Quietly clicking away on their laptops at Italian eatery Uva Enoteca one recent morning were the founders of RealityCap, who are focused on turning the smartphone into a 3-D measuring device. The company may be lean, but at least its employees will never go hungry.
"Uva is only open to the public for dinner, so it's a great place to work during the day," says Eagle Jones, 35, who founded RealityCap in late 2012 with Jordan Miller, 35 (an Uva investor), Ben Hirashima, 40, and Brian Fulkerson, 35, who is based in London. "We're not spending money on big fancy offices. But maybe one day."
These guys may not be long for Uva.
The tech area they're working in — using a smartphone's cameras, accelerometer and other sensors to allow images to be accurately measured in all dimensions — is getting both hot and crowded. Already on the scene is Seene, an app that turns 2-D photos into 3-D. And Google recently announced Project Tango, a tweaked Android phone that "will usher in the age of mobile computer vision."
A definition is in order. Computer vision, the subject of both Jones' and Fulkerson's Ph.D. work at the University of California-Los Angeles a decade back, is the science of overlaying numeric information over images captured on camera. The field may be in its early stages now, but some believe it ultimately could lead to allowing devices to augment our own comparatively limited human vision.
RealityCap's first mission is to unveil its first app, due out in the next few months, called True Measure.
Jones fires it up on his iPad, trains the camera on a square pedestal in the restaurant's entry, slowly moves from side to side and presto — suddenly the piece of furniture is labeled with distances for height, width and depth. In fact, almost any distances within the image can be measured, simply by poking a finger at start and end points.
Using True Measure, there is admittedly a gee-whiz moment wh! ere one thinks, "Well, of course my phone should do that." Jones says the app will be free, with a premium fee-based version available for professionals, "say, an architect who needs to take a series of measurements and then share them with a team."
But, he cautions, "we're not building a company to create an app. We have a technology platform on which people could build a hundred different apps (while licensing RealityCap's software). What uses people come up with remains to be seen."
Not that Jones lacks ideas. Beyond the usefulness of "being able to take a photo of your room and head off to shop at IKEA knowing precisely the space you're trying to fill by calling up that image," he says, the commercial applications of RealityCap's digital guts are myriad.
He cites the example of a kitchen remodeling company that could move from time- and gas-consuming estimate site visits to having the homeowner simply e-mail a photo of their kitchen with all the dimensions built in to the image. "That could significantly change the economics of how that business works," says Jones.
Robust enterprise applications will be critical to the success of RealityCap's software, says Ramon Llamas, mobile phone analyst with research firm IDC.
"How many times are you in the business of measuring and moving your couch around," Llamas asks with a laugh. "From a consumer point of view, this could just be a novelty. But businesses could really benefit. Take real estate, which is limited to showing customers photos or fish-eye virtual tours. This (technology) could potentially lend an air of reality to a digital home tour."
Llamas is bullish on companies pushing deeper into the smartphone space, noting "that it's time we stopped calling them phones, they're high-powered computers that happen to be in our pockets." He adds that Google pushing into the game with Tango only makes start-ups working in the same field "attractive acquisition candidates."
Jones, who brings to mind in both size and ! laid-back! demeanor the actor Jason Segel, says he's not in it to "flip the company, but rather because we think the world needs this."
Eagle Jones, CEO of RealityCap, demonstrates a digital capture with his iPad using his software that allows the device to motion-capture their surroundings in 3-D.(Photo: Martin E. Klimek, USA TODAY)
Sage Weil, Jones' best friend, fellow programmer and angel investor in RealityCap, says Jones lives for a challenge.
"He just loves following a problem to its completion and won't give up," says Weil, 36, who met Jones when they were tech-obsessed high school students in Ashland, Ore. "What's great about True Measure is that it feels intuitively like something all phones should be able to do, but the reality is it's very hard, and Eagle loves that."
Jones grew up in the tiny eastern Washington hamlet of Onion Creek, later moving to California and then Oregon, where his mother is a school superintendent and his father is a contractor who passed down his passion for triathlons. Jones started competing in them at age 7, and went on to race in Ironman competitions.
He brought that same drive to a range of endeavors, from playing water polo at Cal Tech (where he met co-founder Miller) to building autonomous cars for the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 as well as his pre-RealityCap work at data analytics firm Quid.
"The big turning point for me was a few years ago, when (smartphones) started getting packed with the sensor data we needed and had the processing power to compute that data," says Jones. "If you think about it, we're still in the age of the tape measure. But capturing 3-D data can be useful anywhere where you care about objects and the spaces they're in."
Eagle Jones, CEO of RealityCap, sits inside Uva Enoteca, a San Francisco restaurant that serves as headquarters for his start-up, with co-founders Ben Hirashima, center, 40, and Jordan Miller, 35.(Photo: Martin E. Klimek, USA TODAY)
Put another way, Jones and his friends believe it's time for our smartphones to stop perceiving images like cameras do, in two dimensions, and start seeing like humans do — only better.
"None of us knows where this is headed, because it's fundamentally that new," says Jones. "But it sure will be exciting to see."
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ABOUT EAGLE JONES, 35
What: Co-founder of RealityCap, software that allows smartphones to measure 3-D images
Where: San Francisco
Best advice you've ever gotten? "In regards to start-ups, most of the advice is from (venture capitalist and programmer) Paul Graham, especially that you need a co-founder to start a company. Without Ben and Jordan, this company would have gone exactly 0% as far as it has."
Biggest challenge of starting a business? "The biggest but not really unexpected challenge is knowing that nothing will happen if you don't make it happen — needing to push everything forward little by little and day by day."
Does being a triathlete steel you for start-up life? "There is a mental component to being an endurance athlete that I think is likely correlated with the willingness to build a company — basically, stubbornness."
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