MVIS Blog Celebrates 80,000 Page Views

It has been a pretty incredible year and a half writing MVIS Blog. This thing really has taken on a life of its own at this point, and with minimal publicity I can count on hundreds of visitors a day. Being the third hit on Google for 'MVIS' helps!

I've got a lot of thoughts about this technology and why it matters to the world. As one of the company's larger shareholders, I've also got some ideas about steps the company should take to create value and bring forward in time the moment when Microvision becomes profitable for the first time.

Over the past 18 months, I've tried to express why anybody should care about Microvision and their proprietary micro-mirror technology. Why is this technology any more significant or important than fuel cells or molecular computing or bioinformatics?

Probably because, short of implanting something in your brain, this technology is the most direct and efficient way to display a digital image on the human visual system. This technology represents a paradigm shift in the way people interact with computers and personal devices. It requires us to change our usage patterns and leave behind many years of established behaviors -- sitting down at a desk to stare at a monitor, or walking back and forth to a computer kiosk, or pulling something out of your pocket and peering at a tiny screen on a mobile phone. All that stuff is done on a daily basis by most people in the civilized world. All of it is going to be history in the next several years.

My wife and I were sitting down to channel surf last night and I noticed on the guide that 'Superman II' was coming on. (This is the one with General Zod.) My wife being the sweetheart she is, humored me for a little while until we both got bored stiff. But the thing that I took away from it was a scene near the beginning where they have Clark in a busy news room talking to Perry White, the editor of the Daily Planet newspaper. All around is the sound of typewriters clacking. Perry White takes a call on an enormous rotary telephone. I just thought, 'all of that stuff is gone.'

There will never be another scene like that, unless it's a historical re-enactment. 'Superman II' was filmed in 1980, 25 years ago. In that time, an enormous industry of personal computers, cell phones, the internet materialized seemingly out of nowhere. But what I have learned is that these massive advances in human capabilities are built on the backs of all the prior advances. And there's no stopping or slowing down. It just keeps accelerating.

Microvision has the technology to allow humans to take the next step -- to be continuously augmented by digital information and computer processing power. To have our awareness heightened, our capabilities enhanced by a different kind of intelligence and memory than the biological kind. Computers keep advancing -- shrinking, and growing ever more powerful. But in order to keep shrinking until they disappear into a mesh of 'ambient intelligence', society will need to adopt retinal scanning displays built into our eyeglasses and contact lenses, as Kurzweil has pegged for the year 2010.

Things are changing. Technology is progressing. Information has become the most valuable thing on Earth. Microvision can integrate computer information into your life in a way that no other company can. This will cause a wave of change and economic growth as the software industry starts to develop applications for augmented reality. People will be more efficient, faster and smarter. The world will move forward. And never stop.

"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before."

President Eisenhower