When I joined ODG it was a stealth company inventing cutting-edge technology for military and government agencies. There was no brand, identity, attention to UI/UX, nor any standard customer-facing services or solutions. Over the course of 6 years we emerged from classified status into the technology spotlight, producing best-in-class smartglasses with insane capabilities.
In 2014 ODG sold technology to Microsoft to power their Hololens product. As Qualcomm partners, ODG's glasses became the fastest Android devices on the planet. In 2016 at CES the winner in the mobile device category was neither a phone nor a tablet but ODG Smartglasses. Later, in 2018 the company was sold to an undisclosed major technology leader.
Branding & Marketing
Our core competency and future-reaching ideas revolved around optics, vision, and overlaying information. Our brand identity was vibrant and colorful, with references to pixels. Our tone was sleek, dark, and mysterious. Our trade show booths, event displays, office spaces, laboratories, all reflected this cohesive theme.
Websites
Trade Shows
ODG presented technology as platinum sponsors at numerous global events including CES and Augmented World Expo. I was personally responsible for all aspects of our trade show booths, from design and fabrication, to logistics and staffing, to marketing and communications. We hosted business leaders, celebrities, technology influencers, and media journalists as we showed our smartglasses to the world.
One of our largest booths was a two-story, $1M, 3,000sq ft custom booth with a modern retail-like experience below and numerous meeting spaces and demonstration areas upstairs. This included an immersive AR experience I developed in collaboration with 20th Century Fox and Ridley Scott for the 2017 film Alien Covenant that placed the user into a medical bay aboard a spacecraft.
Professional, brilliant, pride of work are words that naturally come to me when describing Britton Holland. Britton is one of those amazing people that has laser focus and can literally do anything. At ODG in title he served as Creative Director but in reality his amazing work influenced everything we did. Britton would one day lead the development and ideation of a next generation UI/UX, and at the same day manage the day to day assembly and design of our CES booths. One day he would be leading our international design team in the creation of some of the worlds first Head-worn specific application, and turn around and personally design and implement our corporate webpage.
- Nima Shams, VP of Headworn at ODG
Software Development
Our smartglasses ran on Android, but Android doesn't speak dual displays, see-through UI, or world-locking interface. Also, the Play Store didn't have a category of device or software to support our products. So we built our own framework atop Android using tools from the gaming and 3D world and created a complete operating system called ReticleOS for our products. This meant a complete suite of applications and "standard" device interactions, support and developer website, and a Play Store-like services for account, device, and software management.
Reticle Remote
Software for iOS and Android to allow powerful and customizable control over your smartglasses.
Product Design
Through a close collaboration with our industrial designers and engineers I designed buttons, controls and badges and informed the form factor of many devices. I was responsible for designing, engineering, sourcing, and implementing the packaging and accessories that accompanied our products.
Operations
As an extension of the trade show experiences and our brand I also designed the interiors of our corporate office spaces and laboratories. The brand and design language were carried throughout over signage, digital displays, labeling, and meeting spaces.
