 You may have heard all the buzz about virtual reality. The technology that for decades has been on the cusp of arriving is finally, finally just around the corner. You've probably heard less about augmented reality, but that field, where you mix virtual images with the real, is poised to be just as big and just as interesting. Daiquiri, a Los Angeles startup, has created an augmented reality headset and the software which powers it. It's aiming to revolutionize the way people work by layering additional data and intelligent computing tools on top of their normal vision. Daiquiri is an augmented reality company that makes hardware and software products for the future of work. Their flagship hardware product is this really cool kind of digital hard hat that you wear and it has flip down lenses and it projects things on the environment you're working within. So if you're at a factory and it can project images on gauges and can read those and track those and feed them back. So it's kind of like a way to modernize what have been legacy industries in a very, very cool way. Early in my career, I got a chance to work in the simulation industry and then ultimately did a lot of work with robotics and computer vision. And I saw all of these pieces come together for decades in very expensive government facilities. I got a glimpse in the late 90s and early 2000s of what would be possible, but it cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. The aha moment was seeing the iPhone 4 get released in 2010. Now all of a sudden I had a multi-core processor in my pocket and I knew that those technologies would now be possible in a mobile form. And that's when I dropped everything and started Daiquiri. When the company began, it focused on creating software. The hope was that other players would quickly create hardware that Daiquiri could piggy back on and that those devices would help to pique customers' curiosity and so demand in a market which didn't yet exist. When Daiquiri started, there was no market for augmented reality and definitely no market for augmented reality at work. The biggest challenge for a company like this is always going to be convincing people why they need it in the first place, especially when you don't have a working prototype that's already being used by somebody out there. Marketing pure augmented reality is very difficult because you're marketing the idea of being able to communicate, but just that idea isn't enough. You have to explain how's it going to deliver value. We had to work pretty hard to just get people to understand the fundamental mechanics of the technology. Every meeting we went into at that time, we had to explain to them what it was we were doing, what the industry was, what the potential was. They'd never heard of it before, never seen it before, and that was an uphill battle every time. We had to build the tools, we had to build the awareness, and we had to build the market all at the same time. Originally, they were mostly a software company, but that brings issues, right? The software is only good if there's actually devices out there that can run it. When we started Daiquiri, we were really optimistic that one of the big companies would come along and they'd make the device that we needed and we could just write our software for it. We realized along the way that that's not going to happen. For us to have the device we needed, we had to get into the hardware business and the things that we had learned about making augmented reality for phones and tablets could wrap up into a pretty sick product. Google Glass has far and away the most well-known attempt to create an augmented reality product and also the most public flop. Daiquiri is hoping to sidestep the concerns over privacy and fashion that ultimately torpedoed Glass by focusing on industrial applications instead. I think a lot of the problems with companies that want to do augmented reality is what's the right application, right? A lot of times people immediately say it's got to be gaming or home entertainment or that kind of thing. And those are actually harder sells in a lot of cases because you have to worry about fashion, you have to worry about pricing. There are all these obstacles that get in the way, and that's assuming your product even works in the first place. What they've done by focusing on the industrial application is it takes a lot of those barriers away. It's not just about what can cost more. Everybody looks goofy in a hard hat, so fashion goes out the window. And it becomes more about making the case, can this make your work life better? Can this make your company more productive? We realized the first place that augmented reality is really going to get to scale is in the enterprise, is in the industrial space. Because this is delivering on-site, in context, knowledge transfer, step-by-step work instructions, data visualization, right where the decision making is happening. A field force engineer goes to service a gas turbine on a jet. They have to know maybe 600 different work instructions. This is a way to do knowledge transfer visually, so you can look at that gas turbine engine and the computer vision can understand what you're looking at, understand what needs to be done, and give you visual cues without language of what you need to do next. When we met our first industrial customer, it was, you know, hey, I have these fundamental challenges and I desperately need a solution to make things better. And this fits into that. Oftentimes technologies come around that replace workers, they take jobs away. What this is, is expanding our senses, it's expanding our capabilities, it's enhancing our vision and transferring us the knowledge that we want in real time. And that can make a huge impact on someone's life. Daiquiri has managed to convince a handful of big customers that its product is worth exploring. The question now is whether or not it can build that into a profitable business and if it can continue to lead the field when massive players like Google, Microsoft and Sony are all making aggressive bets on the augmented reality market. We started five years ago on my living room couch. It took us two years to get to the massive facility that held 10 employees and we thought we'd really made it and really come a long way. Five years later, we've got 250 employees in five offices around the world and are just starting now to know how much we don't know and how much we didn't know along the way. Augmented reality is still in its nascent phase and we're at the very tip of the iceberg. It's gotten so much bigger since we've started. We're at the point now where we don't have to explain to everyone that we meet, what is it? What does the technology do? Okay, let me physically show you because people have heard of it, people have seen it, we're kind of past that point now. But you don't wake up in the morning and look around you and there's augmented reality everywhere. There is that critical path to getting there and we're going to get there. Now that Daiquiri has kind of put that product out there, people can get their head around what it is. They've kind of crossed a major threshold but what's next is how are they going to iterate upon that, how are they going to respond to the challenges and the things they learn when the product gets out there in the marketplace. They're going to learn a ton of things they could not have even grasped before and so whether they're going to be able to pull it off ultimately, we'll have to wait and find out.