VOLOGRAMS LIMITED
What’s your origin story? Everything started in Trinity College Dublin. Professor Aljosa Smolic left Disney Research to start a new lab at Trinity researching creative technologies powered by image-based algorithms. He put together an amazing international team of researchers, which included Volograms’ founders, Rafael Pagés, Jan Ondrej and Konstantinos Amplianitis. We researched methods to easily create immersive 3D content and ended up building an affordable solution to capture volumetric video using smartphones. This 3D capture system sparked interest from both the industry and academia, so we explored the possibility of spinning out. Shortly after, we raised pre-seed funding from Atlantic Bridge and decided to take the leap! Five years later, the company is now one of the most disruptive companies in the 3D AI field, having brought this technology to any smartphone. What is the company working on right now? Firstly, making our technology affordable, accessible and easy to use so everyone can benefit from implementing volumetric holograms and content creation for new media – Vologram Messages is a crucial part of that. Secondly, enriching our products with creative tools and features, for which developing new AI algorithms is crucial. AI has been a vital part of our approach from the beginning. Without it, extracting 3D from single images without multiple devices or specialised equipment like depth sensors is nearly impossible. Thanks to AI, we managed to take our technology to smartphones. With generative AI, we can go further: we now use diffusion networks to estimate the appearance of the person in areas not visible in the input image – such as the side and back of the person – using subtle clues from the front. Similarly, we virtually try clothes on 3D models by asking our algorithms to re-dress them using real clothes as a reference. What is the next step? Based on our existing technology and incorporating new AI capabilities, we want to bring to market an all-encompassing coherent platform that can help our users (general professionals, consumers or specialised 3D/AR/VR creators) to have a one-stop, go-to solution to bring real people into the new generation of media and content platforms. We would love to see this technology directly integrated in the new generation of devices coming. What one thing does the business need most? From 3D creation suites to telecommunications and marketing corporations, we are exploring mutually beneficial partnerships that can help all of us grow in this exciting new generation of content and communications.
COUNTRY: Ireland STARTED: 2018
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