Chinese New Year in early 2018. At Zhengzhou East Station in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, China, police officers wearing sunglasses with facial recognition were looking at the faces of crowded people on their way home. A frame is displayed around the person's face that can be seen behind the lens. If it matches the image of the fugitive in the police database, a warning will be issued.
High-tech eyeglasses capable of face recognition have begun to be used in criminal investigations. The news, which is reminiscent of the future drawn by science fiction anime, was shocked all over the world.
Two and a half years after that, these glasses have evolved further with measures against the new coronavirus.
At Beijing Capital International Airport, security guards wearing glasses are looking at passengers' faces. The glasses are equipped with an infrared camera to measure the temperature of passengers.
Looking through the glasses, the face is surrounded by a square frame, and the body temperature is displayed below it. The measurable number of people is 200 per minute, and the flow of passengers will not be interrupted. Since the position of the forehead of the passerby is specified by face recognition, the error during temperature measurement can be suppressed to plus or minus 0.3 degrees.
The eyeglasses are made by Beijing startup LL Vision.
"Police relations are just one of the uses of eyeglasses," says founder Wu Kai (42).
In fact, it is said that it is a difficult task even in the business scene.
For example, used cars that are becoming popular in China. The trading platform "Yushin Used Car" purchased 4000 LL Vision glasses. Workers who inspect the condition of used cars wear these glasses and inspect them to record the inspection process one by one. After recording, image recognition can be used to verify that the worker was inspecting according to a set procedure, helping to increase the objectivity of car pricing.
It was also adopted by a major airline. One mistake in aircraft maintenance can lead to a major accident. We are currently preparing a mechanism to compare the movements reflected on the glasses with the movements that should be expected in real time by image recognition, and to issue a warning on the spot if it is determined that they do not match.
It is said that adoption is spreading not only to Chinese companies but also to major Japanese manufacturers. Due to the influence of the new corona, it becomes difficult to move across national borders, and when an engineer wearing high-tech glasses works at a factory in China, it can be used as an instruction from Japan.
Engineers can help and guide the work of field workers. It can also improve work efficiency and reduce accidents. "People always make mistakes. Sometimes employees lack experience. More than 70% of quality problems in the production process are caused by human mistakes. Be careful with glasses to do what you should be doing. There is a lot of demand for them to do it, "says the company's executives.
LL Vision is now focusing on the strength of the museum. By looking around the exhibits while wearing high-tech glasses, you can display characters and images in the field of view to explain and clearly indicate the route. On July 8, a Hubei pottery restorer wore LL Vision glasses, shared his horizons with Hainan museum staff, and remotely repaired Hainan pottery.
High-tech eyeglasses produced by LL Vision are called AR eyeglasses. "AR" is an abbreviation for "Augment Reality", which is augmented reality in Japanese. In the case of "VR" = "Virtual Reality" (virtual reality in Japanese) glasses, the field of view is all computer graphics, but in the case of AR, computer graphics are displayed above the actual field of view.
For example, in the case of the body temperature measurement at the airport mentioned earlier, a square frame and body temperature (computer graphic) are displayed on the human face (reality). It may be easier to understand if you think of the AR mode of the game app "Pokémon GO" where you can see monsters on the actual scenery displayed by a smartphone camera. Augmented reality, that is, augmented reality, gives you more information than you would normally see.
In any case, it is generally unfamiliar. When Wu started his business, he had a hard time explaining.
When he was asked, "What are AR glasses?", He always decided to say:
"The glasses worn by Saiyans. That's Vegeta."
It is the "scouter" that appears in the manga "Dragon Ball". It can measure and display the power of the enemy in the shape of glasses with only one eye.
"Everyone likes Dragon Ball, so if you tell this story, you'll understand it well. Everyone in China has seen it. There is a big technical difference," Wu laughs.
LL Vision only makes eyeglasses that combine lenses and cameras, AI semiconductors, communication functions, and software made according to customer needs. The latest model weighs 89 grams. Even when I put it on, it doesn't feel any more uncomfortable than ordinary glasses. It is said that the discount price can be less than 10,000 yuan (about 150,000 yen), and it can be obtained by small and medium-sized enterprises and individuals.
It is the authorities and companies that paid the glasses that read the face to be observed and the process of work with glasses and use AI to compare it with the data on hand. Wu said, "We only provide basic functions," and that no customer data remains under the LL vision. From police to corporate and personal games, there are as many ways to apply AR glasses to customers.
When it was just founded in 2014, there were a lot of evaluations from customers who couldn't imagine how to use it. Even so, I was able to withstand it because I thoroughly worked closely with customers to find out their needs. Wu says, "The correct way to use it is to have it used first and then find the intended use."
Wu was born in Dongcheng District in the center of Beijing in December 1977, just one year before China began its reform and opening policy to introduce foreign capital and technology.
She was naughty when she was a kid and was a kid who bothered her teachers. She said, "I loved disassembling home appliances. I immediately disassembled the toys I received and reassembled them as soon as my parents got angry. Machine messing around was my dad's hobby in the first place." talk.
Both her parents were metallurgical engineers. When she was in elementary school, her father was sent to Nippon Steel (now Nippon Steel) in Japan for three months to learn techniques. He remembers having a Japanese souvenir buy a colorful pencil.
She was a student who was good at math at school. The Chinese government was actively flagging reform and opening up when children born in the 1970s became aware of it. Many young people became engineers.
Wu, who grew up looking at his parents' backs, learned the common sense of science while watching the Japanese science animation "Meme Various Dream Trips". She recalls, "I learned the principle of electrical resistance and why lightning occurs in memes. I was a kid who always wondered why."
She went on to college in 1996. Under the influence of her parents, she entered the "Beijing Science and Technology University", the successor to the "Beijing Steel Academy", which also has strengths in steel. However, her interest in Wu went from steel to personal computers and to the Internet, which had begun to appear in China.
The computer in the office of the company where her parents work was rarely connected to the internet at that time. I opened the NBA homepage around noon, but it took me until the evening to see only half of it. I borrowed her friend's admission card and entered the laboratory at Tsinghua University, where I also tried connecting to the internet. The connection destination is Yahoo!, a search engine. The sites were organized by category, and I was looking at pages about classic hobbies. "I felt like I was connected to the world at once," he recalls.
Wu, who was so enthusiastic about the internet that he had been practicing at an internet company, went on to graduate school at the University of Birmingham in 2001 and wrote a dissertation on the search for Google, which has just appeared.
After graduating from graduate school in 2004, she joined a Swedish antenna company and worked in an office in Beijing. At that time, the antenna of the mobile phone was on the outside. The company was a major contributor to keeping the antenna inside the phone, which led to the worldwide hit of Nokia's mobile phones.
However, Apple released the iPhone in 2007. Thinking that the times were smartphones, he moved to Lenovo, which made smartphones early in China. Born into a family of steel engineers, a science-loving boy began his life through computers, the internet, mobile phones, and consistently touching smartphones and the cutting edge of technology.
Around 2010, many salons where engineers gathered were held every weekend in Beijing. Wu, who was working at Lenovo to see the technology three to five years from now, was participating in the "AI Club". "I would like to hear your opinions about our speech recognition technology." "About the function of machine translation." ... The engineers had an open discussion to ask their opinions outside the company about their efforts. Here, Wu met AR.
At first, Wu only thought of AR glasses as an interesting technique. However, while he was explaining AR at a technical salon with the knowledge gained from reading technical books, he found himself excited. "I realized that AR isn't hard or soft, it's the next generation of communication," Wu said. The information is displayed not on the screen of the TV or the screen of the smartphone, but in the field of view that can be seen with glasses, and I thought that communication would be revolutionized.
Investors who participated in the salon were also listening hard to the story of AR that Wu talked about. "Their interests have become more and more detailed. If you want to learn swimming, you can't learn it on land. So, I thought it would be" Chiyuki Goichi "." Wu talks about how his heart went to the founding of AR.
However, there was some doubt about the final decision. "Is AR a bright future? Is AR a business that people can be proud of? If it doesn't work, it will waste their lives."
It was my running companion who pushed me back. A friend said while running through the Beijing Olympic Park, which was a running course. "I can't continue running as long as I think I have to. Why? Because I don't really love running. When running becomes a hobby or a part of my daily life, I can only continue for a long time. become". When Wu heard the words, he thought, "It can be said to start a business," and abandoned his doubts.
It wasn't long after he left Lenovo in June 2014. He set up a company in July and started recruiting employees. Twenty people gathered in August.
But, of course, none of the talent from Lenovo, Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc. was an eyeglass maker. Thinking that "Sabae is the frame of eyeglasses," Wu immediately rushed to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing to get a visa and headed to Sabae City, Fukui Prefecture, via Kansai Airport.
Sabae's eyeglass makers welcomed Wu who visited suddenly. "I want to make my glasses comfortable to wear, but I need a part to store the equipment. How should I balance the load?" Wu said. The manufacturer said, "It certainly puts pressure on you, so why not replace it with a nose pad like this?" "We also have a patent like this," he said.
We talked from morning till 5 pm. We talked from the morning the next day, and in the afternoon we were taken to Eiheiji Temple. "The temple was clean and clean. Everyone was quietly in the world of their thoughts. That dedication was a great enlightenment," he says.
Cooperation with this vendor continues to this day. The result of LL Vision incorporating the eyeglass frame technology accumulated by Sabae was light, highly transparent, and comfortable AR eyeglasses. LL Vision says it pays a license fee to this vendor for each pair of eyeglasses.
From 2019, it is no longer necessary to start preaching to customers "what are AR glasses". Wu laughs, "I don't have to bring out Vegeta anymore. If an IT company doesn't understand AR, it's a company that can be weeded out."
Wu has been a business that has a foothold in both management and technological development. He used the money he got from venture capital carefully, made the hotel as cheap as possible for employees on business trips, and saved money to share a room with the same sex. "Many companies die in the middle of the road, especially startups, because they can't control their desires and passions, or they take consumer expectations too deeply," he said.
He is also modest in technique. "Technology development is slower than human passion, and it gets excited and heated in the early days. For example, when" the age of AR has come ", marketing and advertising will quickly spread the product. You might say, "I want everyone to spend every day," but there are still many technical issues to be solved. From a technician's point of view, it's dangerous. The rain-moistened land grows everything, but grass. If there is no root in the tree, it will not grow. "
In China, the high-speed communication standard 5G service started in 2019. The demand for IoT is also increasing. Against the backdrop of big data of 1.4 billion people, AI performance is constantly improving. AR glasses are closely related to all of these, and the trend in the world is a tailwind for widespread use.
As manufacturing continued, business relationships with contract manufacturers in China, Japanese optical manufacturers that use parts, and cloud companies in the United States that use services also strengthened. Wu said, "Our path is on the upside. The industry is stable and the risks to our business are getting smaller and smaller."
It is reported that not only Google in the US but also Apple will soon be working on AR glasses. As Wu thinks, if it becomes a "next generation communication tool", will the day when all human beings wear AR glasses will come?
"I don't think the era of wearing AR glasses from morning till night will come yet. However, the function of AR glasses that allows you to intuitively understand the reality linked to data in real time is meaningful and good for all humankind. The chances of living with these glasses will increase over time. " Wu sees such a big change in the means of sensing the world.