Driving home the need for diversity in all arenas, La Jolla resident Dustin Sutton has developed augmented reality sunglasses ‘Rangez’ he hopes will help him and others ace their golf rounds.
Called Rangez, the sunglasses will use GPS signals to calculate the yardage, or distance, on a golf course and display the numbers on a small LED display in the corners of the sunglasses’ lenses.
The idea teed off for Sutton, a commercial real estate broker, during a golf game he played in June with friends.
“We’re 150 yards from the green,” Sutton said, “and my buddy pulls out his rangefinder to verify that. … I’m wearing my glasses, he’s wearing sunglasses, and I [wondered], is there a pair of [augmented reality] glasses that just display the range directly on the lens?”
An internet search later turned up nothing for Sutton, who let the idea putt around in his head until he woke at 2 a.m. a few months ago with the details.
“I just let it all out on a Google Doc. … Four pages of my ideas and how it could work,” he said. “It was a moment of absolute frantic clarity.”
The technology to make the glasses work already exists, Sutton said; he just needed the avenues to specify it for golf, to enhance the game and provide a “hands-free experience.”
Backswing to forward
Just days later, Sutton learned of the nonprofit organization San Diego Sport Innovators, an incubator for innovators in the sports/active lifestyle industry.
Sutton applied for a provisional patent and presented his pitch deck to the organization’s board; both were approved and he began meeting with product developers, financial advisors and other consultants.
“It’s happening,” Sutton said. “I have this solid foundation.”
The next step is to get his Rangez prototype into production, which will be sometime in January.
“This is hopefully going to improve the [golf] experience,” he said. “And that’s exciting.”
Reading the green
Shifting from commercial real estate broker to entrepreneur wasn’t entirely a shot in the dark; Sutton had the confidence to try after starting a property inspection app three years ago to assist in his real estate transactions.
Developing the app with a partner “was harder than I thought,” he said, but he often looks at situations not to complain, but to figure out how to improve them.
Similar efforts have since shown Sutton “there was no magic there,” he said. “You have to get the right team together. You have the right idea and funding and you can make it happen.”
Landing in the fairway
Sutton’s wheelhouse is making an idea come to fruition, he said, the prime example being his founding the Black Commercial Real Estate Network in 2020, in response to the murder of Black man George Floyd by a White police officer
“I had to do something,” Sutton said. “[Doing] nothing was not an option.”
Having been in commercial real estate for more than 15 years, Sutton found himself “often the only Black person in the room” in San Diego and La Jolla, he said.
“It always bothered me and I always tried to make efforts to reach out to other Black members of the commercial real estate community, but they just weren’t here in San Diego.”
Sutton set out to “make exactly what I want: the Black Commercial Real Estate Network.” He then began reaching out to others like him in other regions of the country.
A little over three years later, BCREN now has more than 1,000 members nationwide with some overseas, he said, proof that “I can take an idea and get people together and good things can happen.”
“Being able to gauge [a need] and take action … can open the door” to further opportunity, Sutton said.
Shots from the rough
The courage Sutton found with the growth of BCREN has helped him find the determination to innovate “something fun” in his Rangez product as a Black entrepreneur.
“Life is hard,” he said. “You get beat up a lot and people are like, ‘No, you’re not this. You’re not that.’ If you don’t see it, you can’t be it.”
Sutton doesn’t “see many Black tech executives out there,” he said,
“But that doesn’t mean it’s gonna stop me from doing it. … just because nobody in that space looks like you doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
Rangez is another example of why diversity is important, Sutton said: diversity not only in skin color but also in “diversity of thought.”
He’s been playing golf about three years and “to have somebody come into a game who hasn’t been playing for that long” and find ways to improve it is valuable, he said.
“When you get more people involved in different things, it can take you places that you wouldn’t have imagined … because you’ve never seen it through that lens,” he said. “No pun intended.”
“I like to keep just moving forward.”
