Andy Rubin-backed Owl Labs just launched a robotic video conference camera

A startup backed by Andy Rubin’s Playground incubator and venture capital firm has rolled out a new hardware product, one that addresses the pain points of an unexciting but crucial area of business technology: video conferencing systems.

Owl Labs’ new camera, called Owl, is a thermos-shaped, robotic video camera that captures a 360-degree view of a meeting space and automatically shifts its point of focus to show whoever is talking in the meeting. This robotic shifting is supposed to replace the remote controls or awkward manual turning of cameras that happens sometimes during video conference meetings.

The Owl is a 2.6-pound, fabric-covered Wi-Fi device with two round LED indicator lights and a custom-designed fish-eye lens at its crown. All of the imagery is captured in 720p HD from the fish-eye lens. It has an eight-microphone array at the top, built-in speakers, and connects to a computer or monitor via USB. It runs on a forked version of Android, and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 processor.

THE OWL AUTOMATICALLY SHIFTS ITS POINT OF FOCUS AS A GROUP OF PEOPLE TALK WITHIN A MEETING OR BOARDROOM

The hardware is admittedly cute, but you don’t really get a sense of how it works until you see the output of the camera, as I saw earlier this week during a remote demo. Using the video conferencing app Zoom, four members of the Owl Labs team sat around a conference room table in Boston. As they chatted with me, I was able to see a panoramic view of the four of them around the room, and as they took turns speaking the camera would appear to shift its focus to the next person speaking. If two people were going back and forth in conversation and were sitting across from each other, not directly next to each other, the Owl would automatically create a split view, showing both as they spoke.

Currently, a lot of video conferencing platforms, including Zoom and Google Hangouts, automatically adjust to put whoever is speaking front and center in the field of view. Owl Labs says the difference between its system and others is that others are prioritizing people from different cameras or remote locations, whereas Owl offers that function for multiple people within the same room.

The Owl camera starts selling today for $799, putting it at a midrange price point when compared with video conferencing cameras from manufacturers like Logitech, Vaddio, and HuddleCamHD. Owl Labs’ vice president of growth, Karen Rubin, says its target market is businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees or smaller tech companies that are keen to adopt the latest technology in their offices.

It’s clearly a hardware-centric solution to what Owl Labs sees as a persistent problem within conference rooms and workspaces. It was partly inspired by the experience of Owl Labs co-founder Mark Schnittman, who worked remotely at his last company, Romotive. Schnittman says 75 percent of his working life was “not only working remotely but working remotely with hardware,” he said. “When I saw my colleagues rotate the [video conferencing] camera as opposed to robotics doing it, I knew I could make it happen robotically.”

“I’ve heard stories of people bringing a Lazy Susan to work to get their cameras to rotate,” said Max Makeev, another co-founder who serves as chief executive officer of Owl Labs. “And, there are lots of remote-controlled cameras for meeting rooms, but we found that people have the desire to steer the camera but not the will do it.”

Owl Labs is based in Boston, where Makeev and Schnittman joined forces after leaving iRobot and Romotive, respectively. But the team spent a year and a half in Silicon Valley after being backed by Playground Global, the Andy Rubin-founded company in Palo Alto, California.