Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The deals are still subject to non disclosure agreements, according to CEO and former Cambridge scientist, Chris Doran, but he revealed that Geomerics was in discussions with “games console manufacturers and global software publishers.”

Seed financed to date by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) and technology venturing firm, Angle, Geomerics plans to leverage its enhanced valuation to secure a good deal in its Series A VC financing round.

Doran said: “It’s fair to say that the VCs are beginning to get excited now.”

The company plans to expand its team from six currently, to between 20 and 30 over the next year. It is commercialising intellectual property associated with geometric algebra, a branch of mathematics first invented in the nineteenth century by Cambridge mathematician W.K. Clifford.

The key facet of the technology is that it is able to solve problems in three dimensions as opposed to the two dimensions of conventional algebra taught in schools and still widely used in software.

The technology is of use to scientists trying to calculate the movement of objects through space, where all sorts of forces at work, such as the gravitational pulls of nearby stars and planets. It is also used to describe how particles move in atoms.

Although it is widely used in academic applications, it is yet to find its way into the commercial realm in any meaningful sense. Geomerics aims to change that and it has its eye set on the $700m-a-year market for games middleware as its opening gambit. “We are very confident that we can capture a good chunk of this market,” Doran said.

It has developed two algorithms that it believes will revolutionise the way that computer games – and CGI films – display lighting by enabling them to easily process the vast amount of data that needs to be crunched to make it realistic. The technique simulates the so-called ‘global illumination’ nature of real-world lighting.

Using global illumination all surfaces can be illuminated by emissive sources and, critically, light reflected off other surfaces receiving light. Calculating this effect in real time is a major challenge and one that Geomerics has solved.

Geomerics’ real-time lighting technology incorporates all of these effects in an ‘infinite bounce’ setting. Lights can be moved dynamically, so characters exploring a scene with a torch, for example, can now experience the scene being lit as it would be in the real world.

Furthermore, artists can create lights dynamically to ensure that scenes are lit the way they intended, in a similar manner to movie sets.

According to ScreenDigest, the computer and video games industry earned Britain close to £200m in 2003. Exports were worth almost £500m that year, but only £290m was spent on imports.

Some 22,000 people are employed in the industry, with just over 6,000 of them working for games development companies.

Geomerics’ technology will also benefit other industries. It makes it easier for mobile phone companies to design their antennas, for example. And it will help the defence industry reduce the radar signatures of ships and planes, protecting them against attack.

Cambridge could soon become a centre for other ‘out-of-this-world’ technologies since St John’s Innovation Centre based Qi3 was appointed UK technology transfer officer for the European Space Agency (ESA).

The MD of Qi3, Nathan Hill is also the head of the PPARC innovation advisory service and was instrumental in setting up Geomerics.

Hill’s aim is to increase the rate of uptake of space technologies by UK businesses, through spin-outs and collaborative development and “to mobilise space industry sector to think more about transferring skills and technologies to other sectors.”

Qi3 has also been instrumental in the formation of Arkex in Cambridge, which started life as a research project conducted by Oxford Instruments Superconductors, working on a European Space Agency project to develop a space-based gradiometer.

Asked what ESA technologies he believed to hold the most commercial potential, Hill said: “I expect robotics, autonomous systems and instrumentation to feature heavily. I recently chaired a conference on formation flying technologies and it attracted a huge amount of interest.”

The first event organised by Qi3 as part of its new role is a workshop on the potential science returns from low-cost space platforms. The workshop will bring together UK industrial and academic competences in miniaturised, low-cost, highly integrated satellites, platforms and instrument payloads.

Discussion will encompass potential benefits to the ESA space science and Earth Observation programmes, together with transferable technology for application in telecommunications and security. Anyone interested in attending should contact the PPARC.

PPARC is the UK’s strategic science investment agency. It funds research, education and public understanding in four broad areas of science – particle physics, astronomy, solar system science and particle astrophysics.

Research into particle physics led to the discovery of the electron more than a century ago, which in turn led to the wider use of electricity in all our lives and the birth of the World Wide Web.

It was invented by a British physicist at the European Particle Physics research laboratory at CERN, and has since grown into today’s global information highway.

It also underpins a range of other technologies found in sensors, cancer monitoring, genomics, traffic flow management, MRI and PET scanners, and climate modelling.