Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:07] Hi everybody. My name is Jimmy Carroll. I’m the vice president of operations at Tech B2B Marketing, and I’m here at SPIE Photonics West 2024 doing the Manufacturing Matters podcast. And I have the pleasure of being joined by Alex Fong and my colleague John Lewis. Alex, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Alex Fong: [00:00:24] Totally my pleasure.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:00:25] So, a number of things to talk about today. TechnoTeam, for those who don’t know about TechnoTeam, could you let the audience know what the company does? And I guess what you’re most excited about there?

Alex Fong: [00:00:37] They were a spinoff of Technical University of Ilmenau in Germany. Ilmenau is a town north of Frankfurt. And they make imaging photometers and calorimeters. So these are cameras that are specially designed, calibrated to measure very precisely the brightness or illuminance, in units such as candela meters squared, and the color, in units such as chromaticity coordinates. And they do it extremely accurately, traceable to within sort of fractions of whatever the unit is. And this is a result of a very extensive calibration process that’s traceable to PTP, which is equivalent to NIST in the U.S. It’s essentially like a weeklong process of rotating a camera and taking calibrations from every angle, every light level, and every wavelength. And that’s how you get the kind of precision that’s needed by manufacturers and OEMs who are developing lighting systems, displays, etc. They go into everything, from automobiles to consumer electronics.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:01:48] Okay, so I have a question. Let’s follow up there. So photonics in general is in the tech world, its niche. And what you do is a further niche. It’s very specialized. It’s very specialized product and technology. So one of the things I like, I don’t know if you ever use Reddit, but Reddit has a sub-Reddit that you follow called “Explain Like I’m 5.” So for those people, if you’re having a beer with somebody who’s outside of the space or even somebody who might be somewhat related to it, how do you explain what a calorimeter and a photometer are and how are they used?

Alex Fong: [00:02:25] Well, I think the best way to look at it is from the consumer standpoint. So when you get into a particularly one of the high-end automobiles. When you turn the thing on, you’re expecting all the lights in your car, the trim, the gauges, which are now all digital, you’re expecting the headlamps, all of them to conform not only to just minimum regulatory specifications, but they have to perform for you. They have to be satisfying as a consumer. So you have to see, like, fuel gauge has to be completely filled in and uniform. The color has to be what you expect. Maybe it’s red or whatever. And the red on the fuel gauge has to be the same as red on the temperature gauge. It’s the same as the speedometer and tachometer. So that’s what you’re going to get with our instrumentation you’re able to measure precisely whether or not those thresholds or requirements are met. And at a level that basically is unprecedented. So now you’re able to decide whether or not that component that’s incoming is a pass or fail, or if it’s something you developed, is meeting a spec or needs to go back into design.

John Lewis: [00:03:33] You said that they’re exhibiting over at the SPIE AR/VR. Can you talk a little bit more about what’s exciting about that.

Alex Fong: [00:03:43] And it’s extremely exciting. And unfortunately, I can’t talk about all the details because all the stuff that’s happening in AR/VR is extremely proprietary right now. All the major players, and you can think of all four of them that are in the valley, are very tight lipped about what they’re doing, and we have to respect their confidentiality. And I have to say, though, that it’s going to basically result in some sort of consumer-level product that meets a lot of the shortcomings, fills in the shortcomings that we’re seeing right now. So right now, if you try an AR/VR headset, particularly a VR headset, people talk about being dizzy. They’ll see horizon limits and things like that, or the image is not uniform. These sorts of things. A lot of that is basically the thrust of the work that’s going on in the development side. So our tools enable them to evaluate these kinds of phenomenon or artifacts. And again, this is a really exacting type of measurement. So you need to have really precision optics. We use essentially proprietary lenses that we design in-house to hone in and simulate the eye’s response, the eye’s pupil, the field of view, something called an eye box, which is basically the measurement, sort of envelope that you have.

John Lewis: [00:05:10] I was going to ask about that. It seems like if you’re using an imaging photometer, calorimeter to inspect let’s say a display of a dashboard, It’s very different from a VR display, which is much smaller. And you’re looking at it very close to the eye versus at some working distance of about maybe a foot or more.

Alex Fong: [00:05:33] Absolutely. Yeah. So half the application challenge is determining what the most appropriate sort of analog for the user’s view or vision is involved. So that means, as I said, maybe proprietary lens design or selection of an off-the-shelf lens that best corresponds to the field of view working distance that you’re dealing with and stimulates the eye sort of response as much as possible.

John Lewis: [00:06:02] So does TechTeam have to sort of tailor the optical system for each application?

Alex Fong: [00:06:10] Pretty much. Yeah. We have a selection. You know, if you go, you can configure a system. There’ll be a selection of off-the-shelf lenses. And for probably 80% of what most people are doing in the consumer space or industrial space they’ll work just fine. But there are, and this is in particular for AR/VR, where essentially the application is still evolving over time, going to be very specific requirements that you may have to design for or tailor to. And in those cases, then you’re getting into pretty fundamental hardcore optical design metrics like modulation transfer functions. And, as I said, sort of distortion measurements and metrics like that to try to get it as close as possible.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:06:55] I want to ask a little bit about AR/VR in general. I mean, obviously I read “Ready Player One” and I watched the movie. It’s really cool. And that’s kind of probably the sexy topic in AR/VR or one of them. But the podcast that we do is called Manufacturing Matters. And there are some applications, AR and VR in manufacturing. Any interesting ones that you’ve encountered? 

Alex Fong: [00:07:19] I can’t really mention anything that we’ve actually done. Suffice it to say that, I mean, and this is all very public knowledge, at least to a couple of the major players in this area that we work with. One of the major applications they keep citing is exactly that, sort of aided manufacturing or some sort of application that’s industrial or professional. So there’s one I can speak of. Microsoft talks a lot about using their HoloLens platform for informing electricians on how to wire houses and basically almost gamifying the whole process. I see that as probably the real inflection point for the technology. It’s one thing for — Oculus is already out there, so people are already using it for gaming. And that’s what most people are investing in AR/VR for. But it doesn’t really take off until there’s some sort of industrial essentially embrace of it and adoption of it. So I think that’s going to be the next step. And I think we’re very close right now. If you go over to the symposium right now, all the vendors that are out there, the OEMs, they’re making all the components. Prescription eyeglass inserts that are tailored so that they can do the kind of imaging for AR/VR. That’s one of the exhibitors today. So you’re going to see more and more of that. It’s happening.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:08:50] Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. We talk a lot about in this podcast in general, talk a lot about technologies that can help people minimize downtime. And that seems like a really cool example of that, where something’s down and you’ve got an operator who might not necessarily be an integrator or an engineer. He’s maybe just a floor operator, but he can go and troubleshoot that with real-time feedback.

Alex Fong: [00:09:10] Yeah, I think it’s like moving us towards the plugin thing that you see in “The Matrix,” where someone can learn how to fly a helicopter in an instant. I mean we’re not there yet, but we’re getting close. This is a step towards that ability to sort of create expertise on the go where it’s needed.

John Lewis: [00:09:28] Yeah, I might be dating myself a little bit here, but back in the 90s, I visited a large machine tool company and I used AR/VR as an engineering tool, and it was very rudimentary. And I got to try out the headset and everything, but it allowed the engineer to actually walk into the machining centers, cavity, like stick their head in and look around and help them in their design before it was built. Because you can’t prototype a huge 20-ton machine. It’s like you need to know what you’re looking at. Another application I noticed was for training an operator how to use a machine. They can all learn how to operate a virtual machine and then walk right up and operate it.

Alex Fong: [00:10:10] One of the exhibitors at AR/VR is Ansys. They’ve got a nice display where they’re showing one of the potentials is collaborative design. So you have two engineers basically looking at the same thing, using AR/VR to render it in three dimensions. And they can both walk around together as if the thing existed and essentially virtually explore the design.

John Lewis: [00:10:31] Like the model of the Death Star.

Alex Fong: [00:10:33] Something like that. Yeah.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:34] Very cool. I could totally see you using some of this technology to fix your snowblower, your lawnmower, things like that.

Alex Fong: [00:10:41] Just be careful. Follow the instruction where it says turn everything off.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:10:49] Alex, one of the other things that I wanted to ask about was the Florida optics cluster. We met a colleague of yours. He was explaining to me about the cluster and what you guys do. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Alex Fong: [00:11:03] Well, the Florida photonics cluster has been around  many decades at this point. It’s very closely affiliated to the University of Central Florida’s  College of Optics industrial affiliates program, and both of them have a charter to essentially boost the industry within Florida, the photonics industry, which is actually quite extensive and substantial. People don’t realize. They think about Mickey Mouse, beaches, and the like. But actually there used to be sort of a term, Laser Lane I think it was, because you had Northrop Grumman, you have Harris, Lockheed Martin. They all have very large operations there. But in addition to that, there were some laser pioneer companies, like Lee Laser there. There’s Ocean Insight, which is the ocean optics there. TechnoTeam has got their U.S. office base there. And then there’s new companies. Optic Grade is there, now part of a larger laser empire. So there’s any number of these kind of companies, photonics companies there, and they represent a significant enough portion of the forward economy that requires sort of some attention and love and care.

Alex Fong: [00:12:20] There’s also an ecosystem there. I just mentioned the University of Central Florida College of Optics, CREOL. It’s one of the foremost centers of excellence for this technology. I used to talk about this a lot. And I think of the College of Optics basically putting out the rock stars of the photonics world. So a lot of the people who graduate from CREOL will end up becoming superstars in this field. So I was just talking to Jason Eichenholz, a colleague of mine. And of course, for those who don’t know, Jason founded  Luminar Technologies, one of the main, leading automotive lidar companies in the industry. They’re huge. So that’s just one example of this ongoing development of photonics in Florida. And for my part, I’ve always wanted to see Florida become known for that as much as for the other stuff.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:13:19] What are some of the main goals of the cluster right now?

Alex Fong: [00:13:23] Well, basically, it’s exactly that: to foster growth, to provide support and encouragement and the resources for, in particular, startups, small companies that want to spin out or form and create basically a base of operations. Because Florida does have all the elements to make that successful.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:13:47] John, can you follow up there?

John Lewis: [00:13:51] I don’t know. Is there anything we wanted to talk about that we haven’t asked you about?

Alex Fong: [00:13:54] No, just another pitch for Florida. I would say, as if you did not know. Mickey. Corporate offices, of course. Beautiful beaches, tax free, you know, basically no income tax and very favorable tax conditions for companies. And, as I said, just enormous support structure within the state for photonics technologies. And feel free to reach out at any time to know more.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:14:22] Alex, if people do want to reach out or if they want to learn more about TechnoTeam, is it TechnoTeam.com?

Alex Fong: [00:14:27] Yeah, our website is www.technoteamvision.com.

Jimmy Carroll: [00:14:38] All right. Well thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. You heard it, if you have any questions for Alex, we’d also be willing to take those for you and pass them along. Visit us at manufacturing-matters.com with questions, comments, or if you’d like to come on the podcast. So thanks for either listening or watching.