
Show HN: 3D sensing SDK for iOS – Produces point cloud and 6DOF device motion - benhirashima
http://www.realitycap.com
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z-e-r-o
Really impressive! Nice name, video, website!

However I would strongly recommend picking only one of your "features", the
indoor navigation. If I were you, I'd definitely try to build a business by
concentrating only on indoor navigation!

Indoor navigation is a huge new area where all the big players are looking for
possible partners/acquisitions right now! Overlay-based AR, and the measuring
tape demo is a joke compared what you've shown in indoor navigation!

You really have a chance of making a successful company based only on the
indoor navigation feature. Forget the pricing for now, just offer it as a free
beta on both iOS and Android and try to get the word out as much as you can.

Good luck!

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junto
I know of several large companies that would be seriously interested in the
measurement feature. Manually measuring the rooms in a house is seriously time
consuming.

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chrisdevereux
Looks very cool, but it feels like there's a big gap between Evaluation
(online only, low API call limit) and Enterprise ("contact us") pricing
models.

Not sure what market you're ultimately going for, but right now it seems to
defeat the point of providing a nice simple API if it's only usable for either
throwaway projects or by very large customers.

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eaglej
You make a great point, and we certainly don't want to exclude the in-between
cases. We're still figuring out what those pricing tiers might look like, so
if you've got an application that you're excited about, just let us know and
we'll figure out a way to make it work!

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jeremyflores
Really amazing product! Is the form on your site the most expedient way to get
in touch/get access to the SDK? Also, is the error accumulation small enough
so that you could use the product continuously for extended periods of time?

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eaglej
Thanks! Yes, please use the form on the site. We're pretty busy today with our
launch, but we promise to get it to you ASAP. And yes, usage over longer
periods of time is possible.

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feniv
Very cool! Can you give a brief overview of the underlying technology you use
to extract the distance data back out from a 2D image?

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yetanotherphd
I'm fairly sure that the tech is based around "structure from motion". The API
simultaneously estimates the position of the camera at each point in time, and
the location of some reference points (blue circles in the vid).

Because the device has an accelerometer, it is even able to extract distances,
not just relative distances. I'm actually surprised by this as I always
assumed the accelerometer was too noisy to be of use for this.

I tried to do a similar thing myself, but the problem is technically very
difficult. While a lot of research has been done on structure from motion,
actually packaging it into a usable API is a big task

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sytelus
Accelerators are worthless to measure distances even if they were super
precise. This is because you have to do double integration to get distance and
the errors only accumulates. My guess is that they have used algorithms like
SIFT to track points in space and estimate only small relative distances from
sensors (gyro + accelerators). This is however is very cool. They should make
this as an app that can construct 3D model (i.e. turning iPhone in to 3D
scanner) and ability to send the model for printing.

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yetanotherphd
>Accelerators are worthless to measure distances even if they were super
precise. This is because you have to do double integration to get distance and
the errors only accumulates.

I never said that a distance scale was obtained by applying double integration
to the accelerometer output. I only said that in order to measure absolute
distances, as opposed to relative distances, it is necessary to have an
accelerometer, since no other data provides an absolute scale. See the other
reply by one of the founders for the details.

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rmah
This technology is awesome! If it's half as impressive in real life as the
demo suggests you have done a fantastic job creating some really innovative
technology. I wish you the best of luck in turning it into a real business!

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cookingrobot
I would love to see this combined with object extraction to make 3d models
from the measurements. Here's an amazing demo:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM)

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dharma1
looks cool. You could probably use this for stabilising video footage

