Vergence Labs
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| Vergence Labs | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Industry | Smart glasses, wearable computing |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Founder | Erick Miller, Jon Rodriguez |
| Headquarters | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Notable Personnel | Erick Miller (CEO), Jon Rodriguez (chief scientist), Peter Brook, David Meisenholder |
| Products | Epiphany Eyewear |
| Parent | Snap Inc. |
Vergence Labs was an American startup that made Epiphany Eyewear, a line of smart glasses with a camera in the frame that recorded point-of-view video at the press of a button. Erick Miller and Jon Rodriguez founded the company in 2011.[1][2] Before settling on camera glasses, the founders built augmented reality prototypes, including a head-worn display that matched faces against the wearer's Facebook friends.[3]
Snapchat (now Snap Inc.) acquired Vergence Labs in early 2014. The deal was not announced; it became public in December 2014, when emails stolen in the hack of Sony Pictures showed terms reported as 15 million US dollars.[4] Business Insider later traced the origin of Snap's Spectacles camera glasses to the Vergence team.[5]
History
Founding
Miller came up with the idea for computer eyewear while studying for an MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rodriguez, then a Stanford University student, was separately working on a volumetric 3D display. Rodriguez tweeted about the display, Miller followed the link from Hacker News, and he proposed that they start a computer eyewear company together.[6] Rodriguez built the technology as part of a computer science honors thesis at Stanford and quit an internship at Facebook to work on it.[2] According to Business Insider, the thesis described "assembling an augmented reality computer with video screens and headphones as output, and inputs consisting of gaze tracking, EEG, finger tracking, and GPS."[5]
Before joining Vergence, Miller had worked in computer graphics and visual effects, including at Walt Disney Animation Studios and Sony.[7] In a 2013 interview, Miller told VentureBeat that the team had been working on the project since May 2011 and that Vergence was formed in December 2011.[6] The company's own product site later gave a slightly different timeline: product and business planning in early 2011, a first patent filing in May 2011, an informal start in September 2011 and incorporation as a Delaware corporation in 2012.[8]
In April 2012 the company was based in Palo Alto and had recently been accepted into StartX, Stanford's startup accelerator program.[7][5] By April 2013 VentureBeat gave its headquarters as Menlo Park, California, with a planned move to Los Angeles.[6] The company's later address was on West 2nd Street in Los Angeles.[8]
Early prototypes
Vergence's first prototypes were broader in ambition than the glasses it eventually sold. In February 2012, PCMag described a prototype pair of AR goggles that Rodriguez said could recognize people from the profile photos of the wearer's Facebook friends. The prototype ran Android and resembled ski goggles or a motorcycle helmet, with two front-facing cameras. Rodriguez had presented the glasses at the 2011 Open Science Summit.[3] Singularity Hub described the same face-naming visor demo in April 2012, along with video glasses and electric sunglasses.[7] HuffPost reported in May 2012 that the company was also developing an immersive 3D visor that covered most of the face and was intended for virtual reality.[9]
Business Insider later reported that the team ran more than a dozen experiments, including the face-recognition helmet display and a drone that could be flown with hand gestures.[5] PCMag quoted Miller in February 2012 as writing that the company was making "3D gesture, eye tracking and brain interfaces" for a wearable head-mounted computer, starting with recording and sharing what the wearer sees.[3] Because the company had no funding to build expensive hardware, the founders narrowed their first product to a pair of video-recording glasses styled after Ray-Ban frames.[5]
Crowdfunding and investors
In April 2012 Vergence launched a crowdfunding campaign with a goal of 50,000 US dollars for its computer eyewear. Singularity Hub, VentureBeat and Business Insider identified the platform as Indiegogo, although HuffPost reported it as a Kickstarter campaign.[7][1][9] In May 2012 the planned prices were 199 US dollars for pre-orders and 299 US dollars at retail.[9][10] Business Insider put the total raised by the 2012 Indiegogo campaign at 70,000 US dollars.[5]
Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, whom Business Insider described as the startup's first investor, said he invested after meeting Rodriguez at a talk at Stanford. Adam Draper also invested after hearing Miller pitch at a 2012 dinner in Palo Alto.[5] VentureBeat's 2013 list of investors also named Tim Draper and Joel Yarmon.[6] According to Business Insider, the company tried and failed to raise a Series A round, as investors showed little interest in wearable computers at the time.[5]
Acquisition by Snapchat
Business Insider's account says that in early November 2013 a business adviser to Vergence, Eli Calderón Morin, suggested a partnership with Snapchat, which was also based in Los Angeles. Rodriguez knew Evan Spiegel from Stanford, where the two had lived on the same dormitory floor as freshmen. Snapchat brought on most of the team about four months later.[5] Documents from the leaked Sony emails dated the acquisition to March 2014.[4]
The purchase was never announced. Its terms surfaced in December 2014 in the leaked inbox of Sony Entertainment chief executive Michael Lynton, who sat on Snapchat's board. Business Insider and VentureBeat reported the price as 15 million US dollars, made up of 11 million US dollars in cash and 4 million US dollars in stock.[4][1] The board resolution quoted by Business Insider described a stock purchase agreement under which Vergence Labs, Inc. would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Snapchat for up to 15 million US dollars. Of that, 11 million US dollars was payable at closing (less transaction expenses and repayment of a loan made before signing), and 4 million US dollars was held back to vest monthly over 24 months, tied to the continued employment of the stockholders; the resolution described both payments as cash. Another email, sent days before the deal terms were circulated, showed Snapchat lending Vergence 2 million US dollars.[4] Cheever told Business Insider that Miller informed him of the sale without naming the buyer.[5]
At Snap
Miller left Snap after six months as its director of technology. As of November 2016, Rodriguez, Peter Brook, David Meisenholder and a few other former Vergence employees were working at Snap on the Spectacles team and at Snap Labs, according to Business Insider. Rodriguez described himself on his LinkedIn profile as the "architect" behind Spectacles.[5] Snap's first Spectacles were 130 US dollar camera glasses that, like Epiphany Eyewear, recorded video at the press of a button. They went on sale in November 2016 from a vending machine near the Venice Beach boardwalk.[5]
Epiphany Eyewear
Epiphany Eyewear opened for pre-orders on 5 April 2013. Vergence also announced an application programming interface for third-party apps; video could be shared through the company's own site, YouGen.tv.[6] Android Headlines reported in January 2014 that the first shipments had begun earlier that month, with new orders limited to pre-orders.[11] By late December 2014, after the acquisition, the product site showed the glasses as sold out.[8]
Designer David Meisenholder, one of the company's first hires, had earlier worked on the GL20 camera glasses that Polaroid tried to sell in 2011 with Lady Gaga.[6][5] They copied the look of a thick-framed Wayfarer and were made of a thermopolymer that the company called "plastic titanium".[8][11] A single button on the right temple started and stopped recording, and a small LED visible in the wearer's peripheral vision blinked blue while recording and purple while live streaming.[8] The base model had no display beyond a blinking LED indicator, and the company said it was developing a detachable display add-on.[8] In 2013 The Stanford Daily reported that critics cited the lack of a display for watching recorded videos as a limitation.[2] The frames had a groove for fitting prescription lenses.[8]
| Item | Specification |
|---|---|
| Storage and launch price | 8 GB for 299 US dollars; 16 GB for 399 US dollars; 32 GB for 499 US dollars[6][8] |
| Video | 720p HD with audio[8] |
| Camera lens | "HD 720p Wide Angle 160 degree camera"[11] |
| Recording time per storage size | About 2 hours (8 GB), 4 hours (16 GB), 8 hours (32 GB)[8] |
| Battery life | 1 to 2 hours of continuous recording, depending on usage[8] |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi and USB; micro-USB port for charging and data transfer[8][12] |
| Control | One tactile button on the right temple[8] |
Recorded video was transferred to a laptop, desktop or compatible mobile device through the YouGen.tv application, which could edit clips, sync files to cloud storage and live stream to a Facebook wall.[8] Earlier reports had described the lenses as electrically switchable sunglasses that the wearer could toggle with a button.[6][9] By December 2014 the product site instead listed removable "Electric Transition Sunglass Lenses" among accessories that were coming soon or in development. That list also included Glance AR, a detachable display add-on for phone notifications, and a heart-rate LED heads-up display from Sportiiiis, which slid onto a rail on the lower left side of the frame.[8] By early 2014 the team had also developed, but not released, gesture-control software that could fly a Parrot drone with hand movements.[11][5]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Kia Kokalitcheva (2014-12-16). "Snapchat paid $15M for Vergence Labs, a Google Glass-like startup". VentureBeat. https://venturebeat.com/business/snapchat-paid-15m-for-vergence-labs-a-google-glass-like-startup. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Kiana Hui (2013-04-15). "Alum turns honors thesis into Google Glass competitor". The Stanford Daily. https://stanforddaily.com/2013/04/15/alum-turns-honors-thesis-into-google-glass-competitor/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Mark Hachman (2012-02-21). "Augmented-Reality Goggles Can ID Forgotten Friends". PCMag. Archived from the original on 2018-08-01. https://web.archive.org/web/20180801190654/https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400509,00.asp. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 James Cook, Alyson Shontell, Jay Yarow (2014-12-16). "It Looks Like Snapchat Paid $15 Million To Buy A Google Glass-Like Startup". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2026-02-19. https://web.archive.org/web/20260219142747/https://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-acquires-vergence-labs-2014-12. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 Alex Heath (2016-11-23). "How Snapchat secretly bought a struggling startup, then bet the future on it". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2026-07-23. https://web.archive.org/web/20260723233332/https://www.businessinsider.com/untold-story-vergence-labs-snapchat-acquired-spectacles-2016-11. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 Dean Takahashi (2013-04-05). "Why wait for Google Glass? Epiphany Eyewear is here now (exclusive)". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 2022-07-05. https://web.archive.org/web/20220705113934/https://venturebeat.com/2013/04/05/why-wait-for-google-glass-epiphany-eyewear-is-here-now-exclusive/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Aaron Saenz (2012-04-09). "Talking With the Founders of Vergence Labs: First Steps Towards Merging Man and Machine". Singularity Hub. https://singularityhub.com/2012/04/09/talking-with-the-founders-of-vergence-labs-as-they-take-the-first-steps-towards-merging-man-and-machine/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 8.00 8.01 8.02 8.03 8.04 8.05 8.06 8.07 8.08 8.09 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14 "Epiphany Eyewear". Epiphany Eyewear (Vergence Labs). Archived from the original on 2014-12-30. https://web.archive.org/web/20141230102440/http://www.epiphanyeyewear.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Sara Gates (2012-05-22). "Computer-Enabled Eyewear: Vergence Labs Prototype Allows Wearers To Record Reality (VIDEO)". HuffPost. Archived from the original on 2016-10-02. https://web.archive.org/web/20161002094256/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/22/computer-enabled-eyewear-vergence-labs_n_1537114.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ "Video-recording glasses developed, with Clarke Kent style". Digit. 2012-05-25. https://www.digit.in/news/mobile-phones/video-recording-glasses-developed-with-clarke-kent-style-9635.html. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 Samantha P. Hawthorne (2014-01-18). "Experience Your Life in High-Definition with Epiphany Eyewear". Android Headlines. https://www.androidheadlines.com/?p=311949. Retrieved 2026-10-15.
- ↑ "Vergence Labs: Smart Computing Eyewear". Vergence Labs. Archived from the original on 2013-12-19. https://web.archive.org/web/20131219154452/http://www.vergencelabs.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-15.