Changing Consumer Technology

by Scott Lacourse | Nov 20, 2019

The capabilities of consumer technology have changed rapidly, opening up opportunities for new advances in simple-to-use AR technology. Putting the power of AR and AI in the hands of everyday consumers can have a huge impact on how we navigate both daily life and unusual events. In part 2 of our interview with plnar CTO Dan Jovanovic, we discuss how he stays inspired to innovate plnar’s platform and where he sees technological advances intersecting with his vision for the company’s future.

When I’m faced with an innovation challenge, I usually start with some kind of concept: what would be really useful? What would be really mind-blowingly cool to do? What would solve a headache for someone? Then I enter into cycles where spend a lot of time thinking on it, and then backing away from the problem completely to be able to re-approach it fresh. At some point, it clicks—I see how to get there and start doing all the tactical work to prove out the idea and eventually, make it happen.

For me to be able to do this well, I have to keep my head free and clear and stay deeply immersed in industry trends. I’ve always been proud of the fact that plnar has been at the edge of industry and consumer trends, and to keep that going I have to stay really focused.

The long-term success of the company is really important to me, because I think our technology truly makes a difference in people’s lives.

Our success as a company will mean more simplicity, success and ease for consumers who are usually dealing with an unfortunate event in their lives, like damage to their property.

For example, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, we saw our plnar Pro app top the Apple app charts for two weeks. I think about where we were then and where we are now, and how important a platform like plnar is when we are dealing with massive, widespread damage to such a big, bustling city like Houston. Giving consumers the power and peace of mind to deal with their insurance during a truly horrible time and not have to wait for days, weeks, maybe even months for an adjuster to come out is great.

Even in high school, I wanted to be an entrepreneur and make society just a little bit better off. I am happy that I get to do something today that would make my younger self proud.

The idea for SmartPix is really what drove the development of the whole company. The original idea behind PLNAR as a company was: what kind of business could you create if you could generate measurable pictures with commodity mobile hardware?  If these “smart” pictures (SmartPix) could embed measurements, then have those measurements shared and redone as needed, you could really make an impact in a number of verticals including insurance, home improvement, machining, etc.

What we found early on was that mobile hardware wasn’t quite ready to execute this vision at the time of our founding. As such, we explored tangential technologies for the first few years but eventually, when the hardware and software APIs were ready, we dialed everything in and SmartPix was ready for prime-time. The SmartPix concept is simple: take pictures with your smartphone, enable them to be measurable with no additional accessories, and deploy them into markets where they can have the most benefit for the most people. It took us a few years to get here but here we are. Finally!

What we needed was simplicity in our flow and to present users with a UX they are already familiar with. Think about it.  What most people know how to do with smartphones out of the box are things like browse, take pictures, send texts/emails, listen to music, etc. I think of these abstractly as “lizard brain” constructs. Eventually people begin accumulating custom apps with increasingly complex UX flows that require repetition and learning to be able to use effectively, in other words “wizard brain” constructs.

Our original app incarnation, PLNAR Pro, falls very much into the latter category. We found that motivated professionals could learn how to use our app in about 15-30min but that one-time users, and especially those in the middle of natural catastrophes, simply weren’t ready for this amount of up-front effort. What we needed was something in the former category with UX that people would latch onto intuitively and complete a flow with minimal effort. This is where SmartPix really makes a difference.

To the user, they are just taking pictures but SmartPix bundles in data behind the scenes which allows entire interiors spaces to be created from the accumulated data in our back-end.

This means that users don’t have to wait for an insurance adjuster or repair person to come to their house. Instead, an accurate 3D model of their space is sent to the adjuster (or whoever needs it) with the capability to measure and create an estimate with over 10x reduction in cycle time.

The insurance industry has already experienced such an impact in the automotive space with simple photo apps producing significant improvements in claim processing time and customer satisfaction. The property insurance space is much more dependent on custom measurements which makes it perfectly attuned to the combination of photo-taking UX and custom measurement capability offered by SmartPix. Our early work with our insurance partners is proving this out and we are very excited about what lies ahead.

The mobile hardware space continues to be a big point of focus for us going forward. When we started out the most advanced mobile devices had 2 cores and a generally underutilized GPU. Now devices moving past 6 CPU cores with custom GPU derived hardware capable of running advanced AI algorithms. We see this trend continuing and by staying poised to take advantage of the latest performance gains, literally every year as they come out, we almost intrinsically align our roadmap with emerging industry trends. For example, when Apple released ARKit for the first time in 2017, we derived a prototype and posted a demo video within a week. It went viral on Twitter and ended up with us being the number one featured app on the App Store for two weeks.

In addition to mobile, we are also increasingly putting a lot of focus into the cloud. The app-cloud interaction is what allows us to create the leaps in space-time (e.g. creating and sending 3D interior models around the world in seconds) that delight our partners and their customers. We also see the cloud as rich terrain for deploying increasing advanced AI models to bring our data capture to the next level.

Although we are focused on insurance at present, there are also numerous opportunities to extend our tech stack into other business verticals. I’ve already mentioned home remodeling. In this space, we see having a 3D model available for every house you buy or apartment you rent as being increasingly indispensable. Every time someone would want to update their kitchen, remodel their bathroom, or preview their furniture before moving in, these our models would be ready and available. This couples perfectly with the broader trend towards interior mapping that’s increasingly gaining ground.

If you missed part 1 of Dan’s interview, check it out here.

Meeting of the Minds

by Scott Lacourse | Oct 15, 2019

An Interview with Dr. Dejan (Dan) Jovanovic, CTO – Part 1

Tell us about your experiences with AR and computer vision, high-performance computing, advanced electronics, applied physics, and mathematics.

How exactly have these experiences informed the vision and expertise you bring to Plnar?

Truth be told, the vision I bring for Plnar was informed just as much by luck as it was by my prior experience. I had gotten back from a 5 year expat stint in Europe and Asia when I was approached with the idea of making smartphone photographs fully measurable.

At first, the idea was to use laser accessories to provide depth and scale in photos. I did some work with semiconductor laser and photonic crystal simulation while at Los Alamos so that dovetailed with the early prototype. However, it became clear that to really make an impact in the market, we would need to ditch expensive accessories and move to a more commodity based approach.

At the time, smartphone-based augmented reality (AR) was just coming on the scene and the state-of-the-art was marker-based AR. We explored this space and discovered that we could design a custom AR  marker that would achieve both camera pose accuracy and scalability beyond what was presently available. We quickly kitted up a demo app to pitch the concept to the Austin investor community. This eventually got us into Austin’s Capital Factory, which was a great setting to incubate the idea and to develop a go-to-market strategy. The product eventually evolved into an app-cloud platform with the potential to build 3D models from smartphone pictures. This led to funding, which has all led to where we are now.

So to answer your question, it was a combination of my background, the connections I’ve made throughout my career, and a bit of luck that together produced Plnar’s technology stack as it exists today.

I understand that you’ve generated five patents – can you give us a little background on what they encompass?

The patents have built on each other over time. Much of Plnar’s early IP is built on our custom AR marker design. If you aren’t familiar, AR used to function with markers, which would leverage a specific geometric shape that devices would detect, use its reference coordinate points, and then map onto those references. We made our own custom version that worked with a still photograph, and the first couple of patents focused on that marker, its design elements, where it could be used, etc.

Another patent that we never productized used the marker to get the phone camera’s position while emitting a laser line, and creating a very cheap, easily accessible laser scanner. It’s a very cool application but never gained traction due difficulties getting the laser accessory into people’s hands. It was at this point that we re-focused on building a tech-stack that operated solely on a user’s smartphone and nothing else

The big breakthrough came in 2017 when Apple released ARKit (their proprietary AR SDK). We immediately saw its value and patented the entire AR flow for the Plnar app. This flow is what you see when using our app: you add points around the perimeter of the room, then you build the walls, then you add the ceiling, add doors and windows, create objects, etc. This flow creates a model of the space while simultaneously measuring it, which makes our app unique and powerful.

In May 2019, we were approved for a provisional patent that extends our AR patent to our ability to measure in any still photograph. This is truly getting to the core of what was originally envisioned when founding SmartPicture, because it allows virtually anyone to build a 3D model of a room just by taking photos. It feels like the rest of the smart device world is finally catching up and developing capabilities that make our original vision possible. We always knew we would get there, it was just a matter of timing.

Stay tuned for part two of our interview with Dan to learn more about where he finds inspiration for innovation and how he sees Plnar’s technology evolving in the future!

Digital Desk Platform Story Visualized – 2

by Scott Lacourse | Sep 24, 2019

Many of us are visually wired and most of us suffer from information overload. That is why infographics can be such a useful communication vehicle and why we created a two part infographic series summarizing our recent blog post, Powering-up the Digital Desk: Enabling Virtual Claims for Interior Property Damage.

In series 1, we highlight the market need for a digital desk approach, the key drivers and challenges. Series 2 highlights the history of the digital desk from the early days of desk adjusting to today’s digital transformation.

Here is Series 1 – a quick rundown of Plnar’s Digital Desk Platform – you can’t enable a virtual claims strategy without it!