Vuzix Corporation, one of the leading suppliers of smart glasses and augmented reality (AR) technologies and products for consumer and enterprise markers, has revealed it is working with over a dozen new companies to explore new and exciting marker opportunists.
With this comes the news that ten new customers have entered Vuzix’ Project Planning Phase, meaning their have signed a Non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and are actively performing due diligence of Vuzix and its waveguide optics technology for integration into their hardware roadmap. The outcome of these new companies working with Vuzix could be a number of new products, for both consumer and enterprise, that would benefit from Vuzix’ technology and create new market opportunities.
“Vuzix has spent years and invested significant dollars developing our advanced waveguides and the production process around them,” said Paul Travers, President and Chief Executive Officer at Vuzix. “We believe the fact that we can start volume manufacturing now and deliver them to select partners puts us in an immediate leadership position in AR market. Our ability to do so represents a tremendous value to Vuzix own products and any of the companies we decide to work with. Vuzix waveguides and related technologies can offer fast entry and a significant competitive edge to those OEM partners and as a result we expect will allow Vuzix to achieve premium margins over the available conventional bulky optics alternatives.”
Vuzix have of course been bring their skills and experience to a partnership with Toshiba to develop the dynaEdge AR100 smart glasses which entered production earlier this month. Vuzix’ waveguide optics technology and display engines allow for applications to take advantage of the AR capatabllies and pack it all within small devices such as smart glasses. With a the recently demoed Vuzix Blade AR smart glasses, the company showcased how its solution can be made into a realiable form factor with impressive performance showing that the technology is capable of delivering outstanding results.
With more then a dozen companies now on board to utilize the technology into new products, the growth of Vuzix seems promising and the opportunities for AR applications have now expanded further. VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on Vuzix and its new partners in the future.
“This much larger second wave of early Blade hardware will not only provide a competitive ‘edge’ to the developers and enterprise companies accepted into the program, but will also foster a larger ecosystem of consumer and enterprise apps that will bring even more value to the Blade user community when the Blade becomes publicly available later this year.” Adds the company’s CEO and President Paul Travers.
According to IDC’s report, the increased expenditure on AR/VR won’t end with this holiday season. The market is expected to accelerate over the next several years, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 198.0% over the 2015-2020 forecast period and totalling $143.3 billion in 2020. The report also explains that the consumer market will be the largest AR/VR segment throughout the forecast period with worldwide spending on hardware, software, and services expected to reach $6.2 billion in 2017, an increase of 130.5% over 2016.