So… WHAT THE HECK IS A SBIR??? It’s an acronym that stands for Small Business Innovative Research grants provided by just about every U.S. public agency there is (Helloooo USDA!). Each agency has funds that are specifically targeted at sponsoring the growth of small businesses in innovative areas that also serve agency needs. In other words, they are trying to create products that don’t exist and will pay you to help them do it. You get money and intellectual property to help differentiate your company. In case you didn’t know, Tanagram has been benefiting from these grants since 2003.
Sometimes I joke and say, “It’s like a tax rebate.” which it is NOT. These grants require a final delivery and real work to execute but as I said above, at the end of the project the researchers get to keep the intellectual property for their own use and growth. HOW AWESOME IS THAT???
Over the past few months I’ve had a number of great discussions with small business/startup owners about grant opportunities and have been surprised by the resistance they’ve expressed when I asked them if they’d considered government funding. I’ve heard responses from “Too much red tape.” and “Oh those are really hard to secure” to “You really think you can fund a business with a government grant?”
The truth is grants alone will not build your business BUT they make an excellent addition to your funding portfolio. SBIR grants are relatively small amounts of money. Phase I grants pay between $75K – $150K for an approximate 6 month effort and Phase II (if you’re invited to submit) grants pay between $750K – $1.5M for one to two years of work. There are also several “wickets” you need to hop through to qualify for the grants too.
I have always made an effort to help other small businesses get into the SBIR game, but recently it dawned on me that it might be valuable if I published (blogged) a series of tutorials that helped everyone make sense out of the process. What do you think? Are you interested in learning more? Post a comment if you are and I’ll get to it.
While you’re waiting (I don’t type so fast…), wander through the topic listing and see if there is a call that you might be able to provide a unique solution for. It’s one of my favorite things to do.
If you have any immediate questions please contact me using the contact form here. I’m also on twitter @juhnke or @tanagram. I look forward to hearing from you!
Last Thursday evening we filled the office with chemical smoke. We were shooting footage for a video demonstration of the augmented reality system aimed at firefighters. The shoot was a lot of fun, and we can’t wait to show you the results. We should have the final video done in a few weeks. In the meantime here are a couple photos and a short video of Matt from Mad Town Media playing the part of an extra firefighter.
Motion tracking dots in the hallway
Our office is ON FIRE!!!
no really FIRE!!!
Paul and Mark from Madtown Media setting up the smoke machine.
A little over a month ago we announced our work developing an Augmented Reality Platform for the U.S. Government. While we can’t talk about contract negotiations as they are lengthy, sensitive, and tricky, we CAN share that our Bloom server is currently in an Alpha state and is already doing some amazing things. We are modeling, modeling, modeling from video and still photography and the output is amazing. The video above is a model of the front of my home. The video above represents only a single (but very important) step in the Bloom “Gathering Process.”
We are also in the process of optimizing the code to further improve efficiencies. As our effort continues we will be entering the second phase of our program that will include the development of the user interface for the iARM platform. That user interface will be a multichannel input / output leveraging gesture (hands/hand symbols), speech, and context. Our first evaluation will be the gesture based system. There are a number of open-source and closed platforms (this, and all of these…) that will likely play a part in this system but we are always looking for experts.
Please take the time to share if you have ideas you think would benefit this vision.
ARE2010 did a lot of things for Tanagram. First and foremost it taught us that we aren’t the only crazy people out there. There were many hundred equally passionate (and equally insane) individuals working diligently to realize a vision that has been foretold for many many years. Attending were 400 enthusiasts, 90 speakers, and 40 sponsors.
The conference also re-affirmed that Augmented Reality (AR) is a new frontier. The discussions were widely diverse from immediate implementations of marketing gimmicks to future visions of integrated experiences and super-powered humans. Keynote speakers, Bruce Sterling, Will Wright, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, and Jesse Schell were all brilliant. They taught us to be humble, focused, human-centered, and reminded us that this isn’t the first new frontier and to remember (and reuse) the past. Jesse Schell presented a humorous and sobering view of privacy and what AR could mean for it (his point was it was already too late…).
I personally had an opportunity to meet and discuss ideas with some of my all-time hero’s including Bruce Sterling and Blaise Agüera y Arcas.
On the technology front I can share that there is a definite future for head mounted display technology. We saw proposals for 150deg. FOV systems. It’s going to be a very exciting decade!
As soon as the ARE folks post the videos I encourage you to browse the sessions. I didn’t attend one that was not fascinating. The ARE event will be held next year in Santa Clara and we will definitely be there.
P.S. Through this experience I was introduced to Bruce Sterling’s Wired Blog – Beyond the Beyond. Bruce admits it is eclectic as hell and is really anything that interests him. He saw that as a weakness, but I see it as a strength. I really look forward to the “random” posts. They are always head-stretching. I also encourage you to review the twitter feed for the conference. Great stuff in there!
This is an exciting illustration of the power of “collective memory” a concept we use to describe the knowledge management-like capabilities presented by spatialized AR data. Depending on the amount of stored detail one could rewind a specific view through multitudes of perspectives of a single area to see information from yesterday or a few centuries ago. This concept is a key component in the architecture of our iARM ecology.
Because our system is vision based, we have an extensive amount historical footage for areas of interest and the daily use of our system continuously adds to our model making for an amazingly powerful captured dimensional recording of our world.
If we caught your attention with our last post but you’re having a difficult time understanding what’s so exciting about a little research and some images narrating a potential future rest assured we have a lot to talk about.
The first thing we need to address is one of the “Hows” of the visualization technology. Even though we have several patents pending, we are still too sensitive to expose the ‘whole tomato’ to the masses, but suffice it to say we have cracked the Augmented Reality visual registration nut. The following is our first delving into the details that are under development.
What is this nut? Let me explain…
If you’ve ever used the current lineup of “AR Apps” available on Android or iPhone platform you’ve seen a neat portal into the world of Augmented Reality. You typically see a camera view of the world around you presented on a hardware screen with digital information presented (most often clumsily) on top of the view. As you move the phone around you see that information move accordingly as if it’s locked to some physical location. Sometimes you see that information move or ‘drift’ for unknown reasons and that is really the problem with current tech AR.
Registration is the accuracy by which the computing platform can “lock” the digital world onto the physical world and up to today, that technology has been susceptible to all sorts of errors and interference. One of the reasons registration is still immature is because developers are relying on hardware improvements to solve their problems. We believe that while hardware, especially heavily funded hardware (thank you Apple), may eventually get accurate enough to solve the registration problem we don’t have the time or patience to wait. We instead spent our time researching and testing an elegant and simple solution that would work with today’s hardware capabilities.
If you look at the narrative slides below you can see our User Experience Model relies heavily on pixel-accurate digital registration. We can “paint” anything including highlighting objects, manually marking the environment and even embedded three-dimensional models. I can assure you these aren’t the crazy vision of a designer with no insight as to how the technology works but are based on our registration system (U.S. Patent Pending).
Our system is primarily vision-based, but leverages gross measurements (with error detection) of GPS, Cell/WIFI triangulation, and digital compass hardware. That means that it uses cameras, models, and some other fancy wizardry to rapidly identify the observed view and paint objects within that domain accordingly.
That’s all for now but we’ll be presenting some more details on the system at ARE2010 and are excited to continue this discussion.
About a year ago, Tanagram was granted its first direct (meaning we weren’t a sub-contractor) DARPA research funded program. Our goal was to improve situational awareness for soldiers deployed in contested (dangerous) cultures. During this program we proposed creating a complete server / client based architecture that responded to the program needs by providing digital augmentation of the surrounding environment. Tons of research, some prototype concepts, and a few patents later we are now cleared to share it with you.
We’ll talk more about the technology stack and client platform(s) in future posts, but for now you may read our final report.
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