Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on the Attack of the Clones and Magic Leap’s Wasted Opportunity (Part 1)

The Guest

Karl Guttag, is currently most well known as a speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, memory architecture, and micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses. 

He’s got 150 patents to his name related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at TI (that’s Texas Instruments), and was named a TI Fellow - the youngest in the company’s history. In the 20 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

And these days he’s also the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders when they need it most.

Karl Guttag head shot on white.jpg

Karl Guttag

LinkedIn
KGOnTech

The Conversation

Like my first interview with Karl several years ago, this was a long and wide ranging conversation that I split into multiple parts. In this first part, we touch on cloning - both of microprocessors and AR devices. We also talk about why see-through AR is 10x harder than VR, the importance of field of view in AR vs VR, the poor visual quality of the Hololens 2, the challenges of diffractive waveguides and laser scanning displays, Magic Leap’s wasted opportunity, and more.

Some of it gets technical, but Karl does a good job of making it accessible. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to sit down and have a drink with Karl, it’s something like this.

Jason McDowallhardware, AR smartglasses, micro displays, optics