VIO was first implemented at Boston military/industrial supplier Intersense in the mid 2000s. One of the co-inventors Leonid Naimark was the chief scientist at my startup Dekko in 2011. After Dekko proved that VIO could not run on an IPad 2 due to sensor limitations, Leonid went back to military contracting, but Dekko’s CTO Pierre Georgel is now a senior engineer on the Google Daydream team. Ogmento was founded by my Super Ventures partner Ori Inbar. Ogmento became FlyBy and the team there successfully built a VIO system on IOS leveraging an add-on fish eye camera. This code-base was licenced to Google which became the VIO system for Tango. Apple later bought FlyBy and the same codebase is the core of ARKit VIO. The CTO of FlyBy, Chris Broaddus, went on to build the tracker for Daqri, and is now at an autonomous robotics company, with the former Chief Scientst of Zoox, who did his post-doc at Oxford (alongside my co-founder at 6D.ai who currently leads the Active Vision Lab). The first mobile SLAM system was developed around 2007 at the Oxford Active Computing lab (PTAM) by Georg Klein who went on to build the VIO system for Hololens, along with David Nister, who left to build the autonomy system at Tesla. George’s fellow PhD student Gerhard Reitmayr led the development of Vuforia’s VIO system. The Eng leader of Vuforia, Eitan Pilipski is now leading AR software engineering at Snap. Key members of the research teams at Oxford, Cambridge & Imperial College developed the Kinect tracking systems, and now lead tracking teams at Oculus and Magic Leap.
