Occipital

A central theme of science fiction over the past 20 years has been the dystopian future of humans, laying on couches, connected to machines that feed them and process their waste, while they interact with a virtual world. Advanced versions of this technology let you move around or relax in a comfortable creche. Today we call it VR. I wish the abbreviation, which seems so harmless, had never taken hold as the phrase “virtual reality” helps remind us, just a tiny bit, of what we are talking about. ...

At Foundry Group, we always look for companies that we think build magic into their products. Occipital has been one of those companies. Three years ago, they launched Structure Sensor , which pioneered bringing dense 3D sensing to mobile devices (and it’s only just now that are we seeing some of the world’s biggest tech companies catching up by launching similar technology to consumers). Since that launch three years ago, the team at Occipital has been quietly at work on their next product. Today, they’re announcing Bridge. ...

I love being involved in magical stuff. One of our portfolio companies, Occipital , just announced their newest product, the Structure Sensor. It’s available for purchase right now on Kickstarter – they blew through their $100k goal in the first four hours of being up. But this is a “show don’t tell” classic, so take a look at the video below and prepare to have your mind blown. So awesome. Jeff, Vikas, and team – you guys are amazing. ...

For a limited time, Occipital’s Panorama 360 is free . If you don’t know why this is such an awesome app, watch the short video demonstration below. We closed our investment in Occipital last week and I wrote about it in the post titled The World Is Just A Bunch Of Pixels . The Occipital gang is going to create a bunch of amazing stuff and now’s your chance to get on board with a one minute iPhone download. And, if you are reading this after the free offer expires, it’s still worth getting for the couple of bucks they are charging.

Yesterday, we announced that we have invested in Occipital . You may know them as the creators of the popular iPhone app 360 Panorama, the creators of Red Laser (acquired by eBay) , or just a gang of the smartest computer vision guys you’ll come across. And when I say “computer vision”, I don’t just mean the technical part, but also a vision of where it’s going. For example, from the Occipital blog post announcing the investment: ...

It is so nice to be back in Boulder after my 10 hours trip home from New York yesterday that included a lot of time on tarmacs, a diverted landing in Colorado Springs, and an I-25 road trip. I really want a personal portable teleportation machine. I’m about to head out for a run but thought I’d toss up a few fun posts and videos that I saw when scanning through my email and news this morning. ...

Another TechStars company has been acquired. Well – part of it has been acquired. Today it was announced that eBay has acquired the RedLaser product from Occipital . The Occipital guys tell the story in their post titled Arrival at the Launchpad . Occipital’s founders – Jeff and Vikas – are the epitome of bootstrap entrepreneurs. Every TechStars class seems to have one and Occipital wins the bootstrapper of TechStars Boulder 2008 award. At the end of the program they had a few chances to raise money but weren’t happy with the valuations so decided to hunker down and just bootstrap things. They reinvented themselves several times until they launched RedLaser which has been a runaway hit (over two million copies sold to date.) As RedLaser took off, they had another set of interesting investment offers but no longer have any need for outside capital. ...