While studying for an MBA at the University of British Columbia, Dan Eisenhardt pitched an idea during class to bring augmented reality to swimming. A dozen years later, Eisenhardt is finally bringing that concept to market with the release of FORM swimming googles.
Eisenhardt swum competitively as a child growing up in Denmark, and won NJCAA All-American honors while swimming for Indian River State College in Florida as a freshman in the mid-1990s. Because looking at a stopwatch or a wearable tracker always meant stopping, he wanted to bring real-time metrics to swimming in a non-disruptive way.
His original project was a startup called Recon Instruments, but the concept pivoted to snow sports. Ski goggles were bulkier and didn’t need to be quite so waterproof, so packaging the electronics was easier. Recon’s first heads-up display product, Transcend, launched in 2010, pre-dating Google Glass by more than a year.
Searching for a less seasonal sport with a bigger, more consistent market, the company turned to cycling. Recon Instruments launched AR cycling glasses, called Recon Jet, in April 2015. Two months later the company was acquired by Intel, which had previously injected $4 million (in Canadian dollars) into the startup in 2013, and Eisenhardt became the general manager of Intel’s head-worn devices group.
Eisenhardt left Intel in 2016, however, and began refocusing on the original idea. A year later, Intel closed Recon Instruments and discontinued the company’s products. Eisenhardt used that opportunity to rehire some of the key staff he had worked with at Recon.
“Before FORM, our team spent many years building ruggedized wearables for action sports,” Eisenhardt said in a statement announcing the release. “We knew that giving swimmers real-time metrics was only half the battle. Fit and durability were just as important. The extensive testing we’ve done over the past year shows we exceeded our original goals.”
From the outside, the $199 FORM goggles look more or less like a regular pair of goggles, except they feature a black box containing both movement sensors and a projection system beside one temple. The lens on that side reflects light to a user’s eye, overlaying metrics like distance swum and swimming time. The goggles can be flipped so that the information can be viewed from the left or right eye.
The design is relatively minimalistic, with just two buttons on the goggles, and just two metrics displayed to the user when swimming. Algorithms trained via machine learning during development determine the exact stroke type based on the traces from the movement sensors, creating a relatively handsfree, automatic system. The aim of this is to reduce the need to play with the goggles in the pool.
To fine-tune the setup, and to review workouts, you can connect the goggles to the FORM Swim App on Android or iOS devices. The top number projected onto the goggles is always a timer, but the app allows users to select which other metric to view below that during sessions, including split times, total distance, stroke rate and calories. The app also operates as its own social platform, with swimmers being able to follow each other, and can connect to external services such as TrainingPeaks, Strava, or even Facebook.
Eisenhardt is currently training to race his first Ironman triathlon at the World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, in October, raising money for the Challenged Athletes Foundation. Ahead of today’s official launch of FORM, SportTechie caught up with him about the motivation behind his new product, how the goggles work, and the lessons he has learned on his entrepreneurial journey.
SPORTTECHIE: Why swimming? How did this project start?
Dan Eisenhardt: This came from a personal need as a former competitive swimmer in the distance events. I was just feeling the need to have information about how I was doing in the moment. You always have to guess, and there is a lot of math going on in the pool, even with a team. You know, when you have to start, and giving your times to your coach because the coach doesn’t have time to do that with all the stopwatches and swimmers in the pool.
And nothing was recorded. I always felt like, you try a new workout and then it disappeared. Nobody kept track of your performance. And I realized that was happening up to elite, even Olympians. Very few people could say, “OK, this is what my training load is and this is what I’ve done.” And with exact numbers for everything. That didn’t exist, whereas in all other endurance sports that exists already. That’s really where the need came from. I could see both the personal need and then feel the pain from my past.
SPORTTECHIE: Is distance and time enough data on their own?
Dan Eisenhardt: You always start with the activity metrics of distance and time. You need those as the foundation to do anything else. If you don’t have those metrics, then even if there is a power meter in swimming or a heart rate [monitor], there’s no backdrop to measure those efforts against. So that’s why in cycling, running, everything, those industries started with just the basic message of what you’re doing and you need to have them in real time. And then other things came on top.
And we’re really in the Stone Ages in swimming, none of that is there. Nobody swims with a wristwatch even, which you can only see if you stop and actually press a few buttons. Nobody swims with that if you’re a serious swimmer. Triathletes do, because they use it for running as well, but it really impairs with your technique to wear that and it just doesn’t make much sense. We wanted to really make sure that competitive swimmers and the elite would embrace this. If we could get that beachhead then we could say, “OK, if we can make them satisfied and happy then there’s a good chance that we can expand this out into other segments as well.”
SPORTTECHIE: How do the goggles detect different stroke movements?
Dan Eisenhardt: It’s based on a couple years of training these algorithms with data from many different types of swimmers. Obviously the competitive and the elite are very important for us. They have very hard requirements in terms of accuracy and responsiveness. But we also wanted to make sure that we had a lot of data from just fitness swimmers and beginners, intermediate, triathletes and across the different stroke types. You’ve got more complex stuff in the pool where you’ve got butterfly and medley and backstroke and breaststroke and drills, and all that stuff. There’s a lot of complexity there. When you add all the different types of swimmers and types of ways we can actually perform the same movement, you have to label all this stuff, and use your data wisely and pair it with the video recording and timestamp it. And so you get a good idea of exactly what movements correspond to which sensor outputs and then the work begins of optimizing this to get it into a very high accuracy for an untrained dataset.
SPORTTECHIE: As a swimmer, what was your experience like using FORM?
Dan Eisenhardt: I’ve had my questions about value proposition. The strength of the value proposition versus price point and metrics and all that stuff. But it is a completely different feeling. It’s just such a game-changer.
The first swim is overwhelming. And then the second, third—it just becomes so essential because you have these metrics that you couldn’t see before. And suddenly now you can see them and it just changes everything. I’ve been swimming since I was 5 and competitive from 8 or 9. I’ve spent so much time in the pool. Like that’s sort of my entire life, swimming, doing endurance sport, and [now] I would not jump in the pool without these goggles. And that has nothing to do with me being the inventor because I’m the biggest critic of my own technology. I would just not even jump in the pool with an old pair of goggles. It just does not make sense.
SPORTTECHIE: How do you balance being able to add to an activity without being disruptive?
Dan Eisenhardt: It’s always a trade-off between the experience you’re trying to create. If you want to get all the bells and whistles, and solve for all that, you end up paying with bulk and poor battery life and price point and all these other things. You really have to be certain about what really matters to customers. To solve that need, that pain that they have.
In a lot of the markets that others have tried—and I have myself tried—to launch products for, I think there was more uncertainty about the actual tangible value that we provided over alternatives. Was it essential enough? Is it essential to have a heads-up display in cycling? I’d say no. You have a bike computer on your handlebars. You just move your head down, you can see it, you can see everything. And so that’s a marginal benefit. On the ski slopes, it’s a real benefit. But at what price? You only use it a couple of times a year and then you forget about it.
But in swimming, it’s pretty clear that you have absolutely nothing and now we’re giving you all of that in real time with a very small tradeoff, at a $199 price point. I think that’ll resonate with a lot of people, not only competitive swimmers and triathletes, but I think a lot of fitness swimmers out there will probably be looking at this too.
SPORTTECHIE: How did your experience with Recon affect the design of FORM?
Dan Eisenhardt: Back then there were a lot of things we didn’t even know how hard they would be … Back then, it was form factor, size. The waterproofing I think was secondary. We felt we could waterproof, but again, that would add even more to the size of the units. And then we were concerned as well about being able to deliver a very, very high-quality experience when you mount sensors on the head, because it’s much harder to capture the different events.
[With FORM] we knew we had to create a pair of goggles that basically looked like normal goggles and were a premiere material and something that people go, “These look amazing,” and would actually have to look at an extra time to see, “Oh there’s something down the side with that.” And of course for drag as well. We wanted to make sure the drag was minimal so that they didn’t impair with your technique or with the performance with the goggles in terms of leaking. There was a lot of focus that went into solving those problems.
SPORTTECHIE: How important is searching for existing patents?
Dan Eisenhardt: You know what, you can only do so much. I mean, if you want to do a completely comprehensive freedom to operate search it will take you so long and cost you so much. I think you have to work with your patent lawyers to find out if there’s any obvious red flags, whether there’s a direct threat. Then you need to make a decision whether it’s something you want to take on and try and work your technology around those claims. Or whether you think it’s just going to be too hard to do it, and too hard to get funding for it. It can be sort of an art form, but it’s definitely advisable to do at least a high-level search to see if there are any obvious blockers.
SPORTTECHIE: What advice would you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Dan Eisenhardt: I’d say don’t get blinded by the technology, and what you can do with technology. Really focus on the value proposition and researching and getting a high degree of certainty about the solution that you’re providing. That it indeed is going to be 10 times better than alternatives out there in the market and provides tangible value at the price point that you believe you can deliver that.
And that price point piece, man, that is equally important. You have to dig deep into finding out what is required technically to deliver the solution and what is that going to cost at scale once you DFM [design for manufacturability] that. One thing is making a prototype, but then what is it going to be at scale? Not even at scale? What are the unit economics from Day 1. But the first thing is: always forget about all the details of the technology, just make damn sure that you are making a huge impact with what you’re delivering and that people really want that.
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