During Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 batch in Mountain View, California, engineer Diana Hu co-founded Escher Reality to solve a structural bottleneck in mobile computing: building shared spatial experiences anchored in the physical world. Rather than launching a consumer application, Hu focused on constructing the backend software layer required for real-time mobile augmented reality. Her approach was shaped by a technical background spanning semiconductor engineering at Intel, computer vision, recommender systems, and cloud television architectures.
Converging Technical Streams
Hu recognized that spatial computing required a convergence of distinct engineering fields, including real-time spatial computer vision, mobile graphics rendering, distributed networking, and dedicated hardware design. To evaluate how to build a company in an emerging sector, according to Y Combinator's account, Hu applied economist Carlota Perez’s framework on technological revolutions. Perez divided major technology cycles into two primary periods: an installation phase and a deployment phase.
The Installation Phase
Under Perez’s economic model, early augmented reality milestones—such as the Sword of Damocles headset developed in the 1960s and military flight simulators built in the 1990s—represented early, hardware-constrained experiments. Hu reasoned that augmented reality remained in its installation phase, a period when foundational network infrastructure, operating systems, and developer abstractions must be constructed. Consumer app deployment could only flourish once software tooling made building spatial applications as accessible as deploying a web application.
Hardware Constraints and Economic Laws
To determine whether consumer mobile hardware was ready for this software layer, Hu analyzed key empirical hardware trends. Alongside Moore’s Law, she tracked Koomey’s Law, which observes that power efficiency doubles every 18 months for a constant amount of computation. Benchmarks Hu monitored demonstrated that the iPhone 7’s CPU and GPU performance surpassed earlier MacBook Air models while running at a fraction of the total power cost. This shift signaled that mobile chips were approaching the single-digit watt power envelope required for consumer augmented reality headsets. Simultaneously, Hu tracked Edholm’s Law, which mapped exponential growth in wireless bandwidth toward 10-gigabit 5G connections capable of streaming data-heavy spatial environments.
Validating Emerging Infrastructure
To prove their software core, Escher Reality engineered a live cross-platform multiplayer augmented reality demonstration prior to Y Combinator’s Demo Day. Showing functional cross-device synchronization enabled the startup to secure seed financing led by Jeff Clavier at Uncork Capital alongside Founders Fund. Escher Reality was subsequently acquired by Niantic, where Hu became head of their AR platform. In that role, she led efforts to build out the underlying real-world software layer, demonstrating how establishing core abstractions during a technology's installation phase provides the foundation for future spatial platforms.
AI-generated editorial illustration; not a documentary photograph.
Source: Diana Hu on Augmented Reality and Building a Startup in a New Market Topics Subscribe Transcript
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