Gadgetory

you may have heard all the buzz about virtual reality the technology that for decades has been on the cusp of arriving is finally finally just around the corner you've probably heard less about augmented reality but that field where you mix virtual images with the real is poised to be just as big and just as interesting daiquiri a Los Angeles startup has created an augmented reality headset and the software that which powers it it's aiming to revolutionize the way people work by layering additional data and intelligent computing tools on top of their normal vision daiquiri is an augmented reality company that makes hardware and software products for the future of work their flagship hardware product is this really cool kind of digital hard hat that you wear and it has flip-down lenses and it projects things on the environment you're working within so if you're at a factory it can project you know images on gauges and can read those and track those and feed them back so it's kind of like a way to modernize would have been legacy industries in a very very cool way early in my career I got a chance to work in the simulation industry and then ultimately did a lot of work with robotics and computer vision and I saw all these pieces come together for decades in very expensive government facilities I got a glimpse in the late 90s and early 2000s of what would be possible but it costs literally hundreds of millions of dollars to do that the aha moment was seeing the iPhone 4 get released in 2010 now all of a sudden I had a multi-core processor in my pocket and I knew that those technologies would now be possible in a mobile form and that's when I dropped everything and started decorating when the company began it focused on creating software the hope was that other players would quickly create hardware that Thackery could piggyback on and that those devices helped to keep customers curiosity and so demanded a market which didn't yet exist when daiquiri started there was no market for augmented reality and definitely no market for augmented reality at work the biggest challenge for company like this is you know always going to be convincing people why they need it in the first place especially you don't have a working prototype that's already being used by somebody out there marketing pure augmented reality is very difficult because you're marketing the idea of being able to communicate but just that idea isn't enough you have to explain how's it going to deliver you we had to work pretty hard to just get people to understand the fundamental mechanics of the technology every meeting we went into at that time we had to explain to them what it was we were doing what the industry was what the potential was they'd never heard of it before never seen it before and that was an uphill battle every time we had to build the tools we had to build the awareness and we had to build the market all at the same time originally they were mostly a software company but that brings issues right the software is only good if there's actually devices out there that can run it and when we started a curry we were really optimistic and one of the big companies would come along and they'd make the device that we needed and we could just write our software for it we realized along the way that that's not going to happen for us to have the device we needed we we had to get into the hardware business and the things that we had learned about making augmented reality for phones and tablets could wrap up into a pretty sick product Google glass is far and away the most well known attempt to create an augmented reality product and also the most public flop daiquiri is helping to sidestep the concerns of a privacy and fashion that ultimately torpedoed glass by focusing on industrial applications instead I think a lot of the problems with you know companies that want to do augmented reality is what's the right application right a lot of times people immediately say it's got to be gaming or you know Home Entertainment or that kind of thing and those are actually harder sells in a lot of cases because you have to worry about fashion you have to worry about pricing there are all these obstacles that get in the way and that's assuming your product even works in the first place what they've done by focusing on the industrial application is it takes a lot of those barriers away the product can cost more everybody looks you know goofy in a hard hat so fashion goes out the window and it comes more about you know making the case can this make your work life better can this make your company more productive we realized the first place that augmented reality is really going to get to scale is in the enterprises in the industrial space because this is delivering on-site in context knowledge transfer step-by-step work instructions data visualization right where the decision-making is happening a field force engineer goes to service a gas turbine on a jet they have to know maybe 600 different work instructions this is a way to do knowledge transfer visually so you can look at that gas turbine engine and the computer vision can understand what you're looking at understand what needs to be and give you visual cues without language of what you need to do next when we met our first industrial customer it was you know hey I have these fundamental challenges and I desperately need a solution to make things better and this fits into that oftentimes technologies come around that replace workers they take jobs away what this is is expanding our senses expanding our capabilities it's enhancing our vision and transferring us a knowledge that we want in real time and that can make a huge impact on someone's life Zachary has managed to convince a handful of big customers that its product is worth exploring the question now is whether or not it can build that into a profitable business and if it can continue to lead the field when massive players like Google Microsoft and Sony are all making aggressive bets on the augmented reality market we started five years ago my living room couch it took us two years to get to the massive facility that held ten employees and we thought we really made it and really come a long way five years later we've got 250 employees in five offices around the world and are just starting now to know how much we don't know and how much we didn't know along the way I'm going to reality is still in its nascent phase and we're at the very tip of the iceberg it's gotten so much bigger since we've started I mean we're at the point now where we don't have to explain to everyone that we meet what is it what does the technology do okay let me physically show you because people have heard of it people have seen it what kind of passed that point now but you don't wake up in the morning and look around you and there's all going to reality everywhere there is that critical path to getting there and we're going to get there now that daiquiri has kind of put that product out there people can get their head around what it is they've come across a major threshold but what's next is how are they going to iterate upon that how they're going to respond to the challenges and the things they learn when the product gets out there in the marketplace they're going to learn a ton of things they could not have even grasped before and so whether they can be able to pull it off ultimately we'll have to wait and find out thank God