ClearGaze Defender is built on the science Dr. David G. Cogan systematized across thirty years at Harvard and a decade at the National Eye Institute, the precision-eye-tracking expertise developed across thirty-two years of refractive surgery, and the same hardware platforms the United States Army, Air Force, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing already trust for mission-critical training. Below: a personal statement from the Principal Investigator, our integration partner, and the two extended-reality headsets we run on.
The most direct way to understand what ClearGaze Defender measures, and why we are the team to build it, is to read this statement in the Principal Investigator's own words.
Three formative experiences, separated by decades, converge in this work.
The first was my fellowship under Dr. David G. Cogan at the National Eye Institute. Dr. Cogan was the physician who founded neuro-ophthalmology as a clinical subspecialty.
Dr. Cogan demonstrated, and spent his career documenting, that virtually every neurological disease produces a measurable signature in eye movement: saccadic dysmetria, nystagmus, internuclear ophthalmoplegia, vergence failure, pupillary asymmetry. His two foundational texts systematized these signs and their neuroanatomic substrates in a way that shaped clinical neurology for generations. The ClearGaze Defender twelve-function battery measures precisely the parameters Dr. Cogan identified — saccadic velocity and accuracy, smooth-pursuit gain, the pupillary light reflex, vergence mechanics, vestibulo-ocular reflex gain — now quantified by high-frequency eye-tracking hardware at temporal resolutions unavailable to clinical examination. I am, in the most direct sense, attempting to deploy what he described.
The second formative experience was organizing the First United States LASIK Course at the University of South Florida in 1996, authoring the first textbook chapters ever written on LASIK surgical technique for both myopia and hyperopia, and helping establish the terminology that the field now universally uses — a pattern of first-in-field clinical technology development I have repeated throughout my career.
The third is thirty-two years of working directly with precision eye-tracking hardware as a patient-safety requirement in refractive surgery — not as a research instrument, but as a clinical tool where millisecond tracking accuracy is the difference between a successful procedure and a complication. That experience produced a command of eye-tracker calibration, latency, sampling artifacts, and signal integrity that shapes every technical decision in the ClearGaze Defender protocol.
What Dr. Cogan's science lacked — what the entire field of clinical oculomotor assessment has lacked for seventy-five years — is a way to reach patients outside the laboratory. Conventional clinical eye tracking requires a chin rest, a calibrated screen, specialized hardware costing tens of thousands of dollars, a trained operator, and a compliant adult patient who will hold still. Every one of those requirements fails in the settings where TBI actually presents — the flight line, the carrier deck, the forward aid station, the youth-sports sideline. The spatial computing headset changes the equation: a patient puts it on, and the established science of neuro-ophthalmology becomes accessible at the point of care for the first time.
This project is the convergence of everything in my career — the neuro-ophthalmic science I absorbed from Dr. Cogan, the eye-tracking expertise I developed across three decades in the operating room, and the deployable hardware that finally exists today.
Insight is our enterprise software and hardware partner — a global integrator of mission-critical applications, AI infrastructure, and high-precision eye-tracking systems. They bring 6,400+ certified specialists, end-to-end application expertise, and the unified strategy required to move ClearGaze Defender from breadboard to deployable platform.
Insight delivers end-to-end application services — strategy, design, development, implementation, management — across the full lifecycle of regulated, mission-critical software systems. They are the integration partner enabling ClearGaze Defender to ship as a production-grade clinical and defense product, not a research prototype.
Varjo is the world's most advanced mixed-reality and virtual-reality platform — the only headset combining human-eye resolution with integrated, sub-degree binocular eye tracking. It is the same headset the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing already use for mission-critical training. ClearGazeTest has a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement with Varjo and integrates the XR-4 as our primary deployable platform.
The Varjo XR-4 is what Varjo itself calls "the world's most advanced mixed-reality headset" — a true human-eye-resolution display with full field-of-view mixed reality, built for the operational realism required by fighter pilot training, helicopter aircrew certification, vehicle and weapons crew drills, and astronaut preparation. It ships with built-in, sub-degree binocular eye tracking — the technical foundation of the ClearGaze Defender measurement.
Objective neurological-readiness measurement — twelve circuit-resolved oculomotor biomarkers, captured in five operator-free minutes — built into the same headset the warfighter already wears for training. Pre-flight-line. Post-blast. Return-to-duty. Forward-deployed combat-medic triage. Veteran TBI longitudinal monitoring.
Samsung Galaxy XR is the first consumer-grade extended-reality headset built on the native Android XR operating system, with six-camera tracking, 4K Micro-OLED displays, and Google Gemini AI integration. We access the platform through our partnership with Insight. It opens a second deployable hardware path — platform redundancy for the DoD, and consumer-scale economics for clinical and commercial deployment.
Samsung's Galaxy XR is, in the company's own words, the headset that opens "Worlds Wide Open" — the first XR device built to natively run Android XR with Google Gemini AI, voice, and vision-based interactions woven through every experience. For ClearGazeTest, it is the second hardware platform that ensures our software stack is never tied to a single vendor — a critical resilience requirement for both DoD acquisition and FDA regulatory pathway.
The science: seventy-five years of neuro-ophthalmology, taught directly by the man who founded the field — Dr. David G. Cogan, three decades at Harvard's Howe Laboratory of Ophthalmology and a decade as Chief of Neuro-Ophthalmology at the National Eye Institute. Ten thousand peer-reviewed papers underpin the twelve-biomarker battery.
The hardware: the headset the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing already trust — Varjo XR-4 — plus the consumer-scale Samsung Galaxy XR. Both ship at TRL 9. Hardware risk is retired.
The integration partner: Insight — 6,400+ certified specialists, end-to-end application expertise, security and compliance posture suitable for FDA 510(k) and DoD IL-5 environments.
The result: the deployable, twelve-channel, two-hundred-twenty-hertz neurological-readiness measurement that does not exist today. Five minutes. Operator-free. Field-grade.
The science was settled in 1948. The hardware finally caught up. We built the bridge.
Government program managers, academic collaborators, and qualified investors can request the technical white paper, the full PI biosketch, and a thirty-minute briefing.