Breakthroughs in Sensors

David Hall had a building to fill. In the 1980s, the company he started, Velodyne, built subwoofers. Back in the day, they were the best subwoofers because they were the first to be digitally controlled. Audio fans lined up to get one, since they made your audio system dramatically better. But by around 2000, he realized that China had taken over manufacturing, so he sent his production to China since he couldn't get parts anymore to build them within the United States, as he told us in an interview here: https://youtu.be/2SPnovjRSVM.

Photo credit: Rocky Barbanica. Velodyne founder/CEO, David Hall, shows off his LIDARs and talks about his career as an inventor of everything from new kinds of subwoofers to self-leveling boats.

That left him with an empty building, so he started looking for new things to do. He heard of the DARPA Grand Challenge, a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a prominent research organization of the US Department of Defense, and readied a vehicle to enter to attempt to win the $1 million prize. The military wanted to spur development of autonomous vehicles. Hall soon realized he didn't have the software engineers needed to win, because he was against teams of university students from schools like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, but that showed him a new market: making sensors for the other teams. He had the engineers and production ability, thanks to his empty building, to do that, and so he started building LIDARs.

LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is the spinning thing you see on top of autonomous cars often seen driving around San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Most of them are from Velodyne. Google's early cars used his LIDARs, which spun dozens of lasers many times a second. The cars used that data to build a 3D model of the world around the car. "If they have a spinning one, that's mine," he told us.

Invisible light from his spinning device bounces off the road, signs, other vehicles, and the rest of the world, or in the case of his boat, waves in the ocean. A computer inside measures how fast the light returns to the sensor and makes the 3D model of the world. Without these sensors, the car or robot can't see, so it can't navigate around the world. His new technology plays an important role in Spatial Computing because it gave computer scientists new data to train new kinds of systems. Google Maps, for instance, is better, its head of R&D, Peter Norvig, told us, because as it used Hall's LIDARs, it trained a system to gather data about street signs the car was passing.

"(Starting a LIDAR company) was over everyone's dead body," he said, because his company was so focused on making subwoofers. "I look for things that are electrical and mechanical." He convinced his team that they had a new market and a new thing to do, and now is an important player in the autonomous car space. He also used them to build a boat that won't make you sick (computers control hydraulic lifts to glide over waves).

In 2019, Google also used that data to turn on new Augmented Reality navigation features, where data from your phone's camera was used to compare with 3D models of the street built using data gathered from one of Hall's LIDARs. It is this impulse to build machines that can better see, and hence, make humans more powerful, that enabled these new features and for that, Hall is an American engineering star who is bringing us a whole new world. As we're about to see, this sort of development was not only happening in America, with sensors attached to a Spatial Computing device much smaller than an autonomous car.

Thousands of miles away, in Tel Aviv, Israel, was another innovator working on similar 3D mapping technology, and had a similar philosophy about how 3D sensors would soon play a key role in making human life better. That man is Aviad Maizels, and he started PrimeSense. PrimeSense was purchased by Apple and did much of the engineering on the sensor inside modern iPhones that see your face in 3D, which lets them unlock just by seeing your face, and soon will do much more.

Maizels told us back in 2013 that 3D sensors would soon be on everything. We met Maizels at the company's first suite at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where his company showed what 3D sensors could do―everything from seeing you buying cereal boxes to drawing on a standard desk with your finger. Today's Amazon stores demonstrate his vision was correct. In them, sensors watch you take products off the shelves and properly charge you with no registers or lines to wait in, saving you time and hassle.

It is worthwhile, though, to go back to that booth and take a look at how large PrimeSense's sensor was back then. In just a few years, it would shrink 20 times down to fit in the notch on current iPhones. Soon, it may disappear altogether since standard cameras now can build 3D models of the world, which has been proven by companies like recently acquired 6D.ai, which can do much more with a standard camera than even PrimeSense demonstrated in that suite back in 2013 in this video: https://youtu.be/4VtXvj4X0CE.

Even in autonomous cars, this argument between using standard cameras and 3D sensors is still playing out. Tesla's engineers told us that they are betting on cameras instead of the more expensive LIDARs that companies like Velodyne are producing.

If you visit Silicon Valley, you will see lots of autonomous cars from companies like Cruise, now owned by General Motors, Waymo, formerly of Google, and others, all using LIDAR to sense the world around the car, while Tesla is betting on cameras, along with a few cheaper sensors like radar and ultrasonic sensors.

Photo Credit: Robert Scoble. PrimeSense founder/CEO shows off the 3D sensor he and his team invented. This technology has now been sold to Apple, which shrunk it and included a similar sensor on the top of modern iPhones, where it senses your face to unlock your phone or do Augmented Reality "Animojis."

That is a tangential argument to the one that we are making. These innovators brought our machines new ways to see and because of that, we now have new ways to see ourselves and the world we live in, which will grant us superpowers, including ways to be remembered by future generations that only science fiction dreamed about before.