BeThereNow.com - Background

Corporate History

After working on a number of military and commercial flight simulators-including the Space Shuttle-BeThereNow's founder, Sean Seago, found himself involved in a highly complex military simulation. The General in charge of the simulation, annoyed that its geographic scope was so limited, told Sean in exasperation that the problem with visual simulators "wasn't getting the world out of the computer, the problem was getting the world into the computer."

This comment by the General came back to Sean years later, as he visited the theater and watched a movie depict visual simulation and virtual reality systems as tools widely available. Sean knew that it was just Hollywood, and just how difficult it would be to create such systems. But, he saw fellow theatre-goers take for granted that such technology was available. They didn't realize that all of the currently designed simulation worlds were extremely expensive and had to be constructed laboriously from the ground up, and were unrealistic and looked almost cartoon-like in their display.

The opportunity was there-it just had to be acted upon. So in 1996, Sean formed Be There Now, Inc. to produce the first realistic, fully interactive and mass production oriented 3D virtual reality technology. To accomplish this, he knew that the images had to be built from standard photographs for realism, yet the image capturing process could not require any special equipment or training. In addition, the process to convert the images into 3D constructs had to be scalable and easy to master so production could keep up with demand.

Sean and company toiled for three years perfecting the technology and processes. In 1999, a patent was issued for BeThereNow's revolutionary new process to convert standard photographs into 3D images. Now, today, the world is being put into the computer and people's expectations of true virtual reality are coming true.