A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats
Why I joined 6D.ai, what we’re up to, and how we can help you
Twitter: @6D_ai @ericjohnsen
What do the following have in common: government, money, corporations, and societal contracts? They’re not real.
Since the beginning, humans have tried to record these imagined realities and visualize them. Some examples are books, art, music, legal documents, government constitutions, and currency. But we haven’t had the technology to visualize these imagined realities in our three dimensional world, until recently. According to Noah Harrari in his book Sapiens, our species has succeeded over other species by creating shared imagined realities since we first evolved ~180,000 years ago.
As many of my friends and colleagues know, I’ve been increasingly passionate about augmented reality (AR) over the last six or so years, since I was first exposed to it when my team and I launched “Glass at Work” at Google. I like a) the possibilities b) the challenges and c) the inevitability (the game clock is counting down!). On one hand, AR is exciting ground-breaking technology. On the other, it’s been around for decades when companies like Boeing were experimenting with AR in the 90’s. Or 180,000 years, depending on how you define it.
Whether you refer to it as AR, 3D, spatial computing, immersive computing, mixed reality, or something else, it’s about converging the “imagined” world (call it “the Internet”) with the real world that we live in every day. Why do we only interact with the Internet through little black rectangles called smartphones? Why is shopping so disconnected in-store versus online? Why is it so hard to show my friend the design of my new kitchen? Why are airplanes still designed with paper and pencil? For that matter, why are two billion pencils still purchased every year (and growing)?
During the six years starting with my time working on Glass, I’ve been fortunate to work on some awesome teams, for some awesome companies and leaders all working on hard problems that move AR forward: at Google on Glass, Tango and ARCore, at Upskill (formerly APX) on enterprise software for AR, and most recently at AWS working on creation tools and WebXR. I’ve also been fortunate in each of those roles to work in a function that allows me to interact with some of the smartest and most experienced minds in the industry. One of those people is Matt Miesnieks.
I’d always liked Matt’s humble, but smart, approach and his vision for the AR Cloud, and then later his strategy for 6D.ai. I thought it’d be fun to join 6D when the time was right. But I’d learned the hard way about timing by trying to commercialize new tech before it’s time. As one of my friends says, “if you want to know when something in the industry will happen, ask Eric, then add two years ;-D.” Others friends joined 6D. Jeff McConathy, former VP of Engineering at Trulia/Zillow, joined in early 2018. Then a few months ago, I approached Matt and Jeff about a deal with my former employer and they told me (with typical humility — see 6D values), that unless I was willing to write a significant check, they were already pre-committed to some impressive customers, solving some impressive problems. I learned more about 6D’s paying customers (see use cases at bottom) and shift to commercialization. Hmmm….
Long story short, here I am.
And since I’ve joined, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the rest of the super talented, experienced, and diverse team members from organizations like Oxford University, Microsoft/Simplygon, Facebook, Box, Tesla, Qualcomm, Cisco, Oculus, Schneider Electric, Telefónica and various successful startups.
What Exactly is 6D.ai?
6D is a platform that creates a 3D replica (digital mesh) of the physical world, in real time using just a smartphone camera. Using the 3D mesh generated by the 6D’s platform, developers create AR experiences that look and feel like they are truly part of the real world. Without this platform, there is no reference to place, or anchor, these experiences.
Think of it as an “operating system (OS) for reality” in the same sense that AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud is an OS for the cloud. Our CEO, Matt Miesnieks, co-created the term “AR Cloud” back in 2017 with Ori Inbar, an AR entrepreneur and investor who founded AWE (Augmented World Expo is the leading annual gathering for AR and related industries, happening this coming week in Santa Clara, California). It stood for, “a persistent 3D digital copy of the real world to enable sharing of AR experiences across multiple users and devices.” However, we see this becoming more than the AR Cloud and instead moving toward an entire operating system for reality. In fact in February, Wired published a cover story on the topic entitled, “Welcome to the Mirrorworld,” describing the larger shift toward building digital copies of everything in the world.
People have been building maps for about 1500 years. But it’s never been just about the map. The real value is in inferences, decisions and actions that the map enables. Which way do I sail? Where should I bury the pot of gold? What time should I leave to get home in time for dinner? It’s hard to remember how we lived life before all the apps that were built on top of Google Maps, such as Uber and Waze. The same thing will happen with 3D maps.
Two things that are very unique about 6D software in reconstructing physical space in 3D: 1) speed and 2) it leverages standard smartphone cameras. Until now, this process was very slow and required specialized hardware. Remember when you needed to go to the travel agent to book a trip? Or turn on the TV for a weather forecast? Now end-users can quickly create and leverage 3D maps on one of the two billion smartphones (catching up with the number of pencils!) that people carry in their pockets every day.(1)
For some context on speed, the typical latency for this task was previously counted in seconds, the 6D team brought this down to milliseconds on mobile phone hardware.
A 3D map of the world sounds pretty ambitious, doesn’t it? What is 6D *not* trying to do?
A lot!
Although we will provide low fidelity texturing to premium customers soon, we don’t plan to create full “photoreal” or “high fidelity textures” of the real world. Firstly, it’s not necessary to enable AR since your “base map” or context is always the real world. You do need fully textured, high resolution “3D virtual assets” (like couches) to place in the real world. This is a different problem and there are other established (Amazon, Wayfair, IKEA) and emerging players (3XR, Scandy, Rooomy) working on the 3D asset problem. Secondly, there isn’t yet a scalable way do this fast enough or cheap enough, even if we needed it. Far in the future if/when we live in a “Ready Player One” world, we may need recreations of the physical world that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Solving Real Problems for Customers
Today, we are engaging with developers and customers in two ways.
- The first is a self-service model where developers use our technology like you’d use an AWS service. We plan to come out of beta soon and charge a reasonable fee for developers and enterprises to include 6D capabilities in their applications. We’ve already seen a ton of great examples from our thousands of beta developers, from standalone games to “AR as a feature” of everyday apps. We believe we’ll see more of the latter and that this is a good way to introduce consumers to AR. Thanks for all the great feedback in our Slack group.
- The second is through direct engagement with partners and customers who have acute, high-value problems that we can uniquely solve today. The magic moment for determining market fit is when there is a value exchange (usually in the form of a payment). It is humbling the number of partners and customers that see our tech as differentiating enough to write significant PO’s in order to lead or be first in their respective markets. For these entities, we are providing some combination of direct support, feature acceleration, and/or private cloud solution for 3D maps. These engagements start at $100,000 per year.(2)
The initial categories of our second engagement channel include direct customers, OEMs, authoring tools and special city/world scale endeavors. For example:
- Direct customers: Below are use cases we are discussing and supporting today:(3)
- Site inspection. Example: Increasing speed and accuracy by allowing onsite workers to scan a space with their standard smartphone, mark it up with instructions, then share with follow-on or remote teams at the point of work. An example is a foreman at a manufacturing or logistics facility marking safety hazards and work items.
- Visualization of virtual models onsite. Example: Increasing speed and accuracy by overlaying plans and models in the actual physical location. This pre-visualization is especially valuable in the construction, hospitality and utility industries.
- Estimates, claims and adjustments. Example: Insurance estimator increases accuracy of quote by scanning volume of space, type of materials, and property inside a home.
- AR wayfinding, indoor and outdoor. Example: Theme parks and other large outdoor activities to provide more meaningful, useful and fun experiences with AR.
2. OEM’s and Carriers. Building the 6D SDK into platforms to enable differentiation or cross-platform capabilities.
3. Authoring tools. Established and new AR creation tools need a better understanding of physical space in order to allow their developers to build for AR. We are integrating our platform into these tools. Torch is the first one that we announced.
4. “City/World Scale” unicorns. Self-driving car, drone, and robotic companies have acute needs to drive down cost around such things as “last mile” mapping.
In any case, we’ll share what we learn and encourage the ecosystem to do the same. A rising tide lifts all boats!
How To Know When You Are Ready for Direct Engagement with 6D
Our most successful partners and premium customers fit this criteria (in priority order):
- Well-defined problem. Value is quantified and many customers have attempted to solve the problem and failed in the past. It often makes sense to have a conversation with us to match the problem to 6D capabilities.
- Developers on-hand. Ideally our customers have an internal team, even if it is a small one, to build the experience leveraging 6D. We have also introduced developers, or in some cases written the code ourselves.
- Budget to spend. This budget is typically on a specific timeline — a natural next step after quantifying the value. Our direct engagements start at $100,000 per year.
If this is you, please contact me (eric@6D.ai) or other friends you have on the 6D team, or contact us here. Our team will also be at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara next week and we look forward to seeing many of you there.
Here’s to the rising tide!
Footnotes:
- Yes, at some point, this shifts to smartglasses and other form factors and we discuss that in various other blogs
- As a third engagement model and possible precursor or a more formalized partner model, we also introduce developers from our beta program to enterprise customers that don’t have in-house developers
- We’ll share partner and customer names when we can but for now most of them are motivated by competitive advantage which can be at odds with premature publicity
