The world is asking who is gonna be the
next Iron Man. Stark made you an Avenger The world needs people like you Hello Peter, these are your new augmented reality glasses from North Woah These are even better than than Edith so unlike Edith where you can see the
display on the glasses these are projecting directly on my retina so only
I can see it completely invisible Yeah, they look like normal glasses to me Hey guys, I'm the Hacksmith on this
episode Make it Real we're testing out Edith glasses from Spiderman Far From
Home Hello Peter, these are your new augmented reality glasses from North. Mr.
Stark wanted you to have them would you like to see what they can do Woah Throughout the course of Tony's development as Iron Man we've seen him use various smart glasses over the years to assist him in being one of the
smartest and most powerful heroes of the MCU Tony: Friday what am I looking at? Friday: Not sure I'm working on it When his story arc is over it's up
to Peter Parker to carry on the legacy and Tony leaves him his latest iteration
of his personal smart glasses called Edith Edith by the way stands for Even
Dead I'm The Hero That Tony anyway these augmented reality smart glasses give
Peter a powerful artificial intelligence and access to all stark tech and these
smart glasses right here these are about as close as we can get to Edith in real
life with current technology but we can't come up with revolutionary Stark technology like this in a month or two since the movie came out. No these have
actually been in development for over four years representing millions of
dollars in investment and hundreds of thousands of hours of engineering time
and in fact they're available to buy right now. They're called Focals and
they're made right here in Canada by a company called North.
Unlike other consumer smart glasses available that are bulky and indiscreet
vocals are actually stylish and discreet They protect a holographic display
directly onto your retina, no one can even see that you're using them. They're
literally the closest thing to Edith glasses available today and while I
personally had nothing to do with the development of these smart glasses my
business partner Ian Well he was actually one of the
engineers on the development team for them at North that is before I poached
him to work with me here at Hacksmith Industries but thanks to Ian's history
with the company we're getting exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how the Focals are manufactured and what's coming next Steven Lake the CEO of North invited us
to come see special projects facility number four right here in Canada, where
Focals are manufactured but before we go check that out let me show you what
these glasses can do So what exactly are these and how do they compare to Edith well first and foremost they are normal glasses you can get prescription lenses
you can choose different colors and I gotta say they're actually pretty
stylish too. They're a little bit heavier than regular glasses but the real magic
happens right here. See there's actually a tiny projector which bounces a
holographic image off of a holographic film on the lens into your retina which
means no one can actually see what you're seeing which is pretty cool and to control it it actually comes with this little ring that has a little joystick on it you can also use voice commands and just like Edith you can
actually talk to Alexa for example Alexa initiate drone strike anyway let's go see how these are made Here's a bit of a Museum of the
history of vocals I was with the company up until alpha and then they took it
beyond that obviously A alpha unit is right here that's the first working
prototype but I also worked on other iterations to test certain
features like this one I made this one on the formlabs printer So we're in the lab late one night we're finally getting the first pair fully
assembled where we had all the pieces working I put the last little pieces
together and what was the first one to wear a fully assembled functioning alpha
unit which I think is pretty cool Hey I'm Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO
of North. Started this seven years ago with this whole idea of how do we bring
computing out into the world and basically build those Ironman glasses in
real life and seven years later we're standing here at North So you got tell me when you were out there securing funding for this awesome company did you
feel kind of like Tony Stark bringing this never before really seen
technology to investors and being like check this out I think the first time I
truly like had that feeling it was going through customs at the airport with this
case it actually Ian built, the first one it was like this Pelican case
essentially handcuffed to my wrist They scan it on the x-ray and they're like
okay so you gotta like secondary screening every time, what is this thing?
You open it and you're like their glasses They're like, what do you mean glasses you open it and they're like,
oh my god like what is this some kind of like James Bond thing what is this and
all the TSA agents would be coming over and like asking to try them on and like
calling everyone over It's funny I took a metal Iron Man helmet through customs like a few months ago and no one even raised an eyebrow yeah try a half a dozen pairs of glasses Alright so we've seen smart glasses and various works of fiction over the years but there's never really been like a good consumer pair until now with Focals, why has it been so hard to actually create a pair of smart glasses We saw the early things with Google glass and like these other big headsets that
were like an inch thick of optics and you're realistically consumer you're never
gonna wear that in public So what's next? It's like version 1 of this whole new
wave of computing right it's We're Focals V1 we're crazy excited the
first glasses people are wearing every single day and the idea is that over
time these become completely invisible and the technology just kind of fades
away, there and you need it gone when you don't walking down the street and suddenly
bang there's the interface finish what ever you're trying to do in the world, back to the real world and all you see is an amazing looking the best pair of
glasses that you would have worn period never mind smart glasses So would you say the Edith glasses in Spiderman Far From Home are realistic or obtainable in the future The crazy part today is now we watch these
movies where we go back and watch like original Iron Man or all these movies
that, or James Bond that have these like concept glasses and that's like mostly
real today. We're 75% of the way there like this is a pair of glasses looks like
regular glasses holographic display like projecting on the back of your eye. That
was science fiction like six months ago as far as the public is concerned. I
think in terms of like Edith being fully there, maybe not all the way yet but
like that is absolutely going to happen in the future. Bigger field of view, understanding the world around you like those ingredients are well underway right now and so we're I think we're a
lot closer than you might actually think to that being reality yeah we don't exactly have like superpowered AIs running off the stark servers Hey all that stuff is not that far out Focals will get more contextual
understanding what we're doing in the world and then like you can draw the
line from there to something not too far off EDITH How close are we to having an
AI assistant in our ear able to answer complex questions just like EDITH Google assistant or Siri or Alexa these things we have to tell them everything
right they don't know what we're doing in the world they kind of
know you've asked it to set a timer or asked a fact but one of the things that
glasses will unlock is actually Now I have a computer that can see the world
around me eventually can understand what I'm doing in the world, and so
the amount of contacts or information that you're gonna have to build an
amazing smart assistant is orders of magnitude more than we have today with
our other phones and devices And so that concept of like this all-knowing
assistant is there you need it prompting you of what you're trying to do in the world Whether it's maybe Her or it's EDITH like those things are actually not
crazy anymore so for example as Alexa becomes more sentient how powerful do you think these glasses will be The big change with us with bringing Alexa
with you is like it's not just this little speaker in the corner of your
living room or kitchen saying set a timer for five minutes it's suddenly with you all the time but that next level of actually now
feeding it, letting it understand what are you trying to do and how do you
just have it instantly there knowing what you're trying to do and supporting you
instead of you saying like James What is this question like what is this you know thing, it's just there and it's like bang I can walk home today I can be like, hey
open the front door, turn on the fireplace, open the blinds and like from
the glasses that just happens. Real life today It's crazy So one more fun kind of question, what did you think when Ian told you that he was going to quit his
job here at North to pursue a tiny little YouTube channel So Ian was always working on like pretty crazy stuff for us he was sort of in this little
like prototyping thing we had like building crazy shit, so the fact working on
like the concept of Hacksmith was not surprising but like to go at that point
when I think there's like no money and like very few subscribers and like a
couple videos at that point uh yeah it was pretty crazy it's like really that's
we gonna do you could build these crazy glasses or build some YouTube channel? Now I look back and I'm like ok Well alright let's go on a tour of the manufacturing floor ya sweet let's check it out This entire line we're gonna walk through right here is doing everything
from taking these raw kinda boards, putting all the little components on it,
soldering them on, goes through a big oven to melt all the solder, comes
through right here it gets tested every step. They're automated testing making
sure all the chips are on right they're working and then that's hiding
right inside of the glasses like that That's incredible This machine's kind of cool basically every one of these things like
the big ones here each of these those are all separate little robots. Every
little part that goes on this board is in one of these reels. You can see them
here they're like a tiny grain of sand Ian: How many components are on that board Atleast 100 per side here, on each side of that So the robots picking that
up, the board's going through it's moving and it's placing them exactly on that
tiny little spot there, it flows out into the oven where it all gets melted and
kind of soldered on stuck on board That's incredible And that's when we're
building a product like glasses right it there's real estate and space is at such
a premium we got to pack everything in there as tight as we can Now this looks interesting yeah this is a breakdown of all the parts so almost
everything here we build in-house here in Waterloo and we do that because A. a lot
of the machines we have to build this didn't exist right no one had an assembly
line to make holographic glasses before as you can imagine and so we have to
kind of invent the processes, the machines everything else another
interesting thing is every piece of this is built to order, so if you walk into
the store in Toronto or the online app and you order the product it's
custom-built for you and that literally automatically runs through the line here This is one of the final areas where those all come together, our operators here doing the final assembly hand assembling all the last components
they're packaging it they're doing final tests, calibrating everything and
ultimately putting the retail box and getting ready to ship it out the back
door So cleanroom right here we've got you got to get suited up for this so it's you can imagine right we're working on things that are so small like the mirrors are you know less than a millimeter let's say they're on a chip
so any speck of dust a hair or something would totally ruin that product so we actually have to get gowned up here so we'll head in This is where we do all the optical assembly so we
actually build all of the light engines, the lasers, the projectors, they set up
whole parts that generates the image gets built in here then it's get sealed
up in a little package basically it's ready to go out to the rest of the
facility and be put in the glasses We have stations right here where they're taking
in these little tiny lenses that are tiny have to be aligned in the six
degrees of freedom those are all moved they see by robot
inside of here automatically aligned in the right spot and then cured with the
glue to keep those lenses in the final position And then that's it onto the next step If you look at this screen here it's already aligned blue and it's like currently aligning green and you
can see that it's got the lense in position and it's running through our
algorithm here, so it's calculating whether or not the lens in the right
position. And all that is happening like inside this black box Were these machines developed in house or did you have any external No we built these yeah everything from the station to the software to the algorithm to like the
way we even use this Dulsa camera like all built from the ground up in house So this is a raw holographic film right
there you can just see the element there we actually record that in first it's
recorded by intersecting laser beams in the film we take that we then curve it in
3D so it gets curved and it gets inserted like this right into the middle
of a lens that's cast around it Then believe it or not out of that whole blank comes something like this essentially a piece of optical
plastic with a hologram inside That's sort of the magic of it All the machines we see back here is actually how that happens On all the lenses we put a coating on the front and back that stops glare and reflections in this crazy chamber here And then behind this wall is like
the actual machine is massive James: Wow James: A machine shop area Yeah machine shop A bit more familiar for our viewers This is the machine I used to cut out
some of the first prototype lenses come Come a long way These glasses are pretty
freakin awesome so how do you get a pair well when I got my pair I had to go to
one of North's showrooms in Toronto to get them custom size for my face but since
then they've actually created an at-home sizing app which means you can literally
just order these glasses online and have them custom fitted for you.
All you need is an iPhone X or greater and you can actually 3D scan your face
at home for a perfect fitting pair of glasses It's super simple just check out
the link in the description below to get your own pair or if you want to try your
hand at chance we're actually doing a giveaway to two lucky viewers to win
their very own pair of Focals it's free to enter and easy to do all you
have to do is follow North on Instagram Twitter or Facebook and then fill out the
giveaway form linked in the description below Good luck I hope you guys enjoyed this episode Make it Real see you next time
