Company hopes its imaging technology will become a growing industry’s standard.

Raleigh, NC – We’re standing in the salon, HCX off Harrison Avenue. A hair salon isn’t the first place I’d expect to uncover an influential technology. Then again, I’m not exactly in the market to get my hair colored or to explore a radical new hairstyle.

How a new technology changes our mainstream culture is often hard to pinpoint. In many ways it’s like the IBM advertisements that assert, “Middle-ware is here,” while showing people in a flower shop going about their business. The message is simple. Although you can’t easily see the technology underpinning our day-to-day interactions it’s there working behind the scenes.

Today I’m in HCX because it’s the very place that Hal Wilson wants to introduce me to his company’s technology, and to the experience of being “CyberImaged”. CyberImaged?

One barometer of technology adoption is its status in our common vernacular. It’s only in that gestalt that, “to google,” is a bona fide verb, or the definition of “flash mobbing” has nothing to do with angry crowds of naked people while its reality might not be that far away from it either.

With CyberImaging, the Triangle has its own entry in the techno-pop lexicon. Go and google “cyberimaging” and you’ll quickly discover that it’s an image processing technology used by beauty and hair salons across the country to show clients how they might look with a different hairstyle or color. But you’ll also find, mixed in the search engine results, websites about Cyber-Imaging parties and promotional tours.

In addition to being the rage with tech-savvy hair stylists, CyberImaging is also the name of the Raleigh-based company that licenses the imaging application to salons, beauty schools, and corporations.

“We originally focused the product to be exclusively a salon product,” says Wilson, who is CyberImaging’s co-founder and President. “We figured that the 200,000 salons nationwide would be our market, but it actually turns out that one of our large clients is the government.” When he says, “government,” Wilson is talking about the community college system where many aestheticians begin their professional careers. CyberImaging currently has around 700 clients nationwide, and approximately 30 to 40% of those clients are cosmetology schools and community colleges.

“We also have an initiative underway to work with cruise ships, many of which have salons on them. There are hundreds of those.” Between hair salons, cruise ships, and cosmetology schools, Wilson estimates that there are 300,000 to 350,000 potential applications for CyberImaging in the U.S. market alone.

Although CyberImaging is a current market-leader, a California-based company called Styles on Video actually pioneered the “cyberimaging” concept in 1992. Styles developed a computer kiosk system that let hair stylists take video stills of their clients and cut-and-paste various hairstyles onto the images. The break-through technology allowed millions of Middle-America women to experiment with the latest hairstyles without risking bad haircuts. Styles on Video was relatively successful until the SEC investigated them for questionable accounting practices, forcing the company to stop trading its stock on the American Stock Exchange in 1996. Around that same time Wilson and James Welch, his business partner, were looking for a new venture.

“I come from a financial background,” Wilson explains. Welch, CyberImaging’s other co-founder and CTO, was finishing his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at Duke. “We were searching for a software product to bring to a large market where there wasn't a computer application already. That’s when we [discovered] this imaging technology.”

When Wilson and Welch first examined the market, all of their competitors’ products were cut-and-paste applications. The user would take a person’s photo, digitize it, and trace the face out. Then they would “cut” the hair out of the image and then paste on the new hairstyle. “Of course most of the end results looked like they were cut-and-paste because they were.” CyberImaging’s first goal was to develop software that was user-friendly, but wasn’t restricted by the cut-and-past model. Standing in HCX’s lobby, Wilson needs no more than five minutes of adjusting sliders and toggling switches to alter photos of two models. When finished, one model has four new hairstyles and the other has a radical hair color change.

Wilson and Welch also decided not to develop proprietary kiosks like Styles on Video had done. Following a 12-month development cycle CyberImaging had a product that could run on any Windows-based PC, and they were ready to bring their product to market.

CyberImaging’s real-time image processing technology produces near-realistic photo manipulations by analyzing the colors found in each pixel of the digital image’s hair and hairline. It then plots the pixels on a histogram and compares them to their surrounding pixels. The software uses this information to create a 3D ellipsoid model of different hair colors. When a new hairstyle, chosen from a regularly updated database of more than one thousand is applied to someone’s image, the software automatically resizes it to fit the person’s head shape. The software then takes the histogram information, determines where the person’s natural hairline is, then blends the two together so that there’s a seamless transition between skin tone and superimposed hair.

CyberImaging’s most impressive feature, however, is its color manipulation. “When the user wants to see what another color looks like the software rotates the ellipsoid, so that the highlights and transparency effects can look realistic. Otherwise we’d end up with a big blob without any texturing.” Realistic highlights and coloring, Wilson explains, was a major challenge CyberImaging had to overcome. Initially they were going to implement a drawing function that allowed the stylist to “paint” highlights on the new image. But harkening back to a cut-n-paste model, however revised, only produced results that looked drawn in. Wilson’s alternative was to have his software automatically render highlights. “It took us about eight months to create an algorithm that determines where the top of the hair is, versus the bottom. It also determines if the strands are running North, South, East or West.” The CyberImaging software is able to calculate which strands of hair would go together, if a stylist were going to do highlights. It can also determine whether highlights should run to left or to the right, and where they should begin and stop. “We created an algorithm that matches each stranded hair and determines whether it is should be highlighted. That was a big challenge, and no one in the marketplaces ever done that before.”

Being an innovator in a particular market space means little without product awareness. As much as CyberImaging markets its application to salon owners, the company is marketing the cyberimaging concept to the people who will ultimately be sitting in the salon chairs.

Wilson diversifies his client-base to include high profile, cross-promotional tours with companies like L’Oreal, Panteen, Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic. In addition to promoting the partnering company’s products with styling consultations, digitally inserted milk mustaches (for Sports Illustrated), and CGI magazine covers (for National Geographic), the tours are also reaching potential cyberimaging fanatics outside of the salon.

“Many times people will go to their stylist and talk about how they’ve been CyberImaged,” says Ed Leven, CyberImaging’s PR rep. “In fact they might have seen one of the old Styles [kiosks] and not us, but they’re using our name anyway.