After Enterprise Ireland’s Start-up Showcase for 2020, we decided to take a closer look at the agency’s high potential start-ups (HPSUs). Last week we focused on emerging firms working on sustainability, and this week we’re taking a look at the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

We have rounded up the start-ups to watch over the next few months. The list includes some businesses on the cutting-edge of AI, using this tech for a variety of purposes in the music industry, virtual reality, HR and customer service.

VRAI

VRAI is a Dublin start-up that has developed an AI-powered VR simulation platform, entitled Hazardous Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), which has been used by companies such as Samsung, Pfizer and IAG, as well as the UN and the Irish Defence Forces.

HEAT enables employers to prepare for hazardous working environments in a safer setting, while giving them an idea of what to expect out on the field. VRAI says that it is “more than a virtual reality company”, and describes itself as “a content creation company specialising in virtual reality production”.

The company was founded by Pat O’Connor and Niall Campion in 2017. In September 2019, the company raised €575,000 from Enterprise Ireland to further develop HEAT, and earlier this week it was named as this year’s winner of the Dublin City Enterprise award, taking home the top prize of €5,000.

Published on siliconrepublic.com, read the full article here.

On Tuesday (10 March), data-driven virtual reality simulation company VRAI was named as this year’s winner of the Dublin City Enterprise award, taking home the top prize of €5,000.

The start-up will go on to represent the Dublin City Local Enterprise Office at the 22nd National Enterprise Awards, which are scheduled to take place in the Mansion House in Dublin on 22 May.

VRAI will compete with 30 other finalists from local authorities across the country for a share of the €40,000 prize fund. Categories at the final of the competition include Best Export Business, Best Future Focused Business and Best Innovation, in addition to eight regional awards.

VRAI’s winning solution

Recognised by Enterprise Ireland as a high potential start-up, VRAI was founded by Niall Campion and Pat O’Connor in August 2017 when they saw the opportunity to develop virtual reality training products for high-hazard environments.

The company combines Campion’s experience of directing film and VFX, with O’Connor’s experience as a senior officer in the Irish Defence Forces working in Syria, Israel and Liberia. Now, the duo are based in Temple Bar, where they employ 15 people.

The company’s main offering is the Hazardous Environment Awareness Training (HEAT) VR system, which is used by organisations participating in high-risk activities. HEAT can also be used to train employees in remote or rare tasks, offering them an “authentic, memorable and measurable” experience.

The platform creates virtual training environments, with data capture and analytics to improve performance, safety and training outcomes. VRAI provides this technology to teams in defence, security, energy, utilities, aviation and the construction sector.

National Enterprise Awards

Greg Swift, head of enterprise and economic development with the Dublin City Local Enterprise Office, said: “For the last two decades, the National Enterprise Awards have celebrated homegrown success stories from every corner of Ireland, putting their achievements into the national spotlight.

“At the 2020 National Enterprise Awards, we are delighted to be represented by VRAI, yet another homegrown success story. VRAI exemplify innovation. The judges were particularly impressed by the calibre of international corporate clients they have secured in less than three years of operations. We wish them continued success with their company expansion plans.”

Commenting on the support the start-up has received from its Local Enterprise Office (LEO), Campion said: “We received a grant from DCC LEO in 2018. This grant allowed us to move from being a sole trader business employing contract staff to employing our first two full-time staff members.

“These two staff members are now a core part of our team of 15. The LEO support allowed us to add full-time staff, on a respectable salary, with reduced risk.

Published on siliconrepublic.com, read it here.

Alara Basul  |  Online Editor UKTN  |  7th Feb 2020

 

What are the big tech trends you remember from the past 5 years?

I remember being at a technology conference in 2016 where everyone was raving about the impending impact of IOT. Subsequently, we have heard the buzz around drones delivering our takeaway dinners and Amazon purchases; Cloud being the “new mobile”, autonomous vehicles changing how we travel and, most recently, AI being the new space race.

None of these technologies have quite fulfilled their hype as of yet and the same can be said for the big tech hype of 2015 – Virtual Reality.

When Facebook acquired Oculus in 2015, the VR hype curve was almost off the charts. Since then VR had fallen into what Gartner calls the dreaded ‘Trough of Disillusionment’, but is now reemerging at speed. Many people are predicting that 2020 will be the year of Virtual Reality and the evidence is becoming hard to ignore.

The VR market was valued at $11.52 billion in 2019. It’s expected to reach $87.97 billion by 2025, which is welcome news for those in the space. Last year saw annual B2C VR software sales break the significant $1 billion mark for the first time.

The fact that the Oculus Quest, a wireless VR headset with 6DOF, is in such demand that there is a global shortage tells its own story about demand. Pico, the Chinese headset maker, is also producing an excellent standalone VR headset that is cheaper than the Oculus Quest.

Better content with cheaper and easier to use hardware seems to be the drivers in the B2C market but there is another factor that is driving this increase in VR use –  Enterprise VR.

The “race to be second” is the phenomenon where more conservative companies wait for others to prove the business case before committing to a technology.

This race is almost over with great case studies starting to emerge from some of the world’s leading companies such as Pfizer, IAG and Walmart with stellar results. VR is already a go-to technology for hazardous work environments with many energy companies like Shell, Chevron & ExxonMobil seeing VR as an obvious way to train more of their employees for risky, remote and rare operational environments.

The same can be said for the leading militaries in the world who see VR simulation training as the obvious way to improve training while reducing risk and cost. VR use for training, in particular, is expected to have a 61.8% CAGR over the next 3 years and is forecast to become the largest use case in terms of VR B2B spending by 2023 .

There are still some barriers to immersion and widespread adoption though, such as the current awkward hand controllers, the lack of ‘feel’ in VR and the grumblings about Oculus’s B2B business model, supply chain and customer support.

Some of these do look likely to change in 2020 and also provide opportunities for more enterprise focussed VR companies. Oculus have released a beta version of their hand tracking that removes the need for controllers to some extent. Tesla Suit, BeBop and a host of others have announced the release of haptic gloves that provide simulated feel and touch in VR.

Perhaps equally as impactful as the new products and features emerging in VR are the new business models. As the market grows, so do the opportunities for companies whose business models best support their customer’s needs.

The question remains, is VR ‘the’ next big tech trend for 2020? Perhaps it isn’t as simple as a yes or no answer.

Perhaps the third decade of the 21st century will not be dominated by individual technologies, but rather by the confluence of the technologies we have seen develop over the last 5 years.

IOT sensors are now in many new ‘smart’ products, high speed broadband is increasingly available and soon available via mobile 5G. Companies like Google and Amazon are making AI and cloud computing more broadly available to businesses, and improved mobile processors are increasing the capability of hardware while reducing the cost. The most successful businesses will be the ones that leverage these technologies to solve problems for their customers and do that in a sustainable way.

As a VR company co-founder, I strive to support our mission in becoming product leaders in VR, to provide our customers with leading edge technologies, or the innovative combinations of existing technologies that they need to improve their businesses.

Although, as any entrepreneur worth their salt will tell you, it’s not about the technology, it’s about solving your customer’s problem and unlocking that shared value.

Published on uktech.news, read it here

Perched high up in the turret as the tank rumbles slowly along the dusty road, you scan the roadside for signs of an unexploded bomb.

Your heart is pounding in your chest and you tell yourself to ignore it. Stay calm. Do your job. The United Nations Mine Action Service is here to decommission improvised explosive devices, the lethal consequence of decades of civil war, and you must help eliminate this threat to civilian life.

The bomb explodes, rocking the tank and leaving your colleagues maimed upon the road.

It is a brutal introduction to the work of Dublin start-up VRAI. “Back in 2017, the UNMAS had personnel being deployed on to these dangerous routes on a daily basis,” co-founder and co-MD Pat O’Connor explains to BusinessCloud.

“Because it was such a high-threat environment, a lot of the civilian support staff couldn’t leave the base in Mogadishu. And yet their operational colleagues were going out every day and one in 10 of them were being hit by an IED.”

In 2017 alone almost 2,300 people were killed or injured by IEDs in Somalia, highlighting the importance of the mission.

The UN turned to VRAI to produce a training simulation which would help limit the danger posed to its staff by improving their ability to identify ground signs that indicate a roadside bomb.

“We drove the routes with the African Union troops and created a hyper-realistic, 3D 360-degree video of the routes,” says O’Connor. “And then within that we built high-quality, high-poly 3D assets so that essentially the environment you’re interacting with is real footage.

“That helped us to show how difficult it is to spot indicators of roadside bombs. Not only did this help to reduce deaths and serious injuries, but it also created an empathetic link because for the first time the support staff could see how difficult it is for the deployed troops to do this job.”

VRAI, founded in August 2017 by O’Connor and co-MD Niall Campion, an experienced director and content creator, looks to combine concepts from videogame development and cinematic special effects to create what it terms ‘extended reality’. It provides services to the defence, security, energy and utilities, aviation and construction sectors.

“Those industries are very serious businesses, which are dangerous by nature,” says O’Connor. “If you’re going to train people, it can’t look like a game – it has to look for real. Immersion is key: you need to forget that you’re in the virtual environment.”

Early big-name clients include International Airlines Group at Heathrow and Samsung UK. “These are large organisations who have lots of people being trained and put a high value on making sure they’re trained properly and safely,” says O’Connor.

According to the ERM Global Safety Survey, 52 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have suffered a death or serious injury in the past 18 months, despite spending £80 billion per year on employee training. “That tells us that the training can be improved,” says O’Connor.

“About half of that training is conducted by lectures – how much do you actually remember from a PowerPoint lecture? The science would suggest you retain about five per cent of information per hour of lecture, whereas if you practise by ‘doing’, you recall about 70 to 75 per cent of that information.

“The challenge with high-hazard environments is that practice by ‘doing’ is in itself inherently dangerous; it can be costly to bring people from remote locations to one area; and there can be a rarity of equipment or instructors.”

VRAI’s aim is to reduce workplace deaths and serious injuries to zero through its main product, Hazardous Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), which aims to improve the quality and safety of high-hazard training through AI reporting and analytics. “We’ve developed a sophisticated data pipeline, where approximately 100,000 data points per minute are captured about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and also the movement of your hands, head and body,” explains O’Connor.

“The back-end of our platform then takes that rich data set, correlates it to your individual training record and starts giving you insightful reports on how people are performing in certain areas, allowing you to make the training bespoke.

“But where it gets very exciting is when you have, say, more than 500 people passing through the same training experience and the system has enough data to start applying artificial intelligence. It will then start finding insights and correlations between behaviour and activities, which can improve the product over time and therefore reduce deaths and serious injuries in the workplace.”

An example he offers is training for maintenance work on an offshore wind farm. “The UK is the largest offshore wind market in the world. All the easy spots near the coast are gone so the new farms are like 100 miles off the north coast of Scotland.

“Put yourself in a maintenance person’s shoes on the first day on the job: you’re put on a boat somewhere in Aberdeen; you have to go 100 miles into the North Sea; the waves are bigger than your house; the turbines you’re climbing to the top of are 110 metres high and sway three metres left or right in the wind. So you tell me: are you going to be focused on your essential maintenance tasks or your own feelings of anxiety?

“What we can do is recreate those environments onshore in a highly safe environment without having to stop a turbine generating electricity.”

Key to that sense of immersion is haptic feedback, where people act within the simulation as they would in real life instead of using videogame-type controllers. However VRAI is looking to go even further. “We’re now building biometric sensors into our haptic gloves so we can judge how you feel,” says O’Connor.

“Let’s say we both land an aircraft inside a training simulation fine: what you don’t know is that inside, my heart is pumping and coming through my chest. It’s important to identify that we’re having different reactions: could I land that aircraft repeatedly without having a serious problem?

“If we can identify how people are feeling in those high-stress environments, we can almost inoculate against that feeling in the real world. The equivalent concept in the military is called ‘battle inoculation’: at a very simple level, before you deploy overseas, they stick you in a hole and they blow stuff up all around you and shoot over you so that when you go to that war zone, you can operate safely when it’s happening for real.

“We’re always trying to push the bar – we pride ourselves that we innovate on behalf of large companies because we have the nimbleness to do that.”

The military analogy comes from a very personal place: O’Connor spent 20 years in the Irish Defence Forces including more than three years’ experience of overseas operational deployments in high-threat environments including the Syrian Civil War.

“One of my last roles was as squadron commander of a cavalry unit,” he reveals. “Training was always a challenge: if you have a unit in the south and you need to move it towards the middle of the country to do an exercise, organising a lot of people to move is difficult and costs a lot of money. I always felt there must be a better way to do this.”

Headquartered in Dublin, VRAI has built a high-quality team of 12 with a diverse skillset. “One of our 3D artists comes from a fine art background in Ireland while we also have data engineers from India and a strategy consultant from Japan. Diversity is a mindset as much as anything else,” says O’Connor.

“We’ve got five different nationalities and we’re gender-balanced. And that, for me, counterbalances the complexity of the tech landscape, because the pace of change is so fast.”

The company has €575,000 funding including backing from the Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start Up Programme and is now also registered in the UK. “We just started our first major job there on the ground with HEAT at IAG and Heathrow,” says O’Connor. “We certainly see the UK is a big focus for us in the next 12 months.”

It is exploring potential bases on these shores: “There are some interesting clusters in the in the North East of the country. We’re also looking at London and up in Scotland as well.

“There are lots of potential areas with great clusters of highly innovative companies.”

 

Published on businesscloud.co.uk, read it here

Press Release
7 November 2019

2,550 Dublin Bus drivers will soon experience what it feels like to cycle on the roads of the capital with a brand new virtual reality (VR) training initiative. Launched today, Thursday, 7 November, by Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross in Dublin2Bike, Dublin 2, the new bus driver training initiative uses the latest VR technology to simulate the cycling experience in order to deliver a better understanding of the challenges faced by cyclists on the roads of the capital.

The training video footage is taken from a 360^o perspective of a cyclist on an actual cycle journey from Parnell Square to Camden Street during a typical morning commute across Dublin city centre. Shown on Oculus Go, the ten minute video was devised by the Environmental, Health and Safety Department of Dublin Bus and produced by VRAI, a Dublin based company. It will be used in Dublin Bus’ dedicated training centre for all new drivers and as part of bi-annual driver awareness training for existing drivers.

Speaking at the launch Minister Ross said “I am delighted to be here, today, to launch the Dublin Bus Virtual Reality Cycling Driver Training Experience. This is a really important development in driver training which will harnesses the latest VR technology available to deliver real benefits for bus drivers and cyclists.  It will help increase driver awareness of the challenges facing cyclists and will most importantly make cycling in Dublin a safer experience.”

Dublin Bus is an early adaptor of the most advanced technologies in its objective to be leaders in road safety in Ireland. It was the recipient of a Road Safety Authority (RSA) ‘Leading Lights in Road Safety’ Award 2017 for its commitment to promoting road safety within its organisation and for making a significant contribution to safer roads.

Ray Coyne, CEO of Dublin Bus said “As the largest public service transport provider in Ireland, we move up to 500,000 people a day around the capital. Increased use of public transport, coupled with an increase in cycling and increased on street priority, will play a key role in enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users while reducing congestion. Through our innovative use of technology and virtual reality, we can now bring a cyclists view and travel experience to our 3,500 employees through our enhanced training programme. As our cities roads become more congested a long term solution for the benefit of the majority must be delivered. Public transport and active mobility modes, including cycling, can deliver this solution”.

Dublin Bus drivers are trained to the highest standard and complete their world class training in a dedicated in-house training centre in Phibsboro where all drivers receive a Certificate of Professional Competency (CPC). In keeping with Dublin Bus’ goal of continuous improvement all drivers receive bi-annual driver awareness training. Dublin Bus continuously develops its driver training programme and seeks to use the most innovative, efficient technologies to produce expertly trained and competent drivers.

-ends-

For further information:

Carol Donohue, Communications Dept., Dublin Bus. Tel: (01) 703 3143 M: (087) 388 6927

Nigel Goggin, Conway Communications. Tel: (01) 661 9728 M: (087) 604 1161

Notes to Editor

• Approximately 1,800 buses and 12,200 cyclists* (*National Transport Authority Canal Cordon Report 2018) share the road during peak times.