Just a quick note today about a heartwarming story that involves Augmented Reality.

About two years ago I wrote an article about Evergaze, a Richardson Texas startup, working on passthrough AR technology for people with low vision. Evergaze is headed by Pat Antaki who I have known for about 20 years. Pat sent me a link to recent local TV station (WFAA Dallas) video about a kind man that was given an Evergaze seeBoost and I thought it was worth sharing. In keeping with the season, the video has an “It’s a Wonderful Life” feel to it (the video only about 3 minutes long).

I have watched Evergaze from its early days and occasionally give them some advice. I have seen them go from a concept to a real working product. They do all the design and most of the manufacturing (including having their own PC board assembly equipment) at their offices in Richardson.

The big money in AR seems to go to the flashy companies promising “magic” mostly aimed at video games. Evergaze is focusing on leveraging technology to do the real magic of helping people see. Imagine if you could not see well enough to function and you can understand why they cry when using the product. While it may not look like much compared to the liked of Hololens and Magic Leap, Evergaze has given a lot of thought to what their users actually need including centering the camera on the eye and having extremely low latency between the camera and the display with their custom designed hardware (for more about this, see my prior article on Evergaze).

It turns out that there are litterally millions of people that could benefit from these types of devices and the market is growing as the population ages. So there might end up with there being many more people wearing these types of AR devices than from the companies promising game applications.