Chris Parkinson began working on the idea behind RealWear while at Kopin back in 2007. In 2015, he founded WearNext to explore routes to further technical development and commercialization of the productivity tool for connected industrial workers. That ultimately led to co-founding RealWear in 2016.   The company presents itself as providing the first hands-free and fully ruggedized head-mounted tablet solution. But it's not quite a tablet. It's a headset for voice interactive hands-free access to data, information, and applications.   Earlier in his career, Parkinson was a senior engineer at Alien Technology and a researcher at Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He earned a PhD in computational and theoretical chemistry from the University of Manchester.