The town is home to the world's best-selling HD camera. It's one you can wear on your shoes, or your surfboard, or your parachute, and now it's 3D. It's the latest gadget in the drive to discover "user-generated" thrills.
Nick Woodman enjoys racing, surfing, mountain biking, and other things that don't lend themselves to holding a camera. So, he built a camcorder you can wear on your wrist, and your helmet, and your snowboard, and on the end of a pole. At the end of breathtaking run in his Lotus, we kidded Nick Woodman, founder of family-owned camera maker GoPro.
"We're in your office with you! And you're working!"
"Yes," he replied. "And, that's why Half Moon Bay is such a fantastic place for GoPro, because of the surf, the mountain biking."
Today, GoPro sells in 60 countries, sales grow 300 percent per year, and the company grew from nine employees to nearly 50 in the last nine months. The next step is a 3D version. But, instead of a camera, there is a housing that encloses two cameras. They are connected by a special port already built into every GoPro. This enables them to synchronize left eye and right eye views with no drift, or simply to be used as a couple of 2D cameras.
You think the shots taken with this camera are exciting? Wait until you see them in 3D!
"3D," says Woodman, "just adds that extra dimension, one more sensory input to really get you into the moment. We have people jumping off of cliffs, and racing cars, and surfing, and traveling to exotic places. We get to see what our customers are doing every day on our Facebook page."
