Trinity College Dublin spin-out and Enterprise Ireland High Performance Start Up Volograms has secured its first seed investment of €600,000. The capital, led by Atlantic Bridge and the University Bridge Fund, will help the mixed reality company take its technology to market.
Volograms has developed a means of taking a set of videos captured from different viewpoints and transforming them into volumetric holograms (volograms) that can be visualised in VR and AR environments.
The advantages of the system are that it works with different camera configurations, in outdoor or indoor scenarios, and can even generate content with hand-held consumer devices.
Volograms was founded by post-doctoral researchers in Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics, Dr Rafael Pages, Dr Jan Ondřej and Dr Konstantinos Amplianitis. The team have extensive technical and commercial experience and worked together at the SFI research centre, V-Sense, which is led by Prof Aljosa Smolic, who will continue to work with the company as Scientific Advisor.
Atlantic Bridge partner, Chris Horn, and vice president and general manager of Daqri International, Paul Sweeney, will both join the Volograms board.
The VR and AR market is forecast to be worth $108 billion by 2021, with companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple investing heavily towards bringing VR and AR devices to consumers. AR has even been dubbed what is being dubbed the ‘8th mass media’.
“For AR to become the next computing platform, as experts envision, there have to be easier ways to create content for it,” said Volograms CEO, Rafael Pages. “We believe there is a need for tools to capture real-world content for AR and VR and we are excited that our breakthrough technology can close the content gap. The investment and support from Atlantic Bridge and the University Bridge Fund will enable us to bring our technology to a variety of customers on a global scale.”
Head of commercial partnerships and technology transfer at Trinity, Dr Declan Weldon, said: “Volograms is a product of great teamwork and excellent science happening at the right time. Add to that the University Bridge Fund and the High Performance Start Up support from Enterprise Ireland and you create the right ecosystem for this disruptive technology to take on a global challenge.”
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