Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on the Many Hurdles to µLED and Broad AR Adoption (Part 2)

The Guest

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, 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, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.

He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

He was also recently the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders.

Karl Guttag

LinkedIn
KGOnTech

The Conversation

Like my previous interviews with Karl, this was a long and wide ranging conversation that I split into multiple parts. In In the second part of my conversation with Karl, we talk about:

  • the current state of µLED tech,

  • challenges with AR displays and optics,

  • diffractive vs reflective waveguides,

  • the unique opportunity for Lumus,

  • history/comparable of DLP and LCOS to today's pursuit of µLED and AR glasses,

  • importance of "hands free" and implications on device input,

  • if or when AR glasses will replace a smartphone,

  • which technologies will win in the mid and long term.

Jason McDowallhardware, AR smartglasses, optics, VR, enterprise, consumer, micro displays