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.