Okay. Hi, we're live. I think we're live. Do we have the sound? Can you confirm in the chat please that we have the sound? Okay. So can you hear me? Okay, it works. Great.
So yeah, once again, we're in Paris. I'm here to give you an update on where we are, sit at Lynx, what's currently going on, what I can share with you. As usual, I'm trying to share the best I can and you know what's going on around the company, around the project now.
It's been a few busy months as you can imagine for the community that follows the project a lot. Maybe we've been quite silent or maybe a bit more than usual. It's because we had a lot of going on and now I can share a bit more. So I'll start with the hardware, with the software and then about the company updates that I can share and that I'm happy to share. Currently, the hardware, we are building what's called PVT. So PVT is this kind of last batch before mass production. So it's using the same line as DVT and it's called product validation and testing. It's the 500 units that are compliant with the specs that are also super polished that are in the box as well. And also, most importantly, they follow the certification for FCC and CE and also various other countries that we passed. So we had a lot of work to do to finally be compliant with everything regarding production and we are at that stage. The first pallet that will arrive at the office is at the end of March. So as soon as I have something, we'll send a photo. Again, we'll open all the boxes, make sure that the devices are up to the level of quality that we deem acceptable.
That's, I think this is the last batch we are going to do that in Paris at the office. Otherwise, after they will shift directly from the factory. You also have to understand that the users that are buying Lynx are early adopters, but also we have companies that work in defense, in the medical, in various industries. And for that, today the market is mainly B2B. For that, we are moving the production from mainland China to Vietnam. So the product will be in the coming months made in Vietnam and we intend to do that for the future headsets as well.
So that's the news regarding the hardware itself. So if we receive the first one end of March, we can expect to ship them a week after because the full team will be working on those devices and make sure that we ship them as soon as possible to the people that are waiting for a long time now.
So that's where we are. We were not able to build more. And I touch on that subject a lot of times already now, but we were not able to build more not because of technical issues, not because of engineering problems, mainly because we didn't have the resources. We had to wait to have enough orders to have the money to be able to buy the components, to take loans to do that, to make a lot of... We have a huge financial burden regarding production. It's a super risky endeavor and you can ask other small companies that are trying to do the same in this space. It's very capex intensive, which means that you need to put a lot of capital of your company on the line. It's super risky. Sometimes you don't even have that. So that's where the position we were in. I will touch on that subject after I talk about software in a couple of minutes, but regarding the hardware, it's mainly because we didn't have enough resources up until now, spoiler. But we were clearly lacking financial resources to play or ambition the right way. And I think it created a lot of frustration internally and externally. So this is something... Either we did that or we did nothing. We just did not build Lynx at all. It was not something that was viable at all when you think about it. There is no other company in Europe that is building a standalone headset and a standalone headset is the full computer. It's the full spatial computer. So I'm happy that we persevered. I'm happy. I'm not happy about the frustration it created with the expectation of the community. Maybe we could have done a better job. I'm not even sure. Remember we raised four million something in total over the last four years. So it's a million a year, which is good enough money to have a very strong team, which is the case, but clearly not enough to pursue mass production of a product like that with the scale that we need. Because we have thousands of orders. We have a few thousands of orders stillthat we have to deliver. And I expect that to be 10 times more once we are able to show inventory. So yeah, it's a lot.
So I took this last year to also raise money. It's a very complicated process, especially even more when you're making hardware in Europe, in VR, because people still think it's just VR.
So yeah, it's not finished, but it was something interesting and very hard. I think maybe you can tell I'm very tired of all that. I'm tired of apologizing. I'm tired of coming up with solutions that we are not even sure they will work on the financial perspective. So we had to find the right partners. Well, we had two choices. We either go to acquired or we persevered and convince people also to raise money to continue the development of Lynx. And when I say the development of Lynx, it's not just Lynx R-1 and its software and ecosystem. It's also the progress that we're working on on the hardware because since last summer now, we are conceiving the next generation of headsets. And yeah, all of that is taking a lot of time.
We are clearly lacking the resources to do all that, but yeah, it's changing. This is the month and next month where things are really changing. I'm going to talk a bit about the software.
There is an unofficial discord. If you're not on that, I'm pretty sure someone would put it in the chat. There are some discussion about the development because some people, there are a few hundred people that already have their Lynx on hand. And we have some constructive feedback about the hardware and about the software. And on the software, things are amazing.
It's incredible. The fact that we're delivering a tiny more openness to what you can do with the camera feed, with the capabilities of the device, with the best hand tracking from UltraLeap or a more flexible and sometimes more performance system, we're seeing incredible stuff. I think the next demo you'll see from us in a more official manner is our Vuforia integration and the fact that since you can use the RGB camera feed and without any added latency, you can do some very interesting computer vision. And everything the industry has built so far in computer vision can be applied to Lynx without relying on algorithms provided by the same company that makes the headset. So people are clearly more choice and it shows very well when we see what the community is building. So I'm super excited and super thankful for people that are trying exotic things with the hardware on the software side of things. It's also good news that we have an Unreal 5 integration. So one of our software engineers was able to enable pass-through hand tracking and 6DoF in Unreal 5. So that's also super exciting. It's on our website. I'll put it in the chat so you can download if you want the SDK, if you want to try that for some of you that have your device and we're not aware that we finally have Unreal compatibility. Again, underlying all that, it's our OpenXR runtime which is super helpful to scale or adoption to various engines. So we have Unity, Unreal, some work we're done with Godot. We'll have to check on that and maybe refresh that a bit because now we are also compatible with the standard Khronos loader from OpenXR. So that's also super great for compatibility with existing apps that you probably don't even need to recompile sometimes. I've seen some interesting work around that. So yeah, we have Unreal, Unity, finally, the very big two engines. So that's on the software. We're also working. We have an engineer working on the... So we have two interesting features I can tell you about. The first one is an ability to see, to cast what you see in the headset to an HDMI feed or a mirror cast, a casting device. So we are working on that because you are able to get the RGB feed on our shared memory and we are also able to capture the virtual objects. So we made the compositing in the runtime through an extension of OpenXR that we developed. And you will be able to cast what you see in your device to another device without the weird distortion of the lens, which is a problem. So we have that, which is probably coming in the next update or the next firmware update or the next one after. And we have a new hire. We have a new system engineer. So I expect in the coming months to have the system team growing. So in the software team, we have people working on applications like the launcher, like the web browser, like the things that are very close to the end user. And we have a system engineering team that is working on the firmware that is working on the system and very, very dirty stuff like firmwares and drivers. The thing that no one wants to do, that's them. That's what they're doing and we have a new hire related to that. So we have a new engineer that arrived two weeks ago now. And he's working. We asked him to, that his first work is something fundamental to what we're doing at Lynx. It would be the ability to, so, you know, in our firmware, we have things that are coming from, for example, from Qualcomm or from UltraLeap, that are closed sourced. And maybe there are some stuff we can't share because of NDA. And, you know, that it's very hard to work around this Qualcomm legal thing. So, you know, we ask, you know, partners like how we could do to let our users be able to create custom firmware versions on their own without compromising this legal challenge. And that software, that system engineer is working on the pipeline where you're able to pull the open source part of Lynx, like, you know, most of our, most of our stuff, including the Android image, including some stuff that are very low level. So if you want to change the boot logo, or if you want to change the, you know, the launcher app or things like that, you'll be able to do that in the near future, because we're working on the, you know, on the build pipeline where you're able to build your own image. Because we have customers that need to do very specific stuff on the DSP or on the GPU that you can't access when you're just an application from a user. So we, we're, I think will be the first to enable that. And I think it's going to deepen this connection we have with our users and, and create a lot more values, because you'll be able to tap very, very deep in the system and, and like fork be able to fork our OS. So I think that's great. It follows the philosophy. I wanted to push for the product and what we are building. So we are, yeah, we are working on that.
So those are the exciting stuff we can share today with, you know, the hardware and the software. There is also stuff I wanted to share, you know, as I told you at the very beginning about the company itself. We had a hard time communicating. We had our own internal challenges as the team is growing. So now we are a bit more than 20 people. It's still incredibly low for what we have to do and we're clearly still under staff. But, you know, we're, we're, we're growing and there were some, some internal issues we, we had to solve nothing, nothing crazy. The usual company growing. So we, yeah, we had to, we had to, to, to work internally. And we also had to work on this fundraising that I told you about. And I can't share, I can't make any announcements, but let me put it this way. We were burdened like 95% of our issues so far with, with the Lynx project were tied to our financial capacity. And, and, you know, when you look at other companies working in space, like building their own hardware and also their own OS and ecosystem, these are like the small ones are billion dollar companies and the big ones are trillion dollar companies. And we're, we're so, so, so, so, super low on the food chain. And it's completely crazy still what, what we're building. So they, you know, there was no financial reality in front of what we're trying to accomplish. And, and my message to you for some of you that are maybe not trusting that we could be a success is that it's changing. We've found the right partner. We can't make any official announcements yet, but at least, you know, the next stage of our company is, is going to still be in Europe. It's still going to be Lynx. We are not getting acquired. We continue with the same philosophy and we found a partner that understood very well what we're trying to achieve, both on the technical and financial perspective that is, that is helping us. And it, to be honest, it's super providential. Nothing is, you know, completed yet. So I won't give too much details, but we are, you know, I'm happy to reassure you that, you know, it's changing. And I have a, I have a date for, you know, for this, this, this new phase. So it's soon, if I have dated minutes that it's soon. We probably won't communicate officially around that. We won't, you know, give too much details because it's a very special partner, but I'm super happy that we're given, you know, someone is giving us the tools to create this European champion of mixed reality. So yeah, that's, that was the, you know, most of the news today. I will, I'll take a look at the chat if some of you have answers, questions, sorry, I will try to bring answers.
Sorry, I took too much. So yeah, someone is asking, do you plan responding to Portal messages? We, we try to respond to everyone. Feel free to open another thread if you haven't have any conclusive answers in your, in your previous messages. By email, it would be more complicated. We receive thousands of emails that, you know, it's, it's, as I told you, we're understaffed. So we are trying to prioritize, but everyone is a priority. Feel free to keep messaging us if you think it's relevant. We'll try to address you.
Can you share with us the status regarding the controllers? So yeah, that's another good news. We were, so we finished the, I would say we finished the product definition, the R&D around the controllers. We know what they will look like. We, we are building, we are building the I would say it's more than prototypes. We're, we're building the final things, but not with the, with the factory. We're still building in France, but we have something that we're proud of now. I'm waiting for us to build, to, you know, to build the final thing, a few pairs of them to show them. But the team, the hardware team did an amazing job. You know, we had like three people working on that for, I don't know, close to a year now, total. And so that's still ongoing. This is still going to be an accessory to our product line. And the controllers will be compatible with Lynx R-1 and future projects. Okay. Someone is saying Lynx is an incredibly inspiring venture. I just want to say I would love to work in the company as passionate as Lynx. I just want to tell you that you, you know, thank you for those words. You know, it's not a lot of people say that to us, but we're, we're confident in what we do still. We have a real religious faith in, in what we're doing. Otherwise we would have abandoned with all the difficulties we've been through. And trust me, it's a movie now. And if you want to work with us, we are going to start hiring more before, before the summer begins. So yeah, thank you.
Will Lynx R-1 have a presence at AWE 2024 in June? To be honest, to be honest, June was like science fiction for us at this point. We, you know, regarding like events and, and, and all of that, we are, we were like more like, what's happening at the factory today. And, you know, let's see tomorrow how we can, you know, keep the company alive barely. So I don't have a clear answer. I would like to go. I would like, yeah, that would be great if we can go. I'm sure, I'm sure we'll have a presence there. I'll get back to you on that. If we're going, we'll, we'll share that. Is there a Lynx R-1 eye tracking module still on the roadmap? It was, we were working around that with other companies and also ourselves, you know, regarding eye tracking, because eye tracking is going to be important in the future. Again, no spoiler, but for Lynx R-1, it's, it was, it was on standby again, because of the priorities we had to address and the capacity of the company. But eye tracking is important. Eye tracking is essential to our roadmap and to what we're building. So I don't know if we'll have a module for Lynx R-1, but we're definitely working on that.
Someone is saying, I did not realize we were so short staffed in what areas would you welcome more help? So that's a great question. You know, thank you. Thank you really much for that question. The, you know, I was talking about this software, the system engineer that is working on like open sourcing most of our OS, like not only some demos and some apps, like, like everything we can open source in the most legal way possible. I think that is crucial because it will allow people everywhere to participate in our effort if they want, or to try new stuff that we maybe don't have the time here to try. So, you know, I'm counting on that to, to inspire more people to dig into those devices and what they can really achieve. So we are short staffed. It's going to change because we're, we'll have more resources in the near future. But also keep in mind that we are, we are also counting on people out there to do stuff also on their own and be able to share back to the community the same way that we're able to share our OS. So keep an eye out for, for what Guillaume, our new engineer is building. It's going to be super exciting. That's, that's how you could help and maybe mitigate the fact that even if we hire three times more people will still be 60 engineers. So, you know, compared to 1000 at Apple maybe and like 4000 at Meta, you get the point. We have to, we have to find ways to, to mitigate those difficulties. And for us, it's, it's also through, you know, people that are curious and want to try to help in a way, at least on the softer side. However, it's more complicated, but, you know, thanks, thank you for your question. And again, as I told the previous person, we will hire in, in France, in Taiwan and probably in the US, our goal is to open a presence office in San Diego. I think that's the right place to, to open an office for us.
There is a good question, like what have you learned from the Apple Vision Pro? It's a great question. Many things, I think it was over discussed online. It was, you know, too many people gave their opinion for, I mean, it's great. You know, Apple is a marketing company. They played their game very well. I have friends working there. I'm super happy for the internal projects that they have and that were enabled because of that first landmark that was the Vision Pro. I think, you know, as a designer of headsets, I'm happy in a way that I can see that Apple also had to make some compromises. And it's a great way that we are reminded that the can't escape, you know, the lows of gravity and physics that are around those, those products, you know, like you can see one easy compromise, you know, with Lynx, we, we put the battery at the back for the center of gravity and for you to, to be able to feel more, more comfortable and wearing the headset for a long time. And you can see that the Apple Vision Pro, a lot of people say, oh, it's too heavy. And when you look at the product, it's the same weight as Lynx R-1, but everything is at the front. And they have this cable. And, and, and a lot of people didn't understand, you know, just the cable, it's very not Apple. And I think their compromise was they wanted to put the battery at the back, like everyone. But they also wanted the user to be able to rest and to lay down. And you can't really do that in a comfortable manner with when you have a battery at the back. So I think that's why they did, you know, they put the battery in the pocket. The optics are quite good. The, you know, the hardware itself, you know, it's Apple hardware. They, they, they spare no expense regarding this first product for the hardware. There is nothing to say here. The displays are impressive. I saw some, some other micro OLEDs from BOE and from SIA that are also very impressive. So you'll see more and more of that in other products as well. I think, I think the market is making a huge mistake though, is that when, you know, when, you know, in the world of people that are building headsets and, you know, the management of big companies, a lot of, you know, I saw an article and I can't, you know, give any names. But, you know, last year we saw articles in the press saying that Google and Samsung were working together and that they were starting, when the Vision Pro was announced, they were starting over from scratch their project to, to, to be an answer to what Apple is, is releasing. I think it's a huge mistake that a lot of big companies are pursuing to make Vision Pro clones because, because, you know, even for Apple that product is too expensive. It's too expensive to build. It's, you know, they created something that people will, will want before they can buy it, which is a great marketing ploy. And you will see that their second headset will be much less expensive and something more and more people will be able to buy that will not feature the same specs and technologies that you see in the Vision Pro. And what's super interesting is that, you know, Apple is there and their second version, like the Vision not-Pro will be here and Lynx R-1 is there and will be here and the second version and their second version will probably be very close to be honest because we follow the same principles with, you know, hand tracking first with passthrough with all of that. So I'm super thankful, you know, that Vision, that Apple made that move. I think, I think it's a, it's a great news that, you know, the industry took in. They're not going to shift the market, you know. They're, they're not the one that are going to, to move the market in a new direction. I don't think so. You know, in, in, in a lot of big companies now are so focused on making Apple Vision Pro clones, but I think the market reality is, you know, something a bit below that, you know, like between two and three K per eye with, with, you know, good enough optics. The good ideas with, we had with Lynx R-1 applied a bit better and you'll have something truly, truly compelling. So yeah, you know, we're not trying to make an Apple Vision clone. I think you understood that. We are still trying to do our own stuff and the risk we took with Lynx R-1, I still want us to have this, you know, this, this adventurous take on what AR and VR can be. We are trying new things just like we did with Lynx R-1. There is a convergence on hardware and we want to try to escape that, to have a more opinionated device and I, I think people appreciate that. And that's how, you know, we push for progress instead of, you know, everyone doing the same stuff or like following the guidelines of a reference design or what Apple or whatever Apple is doing. So we, we still have our own opinion on how things should be designed and our industrial designers are doing an amazing job since last summer as we are working on a new project. Okay, I talk way too much. I'll keep answering some other questions. As the price of the Apple Vision Pro made you consider making a more advanced and expensive version of the Lynx sets? No. Another, I will try to give a simple answer. I think the only company able to sell a 3000 and more headset is Apple. I think they, they are the only one, you know, HoloLens, for example, was around that price. I know it's different class of devices, but you know, same target of price. The, you know, in the whole life of HoloLens, they haven't sold that, you know, what Apple Vision Pro sold in a week when you think about it. So I think only Apple could pull, you know, the distance. So we're not going to go super high level because there are also other companies there. There's Varjo, there's very genius. You need to have, you know, you can't, you have to focus somewhere. And I think our focus at Lynx is bringing something between what Quest will build and what, you know, what Meta will build and what Apple is proposing in terms of pricing features. I think, I think there is something, there is a play for being in the middle of all that. And we will stay in the range that we are in in terms of features. Of course, we will bring way more than what Lynx R-1 was, was doing because, you know, when I look at Lynx R-1, I'm super proud of that. I'm super proud of that we were able to design it, that we're able to build it with Compal and Qualcomm and UltraLeap. But I also see all the issues and compromises we had to make. So, you know, the next project will be, will be also amazing. So, no, we won't, don't expect from us to see, you know, a $2,000 or $3,000 headset. We, you know, for me, there is, I don't think there is a market reality to, to this, to this opinion. I'm going to go on. What do you think of Android XR and is this complicated for the Lynx? We are, we heard about Android XR the same way Meta heard about it. I can't give any comments. I don't want to breach any non disclosure agreements. But so far, we're, we're, you know, we're not compatible with Android XR. And so far, I still want us to build our own platform. And if you take Android XR, you also have this risk of having Google services and, you know, in your headset and you're just another Google headset. So, for now, my opinion is that maybe Android XR is a Trojan horse to headset manufacturers. Probably. Maybe I'm wrong. I even have a lot of discussion around that, you know, it's still very early. There were leaks about them, you know, about Meta and, and, and Android XR. I've never seen a demo of that. It was not announced officially. So, so far, nothing to, to comment more about that.
Wow. We have someone from the Bermuda Island tuning. That's crazy. What's the status of Snapdragon spaces on Lynx R-1. I can give you an answer to that. So we're still very excited about what Qualcomm is building with, with spaces. They were issues like technical issues for, for one time, just technical issues regarding spaces with Lynx R-1, but we expect you can expect in the future that our runtime will be able to support spaces for other projects.
Sony did announce their XR headsets as CES and they rip off your Lynx or more headsets you're working on. So Sony and Siemens did indeed announce a headset. Keep in mind that when you see something at the side from Sony and Siemens, they're not the less, you know, they're not the least expensive, you know, products from both of these companies usually. So this, this headset will be a space to be super expensive, you know, there were no indication of the price. And also you have to know like from what I heard that it's, it's more like a, it's standalone, but not really like, you know, it's intended to be used with a workstation. And yeah, well, I won't comment on the design because, you know, they tried, I mean, they, they arrived at the same conclusion as we did, which is good news. But I'm not sure they have, they still have everything. Will WebAR will be supported in the Lynx R-1, Wolvic doesn't appear to see this as a priority. We had to pause our work with Wolvic for priority and financial reasons for quite some time. So the last bill we have from them is from, I don't know, probably September. We will, we will continue to work with them and to update the browser before the summer. And I think they made an amazing progress because they switched their, you know, the backend of the browser was Gecko from Mozilla. And they told me that when they switched to Chromium, they, they saw three times more performance and frames per second. So, you know, I can't wait to update Wolvic on our Lynx platform. Would you be interested in working on more modular headsets? The short answer is yes. Complete, more complete answer. Keep following us.
Okay. So I think we've gone through most of the questions for tonight. I'm, you know, I'm happy to give you some news. I will be happy to also give you more news next month. You know, they're, as I told you, it's a, you know, what's happening around us. It's like a movie. It's like we are living through a Netflix series. A lot of people are still running, you know, with us. A lot of people want Lynx to be a success. I think we were right to, you know, to pursue the effort. And the team is super thankful for most of the comments that we see. And we, we are aiming at ending this frustration of us not being able to deliver as much as we can in the coming weeks. So stay tuned. You can follow me on Twitter. You can follow the company on LinkedIn. We're not super vocal, but sometimes we also, you know, or my colleagues try to participate in the Discord. We are having calls with people that have their headsets so they can, you know, to do some very specific stuff. We are always happy to help. So thank you so much. If you looked at the whole thing, I'll try to keep you updated. And, and thank you for tuning in. Have a good night or good day wherever you are in the Bermuda Triangle or islands or, or Europe or the U.S. or Japan. Thank you so much for being a part of that. And I can't wait to share you the rest. Bye. Bye.