7/24/2015 By Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS
Written by By Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS
Lumenous, a startup founded by CS alumni Kevin Karsch (PhD CS ’15), Brett Jones (BS CS ’08, MS CS ’10, PhD CS ’15), and Raj Sodhi (BS CS ’08, MS CS ’10, PhD CS ’15), has received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). This grant is designed to help Lumenous in creating tools to make projection mapping more prevalent and affordable.
Using video projectors, projection mapping overlays digital content onto physical objects and allows viewer to experience and interact with digital experiences in a new way. The content could be still images or video.
The Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Division of the National Science Foundation (NSF) invests in science and engineering research across multiple disciplines that have the potential for high impact in meeting societal and national needs. It leverages federal, small business, industrial, university, state, and community college resources.
The team will use this grant to develop a novel software and hardware system for authoring projection mapping content. The proposed system will greatly simplify a currently complex content authoring process, and will enable entirely new passive and interactive experiences which fuse digital content with the physical environment.“The NSF SBIR Phase I funding, in addition to the Cozad competition, was instrumental in getting Lumenous off the ground,” said Jones. “We are even more excited that it leads to an opportunity for $1.25M in additional funding through the Phase II grant. We are excited for what is yet to come.”
The company’s stated goal is to reinvent projection mapping, making it easier, cheaper and more powerful than ever before.
The company won the 2014 Cozad New Venture Competition at the University of Illinois. And the founders are all individual winners for innovation. Karsch won the Lemelson-MIT Illinois Student Prize in 2012, and Jones and Sodhi each received an Illinois Innovation Prize for separate projects they were working on in 2013.