Mad Gaze is the company behind a pair of smart glasses that could transform the way people shop, play games and interact with one another.

The Smart Glass is a wearable pair of eyeglasses that comes with an inbuilt computer and a screen capable of displaying digital data. With the Smart Glass, users can go hands-free and use voice control to watch movies, take photos or play games.

MAD Gaze was set up in 2013 with the premise of using augmented reality technology in glasses. After years of research and development, the company launched its first generation of Smart Glass in July, 2016.

The company took three years of research and development to invent the Smart Glass.

“Back in 2013, I thought the AR market was quite large but I could foresee that after 10 year it will become even bigger and to a size that no one anticipates. I found this very interesting,” said Mad Gaze Founder Jordan Cheng.

The Smart Glass is an Android system that is compatible with over 90 percent of the applications currently available in the market. Mad Gaze not only manufactures the Smart Glass, but it also provides developer and cloud support to content providers across a comprehensive augmented reality-enabled platform.

“Our goal is to be amongst the world's top three major smart glasses within two years, and our long-term hope is to become a technology company known in other countries,” said Cheng.

One of the most difficult parts in managing an AR startup is to find funding and to convince skeptical investors and customers that the technology was viable. Given that AR is not fully mainstream, there was also a lot of research that had to go into the creation of the glasses and the AR platform.

“Big technology companies in this field have a lot more resources and they will naturally be our competitors. We hope that by participating in Jumpstarter, we can attract investors and convince companies and industries that we have a product to solve your problems,” said Cheng.

Cheng is not a stranger to startups. The 35-year old started a mobile app company in 2012, grew it to a size of about 80 employees and sold it to focus on his Smart Glass business.

While Mad Gaze faces stiff competition from well-financed global technology companies in the AR space, Cheng is not intimidated.

“I don’t create startups for the main purpose of making money. We had interest before from listed-companies to buy our Smart Glass, but we want foreign countries to know our Hong Kong technology brand,” said Cheng.