sorry i don't know that is um speaking of of seeing them everywhere says can you share any details regarding where the tilt five can be bought uh just our website right now we're going to do direct sales so right now um we did a kick starter campaign we're fulfilling those but you can also pre-order and so after we fulfill our kick starters that's going to take us um you know into the first part of next year to get kick starters fulfilled and get our backlog of pre-sales we've been pre-selling a lot of units so we have a little catch up to do and talking about challenges and having to overcome issues like the world's really messed up as far as manufacturing we have not been able to travel to china to solve any problems so we're having to like everything is just protracted and drawn out it's so long like something that would take 15 minutes of the factory take like two weeks sometimes because we're having to ship stuff international freight and but we've done some really cool things this might be interesting for folks so you know as soon as covid hit and we got restricted from traveling to the factory we started building robotic test equipment so that we could test the the glasses and the wands and stuff remotely so we could um we had to make all kinds of firewalls to get through or vpns to get through the firewall of china and stuff like that but um i'm super proud of what the team did to make these little robotic rigs you can put the glasses in we can actually figure out what's going on by wiggling them around and be like you know give feedback to the factory like no you did this wrong or you misaligned that or you put your thumb print on a lens you need to go and correct that but you know the the supply chain is really messy right now i feel very fortunate we uh we just dodged a big bullet there's like just recently been a huge semiconductor shortage but fortunately for us because we didn't anticipate getting shut down with covid we had purchased a lot of our semiconductors in advance and they were just sitting there so only a few things became a shortage and actually i at the last minute like in the last month i had to do a change to our circuit board design and quickly we spun new circuit boards put a new chip on because we couldn't get this particular chip that we're short of it's crazy it's really crazy i mean sometimes our kickstarter backers are like grumbly like you're a year late and it's like i know but it's like really hard what we're trying to do we probably would have been late with no covid but you know it's really really hard now to manufacture i can only imagine well i'm sure i'm sure when you start really heavily manufacturing you'll find more things to improve and and find things that work even better than you expected no doubt about it i'm so excited to get like you know we sold thousands and thousands of these the feedback we're going to get you know pushing that many units out onto the market we're probably going to i don't know what all the stats are for some of these other bigger companies magically from holland's but we're probably you know on par with what they've sold of their really expensive systems you can buy like 10 of our systems for the price of one of their systems but having that many people out there like using kind of bleeding edge technology like this we're going to learn a lot and they're going to who knows you know we have these theories like oh our barbecue lighter is perfect and then you know one of our backers be like well no it needs to be like this shape and in fact we're trying to do you know i admire valve for always trying to be the good guys right one of our beta backers wrote me the other day and he's like you know i only got one wand with my system but i want to do this experiment and make a different shaped wand you know and i don't want to ruin my wand wand like can i get some circuit boards i'm like sure they'll be in the mail boom semi couple circuit boards who knows you know maybe he's going to invent like an amazing wand with it or or a unique application and that's that's our core belief too is try to be the good guys you open your glasses miss the calibration up you know if you don't do too much we'll take care of you and you know we'll try to be the good guys not even just being the good guys but being human and you know talking about doing the right thing i'm kind of scared about what's going on in the ar space right now we have big companies that are their whole business model is collecting data on people and then manipulating them to buy things through ads when we start to do this kind of ar a everywhere type thing where people are wearing glasses as thin as yours that are like projecting images all over the place and can gather so much data that they understand you better than you do the amount of manipulation that's possible is truly frightening and so we talk about that a lot around the company we want to be super ethical about what we do and we believe that there's like you don't have to go to those extremes to like do negative things to your users to have a hugely successful business and that's our goal is to be like huge we want to be as big as valve you know someday and be be the good guys and good folks or whatever you want to call it okay officially one final question although there are a few left is tilt five open source parts of it are there are some trade secrets like the firmware that goes up on our heads headset but we've tried to leave like if you look at our unity plug-in like everything's in the open as much as we can and so it's not completely open source you know it's difficult to do and you know we want to have some control of our trade secrets all of our all of our development first starts on a bunch of Linux so we're going through this big SDK revision 15 is what we call it and it's super exciting the features that are added to it so it's kind of agonizing for me because all of our games are on windows and it's going to be on like android and things like that there's not a lot of games on Linux right now so we don't really we don't have any like game developers putting stuff on Linux so these the software team gets these new like improvements made and you know the best we can do is like you know i i go into unity and i like drag some cubes and stuff around i make a little project and i wiggle my head around or i move the wand i'm like oh it's looking good i can just like if i interpolate and just kind of imagine it's going to look so good when we get it moved over to the windows platform and get all these games oh that sounds fantastic i guess that gives open source folks a little bit more encouragement to create some new games there you go yeah yeah i should throw the caveat in there my co-founder jamie he does a lot of like the SDK planning and stuff and he he always wants to say like we unofficially support Linux because there's just so many flavors of it and there's just so many configurations so you know you're kind of on your own if you start messing with our our our linux based SDK because we can't guarantee every single flavor but i uh the machine that i'm using right now is my home work work machine using plasma katie ease a bantu variant and the glasses work fine on it that's amazing as of today it's amazing amazing so well i want to thank you one more time and it's always so wonderful to hear your stories there were still questions i would say can folks reach out to you to ask their questions that might not have been answered uh yeah my email is really difficult to to figure out so it's jerry at tilt five j e r i great i hope that for the few questions that we didn't answer if they are still wanting those answered that would be lovely and we have a great we also have a great team on our developer side so if you're a developer and want to do something with our glasses there are loaner kits available for certain projects that we get excited about and there's support there in particular we're mostly interested in games this year um so feel free to reach out to on our website there's some developer contact information those folks are great they'll they'll lead you through what you need to to do to get a game up and going usually just a few minutes to get it basically going fantastic yeah well um even more incentive for folks here to reach out i'm sure there's at least a few developers in the room so as always again i can never say thank you enough it's super fun i love talking to you guys it's so it's so great you're kind of my kind of people so keep it fun put a lot of Easter eggs in and have a good rest of your weekend you too have a great weekend everyone see you next time