About Us
No one should sit out their own life.
Vira Sight started at a family dinner table in Arkansas, on Thanksgiving in 2020. Here is the rest of it, from the person who started it.
Half a second slow
There was something about my family's dinner table that nobody said out loud for years.
My grandfather, Walter Carter, laughed half a second after everyone else.
He sat at the head of the table, where he had sat since I was a boy. Someone would tell a story, the room would laugh, and he would glance around once — quick, almost too quick to catch — and then laugh too. A real laugh. He laughed because we were happy, not because he had understood.
I was thirty-one when I first saw it.
That Thanksgiving I sat across from him. The table was talking about something I no longer remember, and I caught his eyes finish a pass across his son's face, checking whether it was time to laugh yet. In that moment I understood he had been doing this for years. He had not lost the ability to hear us. He had lost the ability to be with us. And he hid it, carefully and patiently, because he did not want to slow the meal down.
He built kitchen cabinets for more than thirty years. The saws took his hearing a little at a time, slowly enough that the family got used to it before anyone thought to name it. He never once said he was deaf or hard of hearing. He said the shop was loud.
I washed dishes alone in the kitchen longer than I needed to that night. I did not pray for anything specific. I just stood there with my hands in warm water and a question that would not leave: why should a man who gave away his whole life have to sit outside of it, because of his ears?
I did not have an answer. I only knew I was not allowed to look away.
Two hundred emails
Six months later I started reading about optics. I am not an engineer. I worked nine years in supply chain operations. I know that one loose screw makes a whole shipment late, and I built these glasses the same way.
I bought a used microscope off eBay. I emailed strangers in Shenzhen and Taichung. I bothered audiologists until they sat down and explained things to me. The question I carried was narrow: if speech cannot get in through the ears, can it get in through the eyes?
Most of the technology already existed. Micro displays. Transparent waveguides. Microphones sensitive enough to pull one voice out of the clatter of dishes. All of it sat inside expensive machines, and nobody had thought to put it on the nose of a cabinetmaker in Arkansas.
I sent close to two hundred emails over two years. Almost nobody answered. I was a logistics guy from Arkansas with no patent, no orders, and nothing to show.
Then an assembly plant in Shenzhen answered. They build smart watches and smart glasses for a number of brands, and the line manager read my whole long email. He promised nothing. He asked what I wanted the glasses to do, then told me which parts were possible and which were not. It was the first time anyone in the industry spoke to me like a person in the trade instead of a dreamer.
Four years later we still work together. They walked with me through nine prototypes. Six of them were thrown away.
The short road we did not take
There is a faster way to do this. Pick a ready-made pair off a wholesale site, put a logo on it, start selling in three weeks. We knew about that road.
But a stock unit did not answer the question I carried from that dinner table. And when it breaks, nobody knows what is inside it.
So we took the long road. Four years, more than ten suppliers across the separate parts, nine prototypes, six of them scrapped. Every revision took nearly a month because samples had to fly halfway around the world and back.
Those six scrapped prototypes were our money. Not yours.
What we got in return is that we know exactly what is inside these glasses and where each part came from. That is why we are able to say this: if a manufacturing fault shows up within twelve months, we replace the unit, and we pay the shipping both ways.
Luciana
Our first prototype was heavy, ran hot, and died after forty minutes. It did not reach my grandfather in time.
But while we were struggling with it, something unexpected happened. The first person to try it on was not deaf. She was Luciana, a colleague's wife, Brazilian, two years in the United States. She put the glasses on, her husband said something in English, and the translation appeared in front of her. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said: “This is the first time I have heard him make a joke.”
That is when I understood I was not building a medical device. I was building a bridge.
Hearing loss and a language barrier are two names for the same thing: words arrive, they do not get in, and a person is cut off from the moment happening in front of them. Walter could not follow because of his ears. Luciana could not follow because of the language. Both of them sat in a room without really being in it.
We solved the second one first, because software can solve it today, without waiting and without a medical clearance. The first one is much harder, and we are still working on it.
Why these are not another headset
The wall between two people is not always hearing. Sometimes it is language. Sometimes it is the noise of a restaurant. Sometimes it is us, looking down at a phone while someone we love is talking.
A whole generation of technology is trying to pull people into a world that is not real. We are doing the opposite. These glasses exist so you can lift your head — so you can look the person across from you in the eye, where everything that matters still happens.
In March 2025, on the ninth prototype, still ugly and still too heavy, my grandfather read a sentence his great-granddaughter had just said. He laughed. On time, that once. He died two months later.
What we sell today, and what we do not
The glasses we ship today do not do the thing I set out to build. They translate. They capture the moment. They listen and do what you ask. They do not put live captions in front of someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, and I am not going to lie to you about that to sell one more pair.
We are still working on it. The day it works, you will hear about it, and not one day sooner.
Until then, maybe the kindest thing a pair of glasses can do is remind you to look up at the person sitting in front of you, while they are still sitting there.
Michael Carter
Founder, Vira Sight
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Live captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing is still in development and is not part of the product we ship today. Vira Sight is not a hearing aid and is not intended to diagnose or treat any hearing condition. If you or someone in your family needs hearing assistance, please see a qualified audiologist.
