Wednesday, April 2, 2014

From color gloves to tiny cameras: 3Gear raises $1.9M

We started 3Gear Systems with the singular goal of creating a gesture recognition system that actually works. We've been disappointed by what's currently available, and felt that with our backgrounds, we could build something a lot better—something reliable enough and powerful enough to become a basic part of interacting with a computer. Since we founded the company in March 2012, we've stayed lean and 100% focused on solving the hard computer vision and human-computer interaction problems involved in building the world's best gesture recognition technology.

Our latest work uses a tiny front-facing depth camera to precisely track a user's gestures
MIT thesis work on color gloves Original two-Kinect hand tracker Single depth camera,
arbitrary gestures

What started as a project from one of our co-founder's PhD work at MIT, evolved into a system that used two Kinect cameras set on a gantry-like frame, to one that used a single camera, to one that now uses a tiny camera that sits on your laptop or beneath your monitor. When we started, our technology could track a hand in six poses and required fifteen minutes to calibrate each new user. Today our system can track arbitrary 10-finger gestures and takes under a second to calibrate. Lastly, we've designed a catalog of gestures around activities our users care about, including browsing the web, watching videos, playing games and manipulating 3D models.

We're proud to announce today that we've raised $1.9M in a seed round led by K9 Ventures, with participation from Intel Capital, CrunchFund, Ovo Fund (Eric Chen), Safa Rashtchy and others. We're excited about the progress we've made with our technology, but are even more excited about what the future holds as we begin building our technology into consumer products.

We're growing our team. Come join us to build a more powerful way to interact with computers.