Today we’re announcing that we just raised 7M in Series A led by Foundry Group, representing the first major investment in Occipital.

Over the last year, what we’ve launched publicly is 360 Panorama – a popular app which lets you capture panoramas in seconds and share them as interactive 360 views. But what you might not know is that 360 Panorama is just the tip of the iceberg.

Your smartphone’s computational reach into its surroundings ends at its touchscreen surface. To your device, the real world isn’t a canvas of interactivity. Instead, it’s little more than a grid of pixels that might as well be random. We’re changing that. We’re using computer vision to make real world environments computationally interactive and fun, thereby extending the computational reach of your device into the visual space around you.

This concept is bigger than Occipital can handle alone, so we’re launching a platform that other developers can leverage. We’ll take care of the computer vision, allowing developers to focus on creating new experiences.

We’re also announcing new additions to our board of directors – Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage.

We’ve known Jason and Brad since 2008 when we joined TechStars. We’ve experienced first-hand their open and engaged approach to helping entrepreneurs. Jason, Brad, and the whole Foundry team, are awesome, and as part of their HCI theme, they share our belief that computer vision will fundamentally change the way we interact with our surroundings.

Dr. Manu Kumar is a successful entrepreneur, founder of K9 Ventures, and has a PhD from Stanford in eye-tracking HCI. We can’t overstate how helpful he has been since we met him three years ago. It’s about time we figured out how to work together officially.

Dr. Gary Bradski is the creator of OpenCV – a computer vision library used by thousands of computer vision researchers and engineers around the world. These days he’s Senior Scientist at Willow Garage where he works on advancing the state of robot vision. Gary agrees that we’re on the cusp of something huge in mobile computer vision and he significantly expands the technical gravity of our board of directors.

Welcome, everyone, to the Occipital team.

It’s going to be a wild ride – and where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Today we released a great new update to 360 Panorama with lots of exciting improvements. But that’s not all we’ve been working on. Along with the update, we’re rolling out our first big cloud-based panorama enhancement, and I wanted to take a minute to show you some before and after results. I think you’ll agree that panoramas are getting much more beautiful, and this is just the beginning.

Improvement 1: Smoother

The first improvement is in the smoothness of panoramas. Check out how the colorful blue sky is made much smoother after today’s update.

Before

After

Improvement 2: More full

We’ve filled in more areas in your flat images. Check out the top and bottom regions of this panorama of St Peter’s Basilica captured yesterday.

Before

After

Improvement 3: 2x resolution downloads

All panoramas uploaded with the Premium feature can now be downloaded in 2X resolution! Unlock more megapixels within your panoramas. Didn’t use the premium feature when you uploaded? No problem, you can convert Free uploads to Premium at any time.

How does this work?

When you tap Upload in 360 Panorama, your panorama is packaged and sent to your Occipital account as a rich collection of raw image data. What this means is that your panorama isn’t set in stone, it can improve over time as our algorithms improve (like today). Behind the scenes, we’re using massively-powerful GPU servers, having them perform billions of calculations to generate and improve your panoramas.

Best of all, this is all automatic and you don’t need to learn anything new. Just upload your panoramas and the enhancements will kick in. If you used the premium upload feature, your panoramas will be enhanced today. Free panorama enhancement is soon to follow.

Just before Christmas in 2010, Jeff and I were discussing Occipital’s plans for the next year. We had launched 360 Panorama 3.0 in early December, and it was a major success – we got to the #3 spot in the App Store and we were getting lots of really amazing 360 views uploaded every day.   We decided was that we really needed a place for people to see these 360 views and we needed someone to help us build it.  We split ways to get ready for Christmas, and then an hour later I got this message from Jeff:

Mick modeling for Mick's Shirts

Some dude named Mick launched the gallery for us:

the360gallery.com

Pretty awesome

David “Mick” Thompson was one step ahead of us! He had seen this Tweet from our friend Josh Fraser:

i really hope @occipital makes a gallery of all their public panos

and decided why wait?

Of course we followed up with him immediately to discuss working together, and soon he left Santa Monica and joined us in Boulder on a contract basis.

Over the past few months we’ve been impressed with Mick’s web wizardry, and today we’re excited to announce that he has officially joined Occipital as part of our core team!

You’ll be able to see what he’s been working for the past few months really soon, but just in his spare time he:

• Got asked by O’Reilly media to write a book about CouchDB and Node.js.
• Won a free pass to Google IO by winning this contest by building a walking tour of San Francisco in a couple of hours overnight.
• Found time to model for Mick’s Shirts.

As for his dedication, we’ve got panoramic proof:

Mick fixing a bug at the Denver International Airport

We’re proud to have Mick Thompson on the Occipital team, and can’t wait to show you the awesome work he’s been doing!

Next month a couple of us are headed to the VTM iPhone Developers Conference in Seattle! (April 9-10) It should be a great conference covering the latest trends, and with Erica Sadun as the technical chair, the conference won’t shy away from getting technical.

I’m on the speaker roster for the second time at a VTM conference. Last fall, I spoke about CoreMotion and AR (see my slides here). This time, I’ll be talking about Computer Vision and Augmented Reality. I will cover how pervasive cameras are becoming (now on the iPad!), and how they really aren’t just about photos and video anymore. Just like how phones are less and less about phone calls, and more about powerful apps, cameras are slowly becoming less and less about snapshots and more about interacting with reality. I talked about this a little over a year ago on an O’Reilly Where 2.0 talk, so it will be fun to see how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go before we all have Iron Man vision in our smartphones and tablets.

In addition to talking about trends and hopefully inspiring some ideas for the future, I’ll share some code that is applicable when dealing with the camera which will be useful in augmented reality apps and any kind of realtime video processing. I’ll cover some important aspects of using AVFoundation and OpenGL.

If you’re not registered for the conference, there’s still time to sign up, and you can get a $150 off by using the special code SEAMAL6. (That’s like getting the earlybird discount even though you’re clearly a latebird!)

PS: We’re hiring top notch iPhone/iPad engineers. Get in touch if you’re interested, or say hello at the conference if you’re attending.

If you have the latest iPhone OS (4.2+) and an iPhone 4 or iPod touch 4th gen, check out the new gyro-enabled panorama viewing we just launched!

Quick update: We always get a little annoyed when technical terms are misused, so we’re the first to admit that this new feature isn’t really Augmented Reality [also pointed out by Gizmodo, DownloadSquad], but we thought AR evoked the type of controls we’ve enabled, so we titled this post accordingly. But to be accurate, it’s true 3DOF gyroscope navigation of a simulated camera view — and it’s pretty cool! And if you want to see some actual AR work we’ve done, check this out.

Some details:

• Live now for every panorama uploaded so far.
• Requires iOS 4.2+
• Allows you to physically spin around as if you were actually at the scene of the panorama.
• Doesn’t currently auto-align with compass North, but you can use touch controls to orient with north.

Let us know what you think and how we can improve it!

Since the sale of RedLaser to eBay, people have been asking what’s next for Occipital. While RedLaser has been in the limelight, the team has been hard at work on our next-generation computer vision application.

Today we’ve launched 360 Panorama (app store: $2.99): realtime panorama creation for your iPhone 4 or 3GS. Gone is the need to stitch together a series of still photographs. With 360, simply pan your phone in any direction and watch as our computer vision system builds a panorama in realtime. Capturing a panorama on your phone has never been easier.

360 Panorama is our first major release since RedLaser, and we’ve surmounted many challenges to make it happen. We’re proud to say there’s simply no other app like it.

Here’s a short video preview of 360 Panorama in action:

Video updated 12/14/10 to feature v 3.0!

Tech Note: The first release of 360 Panorama is optimized to make panorama capture extremely fast and easy so that you can share panoramas very rapidly. As we improve the precision of generated panoramas, we’ll also add options for higher resolution outputs. Current resolution of a 360 degree panorama is 2048 4096 pixels wide (which is still wider than most monitors).

Occipital has grown up a little bit since August 2009. We had survived 2009 by running on fumes and building a shiny stage-1 rocket booster called RedLaser. Back then, we were happy that RedLaser had been installed on 95,000 iPhones. RedLaser has now been installed on over 2 million iPhones. The growth was pure word-of-mouth (see the Newsweek article about it written by Vikas from November 27 2009.) And as we recently reflected with UX Magazine, we learned that user experience was tantamount to success.

2010. We spent the early months of 2010 supercharging RedLaser. We added data feeds, local results, new barcode formats, and we licensed RedLaser’s technology to 70 companies including Target.  Apple featured RedLaser in a TV ad which premiered at primetime during Lost, scanning a bright red Gaggia Espresso Machine.

It was around this time that we realized RedLaser had outgrown our basement office. Occipital is fundamentally a computer vision technology company, but we had transitioned to spend most of our time fueling a large-scale mobile commerce tool. We started laying the groundwork to scale RedLaser up and away from our core engineering focus, and it was around that same time that we started kicking around ideas with a little company called eBay that just happened to specialize in large-scale mobile commerce tools, which brings us to today’s announcement.

Today we’re announcing that RedLaser has been acquired by eBay, Inc. We are confident that eBay is a truly better home for RedLaser than Occipital.  Not  only will RedLaser continue to thrive (now free for the first time on the App Store), but we’re also excited to report that the RedLaser SDK and all of the companies it supports will continue and expand under eBay.  If you’re wondering, Occipital remains a freestanding company and we will not be moving over to eBay.  eBay has an entirely new team running RedLaser.

Tomorrow. We’re really just getting started. Remember, we were just on the crawler with our partially-completed rocket.  We no longer have our stage-1 rocket booster, but we have something even better in the works – a stellar engineering team:

Robert Grant, a Computer Science master’s alumnus from the University of Michigan, joined the team on February 18 as Occipital’s first Computer Vision Engineer.  Since then, Rob has been leading development for Occipital’s next major release, which begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital’s primary focus for the foreseeable future.

Rémi Chaignon, currently working in Paris, is starting remotely in July as our first Augmented Vision Engineer until he will join the company in Boulder this October. Rémi worked at the University of Teeside on the fundamentals of an Augmented Reality Game engine dubbed GEAR.

Shaun Werkhoven, the most recent to accept our invitation to join the team, has a PhD in Computer Vision from the University of Newcastle.  Shaun, who currently resides in Sydney until his trip to Boulder next month, deeply studied Interest Points as applied to object recognition and 3D reconstruction for his thesis.  Shaun will play a crucial role, applying his research knowledge to more optimally help us solve problems as a Computer Vision Engineer.

Without a doubt, this is the most exhilarating time in company history. We’re looking forward to the formal launch of Occipital now that we’re refocused on what we do best as a company – computer vision, and we can’t wait to watch as eBay accelerates and improves RedLaser with a new dedicated team.

If you haven’t already downloaded RedLaser – it’s free today.

I love photography.  And I like the fact that I can take digital photos on a device that fits in my pocket and is always with me.  However, I hate the fact that many of the pictures I take come out blurry just because there is a little motion in the scene or because I didn’t have the camera perfectly still for the shot.

I’m tired of guessing when everyone is standing still enough to get a good picture.  I’m tired of working so hard to keep the camera still when I take a picture.  Most importantly I’m tired of missing the truly special moments just because I can’t get the camera to stay still at the same time as everyone in the scene.  There has to be a better way!

When I found what appeared to be the solution I was estatic: ClearCam‘s quickshot mode.  A camera that took several shots and then just kept the best one – the one where the camera was still AND motion in the scene was minimal.  Brilliant!

Then disappointment set in when I realized it wasn’t in a condition to be released through the App Store.  So a long story short, I called up Jeff and Vikas and said what’s up with that?  Don’t you realize what you’ve developed is the perfect solution to this problem?  Of course they knew that but were way too busy with the success of RedLaser to put energy into it.  Kudos for that, but seriously I was missing way too many moments with this mobile camera that had everything going for it but the ability to reliably capture moments.

With no where else to turn, I reluctantly dusted off my Xcode development environment, formed a partnership with Occipital and off we went.  In the process we have taken ClearCam’s quickshot mode to the next level by virtually eliminating time required between shots (just in case there’s more than one moment to capture, or you’re just not sure which moment you will need to capture).

And finally, for the first time ever, I find myself trusting my iPhone camera.  Seriously trusting it.  For me, it has become one of the only apps I use on a daily basis.  I hope it changes mobile photography for others as much as it has for me.  It’s been fun guys, thanks.

Now if only there were an app that would help me improve those once in a lifetime shots I keep coming across without my DSLR.  There has to be a better way…

About 72 hours ago, the RedLaser 2.5 update was published to the App Store.  It was a soft-launch with our new partner, TheFind, which is the fastest growing search engine for shopping in the US with over 400 million products in its search index.  In the 2.5 release we also improved our scanning speed (6% faster), and made a handful of interface improvements.

Behind the scenes, we were racing to get the technology ready for Black Friday, and in our rush, we made a mistake.  In the US (and initially in the UK, too), we completely replaced Google Product Search with TheFind. We were overconfident in the volume of search results that would be immediately available from TheFind alone.  Over the last 72 hours, based on your feedback, we and TheFind realized that this wasn’t the right decision for RedLaser users.  In response, effective immediately, as of this posting, we have re-enabled Google Product Search results and are now providing them along with TheFind’s Product Search results. This means that in almost every case, we will have substantially better search results in version 2.5 than in the last version, 2.2.

The only case where RedLaser will now display fewer results is for some products on Amazon.com.  The reason is that Amazon has a policy that prohibits querying their API from mobile applications unless they give explicit written permission.  We asked for permission a few months ago, and were told “No.”  We then tried a number of work-arounds and unfortunately, Amazon asked us to remove them as well.  Despite the limitation, in some cases Google and TheFind may be able to provide Amazon results and will include them when possible.

Meanwhile, we knew it would be extremely frustrating to users if we removed Amazon with nothing in its place.  So we began working on a partnership with TheFind.  TheFind, we soon found out, has an incredible product search engine that is comparable to Google.  They include products from over 500,000 stores and online sellers, a number that continues to grow.  By featuring results from TheFind, we can now show local results for many products, a request of many RedLaser users.  They also have coupons, reviews, local addresses, and comprehensive store information, which we can’t wait to start tapping into.  Previously, with Google as our primary search provider, we were limited in how we could improve RedLaser.  Occipital is first and foremost a mobile computer vision company.  (That means we’re rocket scientists when it comes to image processing, but not when it comes to crawling the Internet for products.) Despite a lot of great ideas, we didn’t have the resources to focus on both computer vision and better results. With TheFind, we now have a partner committed to helping Occipital improve mobile product search relevance, the accuracy of barcode data, as well as providing information never before available in RedLaser, starting with local results (They’re rocket scientists when it comes to shopping.)

We’re confident that our partnership with TheFind is going to be a great one ― one that is focused on creating the best user experience possible and eventually paving the way for a new kind of shopping. Occipital will continue to build the best vision-based technology to power RedLaser’s barcode scanner (and barcode scanning is just the tip of the iceberg), while TheFind will innovate new ways to provide you great shopping search results.  We stumbled a little with our rushed launch, but we’re back on track, and we hope that RedLaser will always be your trusted companion for mobile product search.

Keep the feedback coming.  We’re listening and improving.

Thank you for using RedLaser.

Additional Release Notes:

• TheFind and Google Product search are now enabled for the US and UK.  Google Product Search also supports searching for results in Euros, so RedLaser can be used today with Google Product Search in Europe.  In other vicinities, we currently cannot surface listings.  Let us know if you have data sources we should look into, and if you have one that can already be searched via barcode, check out RedLaser custom apps.
• Custom Apps improved:  As in 2.2, you can create a RedLaser custom app that searches just about any website with barcode, and in 2.5, we’ve improved the launch screen to make it seamless, and added a built-in browser so you don’t have to redirect back to Mobile Safari after you’ve scanned in your custom app ( use “noexit=YES” ).  We’ll keep improving Custom Apps so that RedLaser is even more useful in areas where our coverage is poor.

We’ve been getting a lot of requests that look like this:

I love RedLaser, but can you please add my favorite site X to your search results?

Can you send the barcode I scanned to site X for logging?

We thought this might happen, so we embedded a feature in RedLaser 2.2 that lets you search any website by barcode. But until now, we haven’t announced the feature.

RedLaser Custom Apps is now live! After you’ve installed RedLaser, check out this page: redlaser.com/apps (best viewed on an iPhone).

Pre-built popular custom apps

Build your own custom app

Your new custom app!

Try building an app by following the instructions and let us know what you think. We’d also love some suggestions for other sites to add to our “popular” custom apps list.

We’re excited to see what RedLaser Custom Apps get built and used!

By the way if you like RedLaser, we also launched two other iPhone application last week -FoodScanner (partnership with DailyBurn), and Snapture (partnership with SnaptureLabs). All three of these apps are doing well – they’re all in the top 100 paid apps on the App Store and RedLaser is at #2!

******* EDIT *************

We just added the option to convert scanned barcodes to UPC if the site you are searching only supports UPC format.  On the RedLaser Custom Apps page, when building an app, simply check the “Convert to UPC” box, and the app you create will convert to UPC before searching.