A Brief History of Reality Mobile
People often ask us about the company’s history. A few of us started the company in late 2003-early 2004. In the beginning we were focused on offering consulting services in our core area of expertise: mobile communications. Our co-founder and chief scientist Dave Rensin is an industry expert and has won multiple awards for technological innovations.
As the Washington Post reported in its Start Up column, we billed ourselves as a:
“company that cuts through the hype in the mobile communications market, giving large enterprises (particularly in the intelligence community) objective advice on what will work, what won't, what's overpriced and what's too risky. ‘After 9/11 everyone's continuity of operations plans require them to be mobile,’ Rensin said, but carrying or exchanging data outside the office is complicated and inherently risky.”
In the course of our consulting work, particularly for U.S. government customers, we started to hear a pronounced theme for “situational awareness.” More specifically, organizations wanted to understand how they could take off-the-shelf equipment like cell phones and make them a more relevant tool for first responders to share and receive urgently needed information, especially live video.
Always up for a technology challenge, Dave Rensin started to tinker and soon enough we were all bunkered down in a single office trying to create a brand new kind of software application that would, over two years later, ultimately become RealityVision. Throughout the process we focused on three interrelated goals: how to let an organization see what was going on in the field as events were unfolding, how to give first responders real-time access to information being generated elsewhere, and how to make the user experience as painless as possible (read: avoid an over-engineered solution that is clumsy to use in the field).
After a year of intensive development, one of our government customers, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, invited us to preview our developing prototype at the February 2006 Super Bowl under the supervision of the FBI. We hesitated only momentarily—no one had ever tested our application outside our office, it wasn’t nearly ready for commercial release, and now we were going to hand it to FBI field agents being deployed to protect the biggest sporting event of the year. But, of course, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend 10 days at the FBI/Detroit Police Department Joint Operations Center working directly with FBI field teams! And we were certainly glad we did. The FBI responded enthusiastically and used the prototype throughout the Super Bowl festivities for actual field operations. As Jonathan Kozlowski reported in a Law Enforcement Magazine article entitled Instantly There:
"The official-in-charge of FBI security at the 2006 Super Bowl considers RealityVision a force multiplier. 'The software allowed us to communicate directly with teams and then appropriately respond depending on what we saw,' he says.
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The security agents in the 2006 Super Bowl utilized Reality Mobile’s software to its full extent within Detroit’s dome. As well as having the capability to view live video feed from cellular phones and other IP computer-based devices, the software also can utilize fixed security cameras. RealityVision allows law enforcement to view a variety of happenings in one place, says the FBI official.
The FBI field agents also gave us a ton of user feedback that really helped to influence our future development efforts. As I said a year later in our press release announcing the official release of RealityVision, “We took their feedback—positive and negative—to heart and have worked intensively over the last year to enhance the system to meet real field requirements for our users.”
After the launch, I did a live interview for the ABC News Ahead of the Curve segment, where the anchor, Sonya Crawford, struck a familiar theme in describing the technology as something out of the TV show 24. We had gotten that reaction many times, I think because first-time observers are often surprised at how quickly information can be obtained from one source (such as a organization’s network camera or even a cell phone camera) and delivered to anyone else connected to the RealityVision network without any intervention on the recipient’s part. As Sonya noted in our interview:
“This sounds so much like the TV show, '24,’ where they're looking for the terrorists and they have a lot of real time information coming in that – that they're analyzing. Obviously, a big event like the Super Bowl, you have a big crush of people, but a big crush of law enforcements, so this was probably very helpful to them last year.
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And I'm sure the fantastic thing for them is that you're using existing technology. You're using Google Maps, you're using existing cell phones. It's not like they need to buy into your system. It's just your software that's sort of organizing everything and allowing them to use it.”
Watch the whole interview here.
Numerous print journalists reported on the product launch as well, including: