Piccolo (YC W18) – Camera for controlling your home with gestures

Hi HN — we’re Marlon and Neil, founders of Piccolo (https://www.piccololabs.com/). Piccolo is a smart camera that lets you control your TV, lamps, fans, speakers, and other devices with simple gestures. For example, you can point at your lamps with your hand to turn them on or off.

The two of us have had an interest in computer vision for a long time and were in Udacity’s first self-driving car nanodegree cohort in 2016. We started this as a side project to control one lamp and soon had our entire house connected. For some actions, we found gestures to be much faster and more intuitive. For example, pointing at a lamp to turn it on is way more natural than saying “Hey Alexa, can you turn on my left living room lamp?”

To set up Piccolo, you can place it anywhere (near the TV is usually best), and then on the app you can indicate with bounding boxes where the devices are. After that, you connect those same devices (Chromecast, Hue lights, smart plugs, etc.), and you’re good to go. Some processing happens on-device, but the more complicated models are run in the cloud. Since we’re not a security camera, there’s no need to store video and so no image/video data is ever stored.

We’re excited about the experiences you can build when you have a camera and apply computer vision techniques. With recent progress in human pose estimation, object classification, and object tracking, there’s really a lot you can do. We’re starting out with gestures, but our goal is to build a platform that lets anyone create and deploy vision apps. Here's a few things we're excited about:

- New apps. For example an app that detects medical emergencies (like an elderly person falling). We'd also love an app that can tell you where you left your phone and keys.

- App integrations. For example, letting Netflix know which people are in the room to get tailored recommendations for everyone vs. just the person signed in.

- Smarter hardware. For example, an Espresso machine that, with one click, makes your favorite drink because it knows who pressed the button.

- Voice-vision fusion. You should be able to trigger Alexa just by gazing at the Alexa device instead of saying "Alexa". You should also be able to hold something and say "Order 5 more of these".

We're giving away 20 pre-release units next month to anyone that joins the waitlist. We’re happy to answer any questions and look forward to your feedback. If you want to follow up, our emails are [email protected] and [email protected].