#141 - Diana Hu

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast.
Today's episode is about augmented reality, and it's with Diana Hu. Diana co-founded Escher Reality, which went through the YC Summer 2017 batch. They were acquired by Niantic, so she's now head of their AR platform.
Diana's on Twitter at SdianaHu. All right, here we go. All right, Diana Hu, welcome to the podcast.

**Diana Hu** (0:27)
Thank you for having me here, Craig.

**Craig Cannon** (0:30)
So maybe we should start from now and then go backwards in time. So you're working on AR at Niantic after your company, Escher Reality, has been acquired.
How did you serendipitously stumble into AR?

**Diana Hu** (0:44)
Into AR? Well, AR is a funny field. It's not like a single discipline. AR is a culmination of so many fields.
To really build a great experience for augmented reality, you need, of course, part the computer vision aspect to be able to take sensor image data to understand the world, graphics to render it. Then there's actually a lot of engineering to make all this run in real time. So systems, distributed systems, to make the experience just gel together. Plus, to get it working at some point in devices, you have hardware, optics, and there's so many of those pieces into it. Personally, I've come from a very diverse technical background.
I've done before, I worked a lot in cloud television before and recommender systems and doing analysis on television streams with computer vision techniques. So that was one space. I was in the space of semiconductors at Intel. So I understood a few things about hardware. And coming into AR was an interesting point because it's such a kind of, I really do think, it's the next technology evolution. So we went from desktop, mobile, and next one in terms of representing information in a very rich way. It's going to be the space of mixed reality with AR, VR and beyond.
And that will take many, many disciplines to join in to do something interesting. The reason coming into AR was that part. Plus, just I think always been interested in some sense of the possibilities of what AR could do. So a lot of curious, very curious about that, what it could take us to be able to see information, blend in in the real. This concept of pixels, photons, where's the line to narrow between pixels and photons?

**Craig Cannon** (2:53)
Do you recall the kind of first exposure you had to it, where it clicked?

**Diana Hu** (2:59)
Where it clicked?

**Craig Cannon** (3:00)
Yeah.

**Diana Hu** (3:03)
First exposure, so I think part of it is, the thing that I really enjoyed about AR is about being engaged in reality instead of escaping it, where imagination to show or tell a story is really used to engage even more so, more deeply, with more layers of information represented, rather than really escaping it, where the magic in AR is not just whimsical. The reason why magic is so magical is that, in AR is that you see a lot of the digital representation believable there.
In the past, I did help some start-ups build some projects way, way back. One of them was building a 3D light field display. So basically, you could see 3D without glasses. It was like, oh, that's really cool. It's like holograms in Star Wars.
So that was one part. And then you start peeling the onion of what are all the pieces needed from the technology. And AR is a fundamental piece to build this new kind of infrastructure to just change the way we do computation for information.

**Craig Cannon** (4:28)
And so obviously, like Niantic, you're working on games. At what point do you think AR becomes this kind of like first-class citizen in media, you know, alongside video, photo, I guess audio?

**Diana Hu** (4:44)
Yeah, I think it will take time because we're at the early stages. I think the progress of technology has like different cycles. I mean, if you read some of the work by Carlota Perez, who was an economist talking about innovation cycles, there's like big two stages. Stage number one is when technology gets installed, quote, unquote.
So installation types of technologies are when the applications are not ready to be built because you really need the tooling to be able to express those applications. And examples of types of installation types of technologies are just like network infrastructure, operating systems, programming languages, all these levels of abstractions that are needed because you're not going to, let's say an example, today, it would be crazy to program a website based on assembly, right? So you really need those abstractions to be built to be able to have a richer way of creating experiences that are more advanced because you want to kind of build on top of the abstractions always. So AR is kind of in that phase of really building the installation phase, of solving all the hard problems so that you get to a very expressive world in the future that I imagine where AR programming and AR could be just as simple as spinning up a website. Because right now, it does require a lot of very specialized understanding to create AR experiences. There's things with 3D environment development that are very good mix for games. This is why games are also very good for AR. In the early stages, that's kind of part one. And just to close the second stage for this technology cycle is the deployment phase. That is when really you see the explosion. Because you have this kind of solid infrastructure built. And deployment is when you have all these applications built into different industries. At that point, let's say, just to give you another example, the installation phase for mobile was just getting the hardware devices and the operating system with iOS and Android. And then the deployment was all this proliferation of apps. And it just explodes when the tooling and level abstraction is right enough.