Sometimes the gap separating conventional optics from advanced high-precision performance is only an angstrom thick.

Even cutting-edge optics don’t always cut it for the most demanding applications in imaging, laser systems, LiDAR, and augmented/virtual reality gear. Accucoat’s Patrick Iulianello joins TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Dan McCarthy in this episode to discuss how advanced optical coatings can minimize reflection, maximize transmission, optimize durability, and enhance other performance features of optical elements — from spherical optics to elements with more complex geometries. Iulianello also shares which end-markets are driving development of new coating techniques to solve emerging design challenges. 

Dan McCarthy: [00:00:06] Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Tech B2B Marketing’s “Manufacturing Matters” podcast, where we talk about automation, manufacturing, and other technologies. I’m Dan McCarthy and with me today is Winn Hardin, founder of Tech B2B Marketing. Joining us is Patrick Iulianello of Accucode Technologies. We’re recording, by the way, from SPIE Photonics West. Welcome, Patrick. Welcome to the show. We’d like to learn a little bit more…

Patrick Iulianello: [00:00:35] Yeah, really appreciate it.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:36] Busy day, I know.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:00:37] Yeah, we’re very busy today.

Dan McCarthy: [00:00:39] So we’ll get into it very quickly. Tell us a little bit more about Accucode and what you do. You’re not an optics manufacturer on the coding side, so….

Patrick Iulianello: [00:00:49] So Accuccode is strictly coatings for optics. We’ve been around for 25 years supporting the precision optics world——anywhere from polymer, glass, crystals, and infrared materials. We have a niche in custom coatings and polymers, because of the durability, and particularly in the military and the medical applications for lightweight and applications with long-term durability. Our biggest market focus this year is on infrared materials, or chalcogenides, the germaniums, the silicons for the infrared. A lot of military applications, but there’s a lot more commercial applications coming up by the day.

Winn Hardin: [00:01:29] It’s funny because I was just at the A3 Business Forum last week, and we were talking with a number of camera manufacturers at that time —— specifically in the imaging space, machine vision, computer vision, some defense related —— and we were talking about the growth and, you know, chip prices coming down on thermal cameras and sensors and how we’re finally going to make that pivot point where we can start moving to more volume deployments. I know we’re going to talk about LiDAR and AR and VR down the road. So one wonders if autonomous mobile vehicles or mobility solutions might play into that a little bit?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:02:02] Oh, absolutely they will. Actually, one of our largest applications a couple of years ago was in the LiDAR world, not from the infrared coatings, but a 905 nanometer coating, a protective lens for the camera systems on top of the vehicles —— a lot of them you see on the mapping vehicles or the driverless vehicles that are out there now. We did a lot of the application on a cylinder lens —— put an anti-reflective coating all the way around a cylinder four-inch lens uniformly —— and to meet their specification, which predominantly was optical specification, but also cosmetic specification of a blue image. They wanted a blue appearance and they wanted it consistent on every part. So we developed a whole process for that application and probably did 10,000 parts that first year. For a camera lens protection, that’s all it was. It was just a cover lens.

Dan McCarthy: [00:02:56] And because this is a show about manufacturing, I’d like to ask you: A lot of people could view… People downstream —— the integrators, the assembly makers —— could view optics as a little bit more of a component of technology, a little bit of a commodity. Tell us why that might be a mistaken perspective.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:03:10] A lot of times it is considered a commodity, but a lot of the applications need custom design, custom form, shape, and the coating design to go with it. Our coating, basically an anti-reflective coating, will improve the laser or optic performance like 10 or 20% transmission, depending on the refractive index of the lens. And that’s where it really enhances the performance of the system. Or gets rid of ghosting from extra reflections, special beam splitters for imaging, things like that.

Dan McCarthy: [00:03:45] Can you give us an example of an application in which this complexity really kind of bears out? You know, you talk about the machine and the optics, but you’re on the coating side. Talk to us a bit about the complexity of that —— I mean, I know it’s not one step where you coat and you’re done.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:03:59] So one of the more complex applications we do is a cylinder or a polygon kind of application. So think of it as a 4- or 5-inch disk, maybe an inch thick, and it has multi-facets on the outside like a spinner. And we actually developed a process that can spin the optic around a spindle. But also the spindle is rotated around the machine at the same time, kind of like an orbit, so that we’re uniformly getting all the facets at the same time to get the high performance that they need —— uniformly across 24 facets that are on there.

Dan McCarthy: [00:04:35] Right. Okay.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:04:36] So it’s a very unique application. That application is more for space guidance and imaging and things like that, but it can be used for something as simple as a barcode scanner at your retail store. They have polygons down there all the time, but those are your low-end polymer optic spinners.

Dan McCarthy: [00:04:54] Those components came up in recent Photonics Spectra article.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:04:58] Yes they did.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:04:58] Adapting metallic coatings. We were a big component of that. That article was about the necessity of metal coatings or reflective coatings, because aluminum, gold, and silver coatings can be in the 90%-range reflective, 97–98%. We also do dielectric coating, which has no metals in it. It’s a combination of dielectric materials. And we have one application that was mentioned in the article, it’s for a 3D printer laser. And it gets 99.9% reflection at the wavelength that they need. And with the metal coating you’re reflecting all that light and not losing anything through the optic.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:42] Wow.

Dan McCarthy: [00:05:43] And that’s a function of the coating itself?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:05:44] It’s a function of the coating. That’s one application that the customer came to us with roughly a 92–93% reflection, and we enhanced it to 99% and then also lost the light that was going through that was damaging the system on the other side. So they were able to reflect all that light and not have the heat damage going through.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:05] So you were saying that was part of a 3D printing…?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:06:08] 3D printing application —— the mirror that’s in the system.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:11] As a laser centering-type of approach?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:06:14] Yes.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:14] Okay. I wasn’t sure if we were monitoring plastic or if we were actually executing using the laser to create the object.

Dan McCarthy: [00:06:22] And in terms of your capabilities —— I know we talked about what you do. Talk to me a little bit about the machinery that’s on your floor. So, what are the processes and techniques and how does that work?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:06:31] From the beginning of it? We have cleaning processes. We either do manual cleaning or we also have ultrasonic cleaning for certain materials and applications. But the big applications are done through vacuum chambers. So we have vacuum chambers —— a variety of different types, mostly e-gun and ion source deposition. We apply a variety of chemistries to the optics for the customers to meet their demanding applications —— and they could be very thin. We’re talking angstroms-thick coatings, or very thin coatings. That’s why we’re called thin-film coatings. We do not add… A lot of people think coatings can fill the voids, the cracks, the chips. No, we don’t. We’re not the paint. We’re just thin film coatings. And we think.

Winn Hardin: [00:07:16] Optical caulk! There’s always an option…

Patrick Iulianello: [00:07:18] Optical caulk, yeah! So if it’s there, we’re probably going to enhance it rather than fill it in and make it go away. Vacuum coatings will go down to 10 to the -6 Torr.

Winn Hardin: [00:07:28] Wow.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:07:28] And in a typical process, let’s say a polymer optic, we could load a machine up with 500 to 1000 one-inch parts. We could pull vacuum, apply the coating, and open it back up, probably within an hour-and-a-half to two hours once it’s set up and running.

Winn Hardin: [00:07:44] Is it usually a single-step process like that, Patrick? Or are you using ion E-beam or whatever in different locations depending on…

Patrick Iulianello: [00:07:51] It depends on the application and the material. Not all materials can handle all the applications that we do. So, it’s customer application-specific and material-specific to what they use. Glass all looks the same, but they don’t all act the same. Polymers all look the same, but they definitely don’t act the same. That’s why a lot of people went to polycarbonate for safety and protection. Acrylics are known to be very durable, but they do have their peculiarities about coatings. There’re certain materials that we use… Znx material is a very strong material used in optics. It’s got very good properties for a lot of different things, and we have tremendous success with that. We actually deal with a lot of the material suppliers to learn what materials are coming down the pike in order to qualify them before our customers start using them for molding, diamond turning, polishing, whatever they’re going to do. So we try to get in on the early side of the materials —— and the same with customers. We try to get in before they dictate what the coating needs to be. So that way we can understand, well, if you do this, it’ll help everybody because we can make it enhanced with this coating.

Dan McCarthy: [00:08:57] I was curious about that. How hand-in-glove do you work with customers? Do they rely on you for the coating and just hand it over to you, or do you work with them?

Winn Hardin: [00:09:04] It sounds like a very consultative relationship.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:09:06] Yeah, it’s very, very consultative. They don’t necessarily specify coating materials and things like that. They specify reflectivity, durability, all of that. And then we have to take into account the substrate and the coating materials and the environment it’s going to be used in. That’s a big key, because somebody will tell you, “oh, it’s a very benign environment.” And then you find out it’s very chemical-based environment, which will etch away certain things but won’t touch other things.

Dan McCarthy: [00:09:32] “Benign” has many meanings.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:09:33] One of the oldest materials in coatings is magnesium fluoride. Mag fluoride coatings—— if you look at a lot of old camera lenses, they have a purplish blue hue to them. That’s probably got mag fluoride, either a single layer or in the coating. It’s a very, very successful coating material for a lot of durability, although it needs a lot of heat. So it’s not a good application for plastics. So there’s other alternatives for plastics to get that protection coating.

Dan McCarthy: [00:10:00] And also in your capabilities —— this is not a manufacturing capability, per se, but it’s certainly value add —— you also do a quick turn prototyping.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:10:07] Yes, we do quite a bit of prototyping.

Dan McCarthy: [00:10:10] Why is that important amongst your customers?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:10:11] Well, usually by the time we get to the prototyping stage of actually creating a component, the project’s probably been around for months. So they want to get some kind of result pretty quickly. So we have capability of six different coating machines, including a couple of smaller machines —— and I’ll call them smaller, they’re in a 36-inch range —— that are very efficient at doing one or two parts, if that’s all you want. But it’s still a batch process. So, we’ll tell you what the batch is. We could probably fit up to 50 more than you say, but we’ll tell you what you can fit. And if you make that many, you got it. If not, you get your one or two pieces in a relatively quick couple-week turnaround, which is great for prototyping. And we also offer some environmental testing and other applications that they want, to make sure that they work preliminary in those applications—— temperature, humidity-cycling, temp-cycling, salt fog testing, that kind of thing. Which are important to a lot of applications. One of the newer applications that’s coming out is AR VR, and there’s a lot of prototyping in that. We have a couple customers dealing with three or four prototypes at once, trying to dial in different things until they narrow in on exactly what they want. So, we’ll have three or four different batches going for the same customer ——  sometimes knowing what they want, sometimes not.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:32] Is this probably in a heads up display?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:11:34] Heads up display. Eyeglass-type displays. You know, because they’re all trying to go smaller, right? They all want to be smaller. Portable. We’ve done half-face goggles. We’ve done eyeglass-type stuff. And we’ve done micro-size stuff where it’s implanted in a component.

Winn Hardin: [00:11:51] Very cool.

Dan McCarthy: [00:11:51] I’m curious about the value chain of that, because it seems to me that there are two, three, four, maybe five whales who are manufacturing…

Patrick Iulianello: [00:11:58] Oh, absolutely.

Dan McCarthy: [00:11:59] And then everybody’s trying to compete for that.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:12:01] There’s a lot of fish that the whales eat, yes.

Winn Hardin: [00:12:03] Yeah, that’s how they get to be whales!

Patrick Iulianello: [00:12:06] There’ve been a lot of small, small entries in there. But yes, there’s a lot of focus by about four or five main companies. And it’s interesting… We know a lot of guys that started off in the old Kodak optics group and now they belong to some of the larger social media-type companies that are in the industry. They’re doing a lot of different applications for either AR VR, driverless vehicles, imaging, thermal imaging. It’s funny how many different applications the same company will come to you about. It’s like, okay, these are all different projects and you’re not going down the same road.

Dan McCarthy: [00:12:45] I know AR VR is getting a lot of the press. Is it the largest? Is that what most of the demand is being driven by?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:12:50] Actually, I think right now… I would have said that five years ago. That was our big push. We had the same four or five customers at the same time, dealing with the same type of imaging. And now it’s more the driverless vehicle LiDAR applications. And LiDAR is not just driverless vehicles, but it’s traffic mapping, traffic tracking. We do applications where we actually buy a component that’s roughly about seven inches, and it becomes a traffic LiDAR window over the camera system. So we’re doing the front lens——.

Winn Hardin: [00:13:20] Gantry installation in that case?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:13:22] Yeah. So they came to us with a problem. They were using glass and they were using other things. We suggested this protected polycarbonate material with an anti-reflective coating optimized for their application, then added hydrophobic to it for cleanability and less damage from water. And it’s working out really good for them.

Winn Hardin: [00:13:44] Very good. And we’re talking about the LiDAR systems for automobiles specifically. I mean we’re not just talking EV. I mean we’re talking all the way across the board.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:13:51] Yeah. General LiDAR. I would call it general LiDAR. Those cars that have driverless applications in them, but there’s still a driver in them.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:00] Yeah. Even if it’s just self-parking. Which is good because, you know, the EV market has faced some headwinds over the last 12 months.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:14:05] Absolutely. A lot of people don’t understand that a lot of the new vehicles coming out have those features in them, for parking, crash protection, sid-view protection, backup.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:20] So how many square feet do you have under your roof right now? What’s your production capacity?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:14:24] We’re about 12,000 square feet. We have six coating chambers. Right now, we run an extended first shift. We still have plenty of capacity. We do a lot of prototyping, but we have a lot of high volume parts that run 30, 40, 50,000 parts through in a year. Those are mostly military medical optics right now and a couple in the LiDAR applications.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:48] Gotcha. Is that kind of the holy grail of your space right now? I mean, if you can become a primary supplier to Volvo’s Tier 1, whoever is developing their LiDAR systems…

Patrick Iulianello: [00:14:59] So we’ll be down line from that. We’ll be into their sub subcontractors. They make a module that’s going to plug into the car. So we’ve had those, many of our applications have gone that way. So they end up in those Volvo’s, Toyotas, those kinds of vehicles.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:14] Do those represent volume increases of like an order of magnitude?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:15:19] Yes.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:19] Is that what you’ve seen over the last few years? Because as you said, practically every vehicle has a self-parking feature or a pedestrian detection system.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:15:28] Yes, that would be the next increase in production for us. Like I said, right now our largest capacity is probably more towards the military medical applications, a lot of goggles, a lot of heads up displays, imaging, gun scopes, those kinds of things. As you’re familiar with, they just had a shot show in Las Vegas, and that’s a pretty big application for many red dots, gun scopes, sights, that kind of stuff. We didn’t represent there this year, but we’re thinking about going there in the future, because it seems to be a big application that we’re already in.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:59] With capacity to grow. So, AccuCoat is a partner who can actually produce those volumes, as well as give that consultative final design and optimization.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:16:10] My partner and I have been together 25 years doing this, and he has over 35 years in coating design work, on multiple materials.

Winn Hardin: [00:16:20] So, 12,000 square feet. How many staff engineers?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:16:23] Right now we have 25 staff. We have a quality engineer. We have manufacturing production engineering. We have a process engineer who’s an understudy to my partner, who’s basically [in charge of] coating designs. So those two take care of that and process improvements of vacuum chambers, updates, things like that. Because we always have to keep them up to date. We have three machines that run on Windows 11. So you have to make sure you’re always staying up to date with those things.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:16:56] Mark Kfoury is director of new business development and sales. And then we have Sarah at Inside Sales and Melissa in the office. And the rest is production staff.

Dan McCarthy: [00:17:04] And one chemical engineer, your partner…?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:17:06] One chemical engineer, my partner.

Winn Hardin: [00:17:10] When you’re doing this kind of production is QA, quality assurance, built right into it? I mean, are you testing every, or are you doing batch testing? How does that work?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:17:17] Spectrally, for performance, we’re testing every batch that comes out. We’re testing a witness and/or customer part if they require it and the system can handle it. A lot of their odd shapes, free forms, are hard to measure spectrally for anti-reflective or metal coatings. So we always have a witness piece along with the right. And a lot of times now we have a witness piece along for the customers to prove it. So a lot of them need retention pieces, archive pieces, history, things like that. We probably say about 40% of our jobs right now have a witness that goes back to the customer along with it to prove that our coating meets their specification and we have retention pieces. And, of course, because of applications, we have to keep them five, seven or 10 years, depending on the application. We have to be able to get back to those records for the customer.

Winn Hardin: [00:18:07] Yeah, because a lot of the things you do are in critical safety, especially when you talk military applications or automotive.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:18:13] Yeah. A couple of our longest term programs are probably over 10 years in production, and they’re more on the military optical side.

Winn Hardin: [00:18:21] Where is the defense market right now? I mean, it’s always around all the edges of everything that we do. But the world’s gotten a little bit more interesting the last couple of years.

Dan McCarthy: [00:18:31] Been using a lot of tools out there.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:18:32] Yeah, I think it’s been pretty stable the last five years. And actually we’ve seen a lot of growth the last year. Lot of growth in a pretty good magnitude, not just a few hundred extra parts here or there. We’re talking multiples of what we used to do.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:18:51] The biggest shift is because they’re going to lighter, more durable parts. So a lot of our expertise is in the plastic polymer optics. So a lot of our components that we’ve done long term for military applications are polymers, the Znx, the polycarbonates, the OKP products, those kinds of things. So they make them a lot lighter, a lot more durable, and they can keep going.

Dan McCarthy: [00:19:15] Do drones play a role in that? In your technology?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:19:18] Drones play a role more so from the… The only application I know of that we’ve done on drones is more in the LiDAR, the mapping, those kinds of things, where you’ll see the camera hanging below the drone. Protective lenses and that type of stuff. that’s where our applications have been.

Dan McCarthy: [00:19:34] Have to be a little larger too, though correct? To cover more ground. Fewer passes?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:19:38] They’re basically a 4- to 6-inch lens cylinder. Those are basically the cylinder lens systems. And either they’re used on the vehicles or mainly, right now, I think they’re used on the drones, because they’ll carry the camera system up there. A lot of it is just a protective lens to prevent anybody from seeing what’s inside and any stray light from getting inside. It’ll basically be a black-dye lens because it doesn’t need to work in the visible region. Your eye only sees out to about 700 nanometers. You know, those cameras are working out in the  900,000 nanometer range, so they could be dark. The laser will still go through them.

Dan McCarthy: [00:20:11] I know it’s only the first day of Photonics West here, and it’s the morning, so you probably haven’t had a chance to view the whole floor. But I’m curious: What do you see, looking ahead? Is there anything on the floor that’s kind of caught your eye or at the show or… What are you seeing?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:20:23] Actually, I was pretty impressed the first couple of hours by the traffic flow already and, actually, the size of the show, the size of the booths and stuff and the imaging—— it looks like a lot of what I call the forefront companies, the investment they put out there shows me that, okay, they know that we’re moving ahead. We’re going to move forward. It’s been different over the last five years. We’ve had a tough five years and 2023 was a big comeback year, and then this year we’re looking for an even bigger year. Last year was really good for us. I wasn’t at that show, but my partner and the sales staff were. And then this year is already looking pretty good.

Winn Hardin: [00:20:59] Macro economic indicators are looking up.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:21:01] Yes, absolutely.

Winn Hardin: [00:21:02] That’s a good sign. Although a lot of the industries that you’re working in, medical device, defense, and others, kind of exist outside of normal cyclical stuff.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:21:10] Fortunately, during the bad five years, those markets were still doing pretty good. So, our business actually did not suffer during the five rough years we’ve had here. It was interesting because we do a lot of medical and military and the way we’re set up we were able to stay operational pretty much straight through everything.

Winn Hardin: [00:21:30] It’s interesting… Most manufacturing companies actually did. Well, if you could get components. If your supply chain didn’t fall apart.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:21:37] After that first year, if you could get components, you were successful. Actually we were very fortunate because the materials we buy are very low volume. You know, we’ll buy a 500 kilogram bottle.

Dan McCarthy: [00:21:49] No kidding?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:21:50] And it’ll last a pretty long time. We are using grains per run. We’re not using scoops. So, not like scooping your coffee. We’re putting a few grains in there every few runs. Our material, a couple substrates —— we purchased very limited substrates, plastics or glass, some flat stock stuff, we don’t buy any custom —— but those had a little bit of delay. But everything else we stayed pretty much on course. Now, we did buy ahead a little bit during that time because we were banking on some issues coming. But, fortunately, we actually survived pretty good. Some of our component manufacturers did not. The glass supply slagged, plastics. Germanium. Germanium is definitely still a little bit of an issue. That’s why more people are looking towards chalcogenide alternatives if they can.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:41] So the supply chain issues are more substrate-based?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:22:43] Yes.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:44] Rather the coating-based?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:22:45] Yeah.

Winn Hardin: [00:22:45] And most of the substrates are coming from overseas, correct? It depends on which one you’re looking at, of course.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:22:52] Some of them. I would say we’re still about good percentage in the US. A good percentage of the glass manufacturers are overseas, yes. That would be down line from us. So we buy from a finishing fabricator. They get their parts from the glass supplier who then gets it from the raw material stocks.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:13] But the deposition materials, those are almost all here?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:23:16] No, actually, almost all our depositions come out of Europe.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:20] Okay, no kidding.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:23:21] All our materials come out of Europe. Even some of our cleaning line materials. So we have to prepare for that. But we’ve been very fortunate with that.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:28] And why is that the case?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:23:31] It’s just where the source of the material is. And the companies, like you said, the whale buying the fish. So that’s where they’ve all ended up. Germany’s a big area where coating started, and all that development of materials was in Germany and Switzerland. So that’s a big source of a lot of our stuff. Now they have local reps or local warehouses, but it’s obviously beginning overseas.

Winn Hardin: [00:23:57] Yeah, that’s a good thing. It’s friendly nations.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:23:59] We didn’t get jeopardized, like when cerium oxide had their issues, or polishing materials. They had long delays or availability problems because of the countries that they were coming from. We didn’t experience that. We just experienced… We didn’t get product that used that material. So we saw a slowdown in that.

Winn Hardin: [00:24:16] At least your your portfolio is diverse enough.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:24:19] We’re very diverse. Very diverse for a small company. Like you said, we’re 20, 25 people. We’ve been around quite a while, but we have very diverse applications. And it’s very interesting: usually when one part of the industry is slacking, the other one’s probably picking up and moving ahead and then, you know, it’s always nice when you see new prototypes research coming out, because that’s where the next round of stuff is going to come from.

Winn Hardin: [00:24:41] When you were talking about AR and VR earlier. Do you have any kind of insight into what are the end-user markets those are going into? I mean, is it industrial operations, maintenance, MRO type applications? Obviously defense.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:24:57] Some of the bigger ones we’ve worked on are probably not defense. A lot of them go into commercial industrial applications first, to try them and test them, and then they move over to the defense world. Some of the strange, peculiar applications? Those are definitely coming out of defense. They’re really trying to push the limits before anybody else, but a lot of the general applications we do right now are more in the commercial industrial.

Dan McCarthy: [00:25:22] Give us an example.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:25:24] Vision inspection for people looking at equipment. We saw one application where it was an AR VR application of creating goggles, where software engineers can all work on the same package at the same time, but they could see what’s going on in the goggle set.

Winn Hardin: [00:25:44] That’s interesting.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:25:45] You know, also game imaging, the gaming world.

Winn Hardin: [00:25:48] That’s kind of what I was wondering, if the consumer electronics market was finally starting to see significant volume.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:25:54] Yeah, they are starting to see a very, very big application. There’s a couple larger companies, nameless, that are really driving that in various ways, either they purchased and or developed from scratch.

Winn Hardin: [00:26:07] Yeah. Well, I’m an AR VR geek, for sure, so I find that stuff interesting.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:11] Matter of fact, they got that show. And hopefully I’ll get over there Thursday to see some more of what’s going on over there. I just saw some setup yesterday, but not much going on.

Winn Hardin: [00:26:19] It should be interesting for sure.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:19] It is pretty interesting what they’re doing over there. You know what’s going on with that.

Winn Hardin: [00:26:23] And then next year that’s going to be paired with the machine vision, is that right?

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:25] Yes that’s right.

Dan McCarthy: [00:26:26] Well, it’s the same building. Yeah actually it’s the same floor.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:29] Vision tech, whatever it’s called.

Dan McCarthy: [00:26:31] Same floor. Same building. Plenty of work to do over there.

Winn Hardin: [00:26:36] It’s nice to see this commercialized.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:37] Actually, I think this show is getting big enough where we need to bring more people out. We usually have three people here, but it’s getting to a point where you almost need to have extra people so you can rotate and get out more.

Winn Hardin: [00:26:49] Especially if you want to go meet any partners out on the floor.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:51] I don’t know if I want to get to that 20-person staff here, but…

Winn Hardin: [00:26:54] Well, if you do, you’re making so much cash, it’s all good.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:26:58] It’s all good.

Dan McCarthy: [00:27:01] Awesome. Patrick, really appreciate your time.

Patrick Iulianello: [00:27:03] Thank you very much. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you guys. Appreciate it

Dan McCarthy: [00:27:07] It’s our pleasure. And for all of you listening, this is “Manufacturing Matters” podcast. If you’d like to join us, look us up on LinkedIn. If you’d like to view more of our episodes, or this episode when it comes out, you can find us on manufacturing-matters.com.

Winn Hardin: [00:27:21] That’s correct. And if you have any questions for Patrick, just put them right below there. We’ll make sure it gets to Patrick. Or go to AccuCoat.com and I’m pretty sure you can get a little faster response, but whatever we can do until next episode. Thanks for joining us.

Dan McCarthy: [00:27:33] Thanks for listening. Thank you.