Aerodrums

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Company info:

Name: Aerodrums
Date founded: 2011
Number of employees: 5
Location: Liverpool
We aim to democratise access to musical percussion instruments by making air drumming a reality.
aerodrums.com

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

Making a self-contained air drumming instrument

Challenge

We were able to bootstrap Aerodrums using readily available hardware, but this meant requiring users of our first model to own and operate a computer. The challenge is to enable people to set up and drum without a computer.

Solution

Our solution is to create an embedded IoT instrument that people can use with a mobile phone, tablet or virtual reality headset. This means solving the problem of doing high speed real time motion tracking and low latency audio rendering on an affordable IoT hardware platform. No one has tried to do this before – we are the first mover and leader in optically tracked percussion instruments.

FED4SAE Support

FED4SAE enabled us to further a collaboration with Intel; receive support from BME’s Department of Electron Devices; receive advice on the management of innovation from Blumorpho; and fund R&D. Using Intel’s Myriad 2 platform, we were able to finalise a proof of concept. We then moved on to a design-to-cost phase and completed a pre-production prototype. BME assisted us with advice on heat dissipation for LED arrays, and with characterising the behaviour of the prototype under different temperature and humidity conditions. Blumorpho helped us overcome unforeseen supply difficulties in the course of the project.

Impact

The project enabled us to de-risk the introduction of the next Aerodrums model to market, as well as reducing its cost to end users. This is key to our ambition to democratise access to percussion instruments. These fall in a category of goods that is currently difficult to use in dense housing, expensive and whose manufacturing is demanding on the environment.

When we launch the product we will be able to activate a key part of our business model, which is to offer digital goods to users of the instrument. These will include music lessons, new sounds, new instrument configurations, visual 3D “skins” and play along songs.

The above combined with the higher attractiveness to end users of a self contained instrument will allow our company to grow.

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AI VLIT

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Company info:

Name: Artomatix
Date founded: 2012
Number of employees: 26
Location: Dublin Ireland

Artomatix is an award winning software company that uses Artificial Intelligence to transform 3D artistic workflows in top creative arts studios worldwide.

artomatix.com

Partners:

Innovation Management Partner:

Artificial Intelligence based algorithm for image quality enhancement

Challenge

Streaming Video Content accounted for 63% of Internet Traffic as of 2017 and future traffic volumes forecast significant increase as a result of more internet users, more smart devices along with the demand for higher resolution content from HD to 4K or 8K UHD. The challenge of the project was to deliver high quality video experience to the user by increasing the compression and decreasing the resolution of the source stream. This will have the potential to massively reduce global internet traffic, improving the user experience and benefitting the World at large.

Solution

Artomatix goal was to develop a more efficient method to deliver high-resolution content to the user while minimising the network traffic and associated infrastructure costs. So the challenge was to enable data to be transmitted / broadcast at a low resolution and then upscaled and enhanced in real-time on the user’s device by applying “AI at the edge” to deliver that compelling user experience.

By exploiting the capabilities offered by new AI approaches and applying CNNs to image upscaling, Artomatix was able to develope an efficient high-quality hardware independent upscaling engine which can be licensed to and exploited by multiple platforms such as the TheoPlayer™ multi-platform players.

FED4SAE Support

FED4SAE has enabled Artomatix to further a collaboration with Intel; receive support from CEA and receive advice on the management of innovation and the got-to-market strategy from Blumorpho.

Artomatix have built a stripped-down version of its image-enhancement NN making it compatible with resource-limited hardware such as the Intel ® Movidius™ Myriad VPU in the Intel Neural Compute Stick hardware with almost unperceivable quality loss. Thanks to the collaboration with CEA, Artomatix is now operating an industry-standard-based image and video compression testbench for enhanced-images quality assessment and NN training.

Impact

Artomatix have investigated the impact of applying Artificial intelligence approaches to enable high quality video upscaling images from 720K to HD 1024K and above. They have identified and validated the best approaches and compared these results to existing upscaling approaches using SSIM etc. They have applied and validated these approaches in a number of domains from Gaming (synthetic images), cartoons to static images used in web content (furniture).

In 2020 Artomatix is now part of the Artomatix is now part of the Unity family (€60m acquisition) who have committed to growing the investment resulting in significant and headcount growth in Europe.

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