Computer Graphics World

May/June 2013

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Education•Business ■ THE LYNX A Camera does object modeling as well as scene modeling and motion capture. A person goes to college. Sometimes, graduate school. Then, armed with the knowledge and experience obtained from the classroom, the student seeks employment in what is today a very tight job market. At least, that is the traditional path most take from student to professional. However, for two particular students from the University of Texas at Austin, there was a different option worth exploring: Starting their own company. The firm is called Lynx Laboratories, founded several months ago by Chris Slaughter (CEO) and Jeff Mahler (senior engineer), along with Dustin Hopper (senior software engineer) and Sriram Vishwanath (advisor). Also joining the team is Nick Shelton (computer vision), Albert Rondan (graphics), and Kyle Cox and Larry Walker (advisors). The company is full of young, eager students/recent grads, all but one of whom hails from the University of Texas or are experienced advisors from the university. The startup was hatched from a computer vision research group at the University of Texas. It was there where engineering grad student Slaughter had the opportunity to work in the school's research laboratory, starting up the UT Perception Lab. The lab, which involved a handful of people, was trying to solve the problem of inferring imagebased data – such as shape and motion – from a camera feed. "It started out as a computer research problem, and we had some breakthroughs there, and after demonstrating what the technology was capable of, people in the com- ■ LYNX LABORATORIES has made scene modeling fast and inexpensive. munity started reaching out to us, saying that this would be really great for industrial inspection, architectural surveys, and visual effects, things like that," says Slaughter. "After hearing the really high level of interest from the community, we decided [pushing our vision] would be better accomplished as a commercial company than as a research lab." At the university, word of Slaughter's lab project had spread throughout the various disciplines, from the architectural department to the film department, and then via friends and then friends of friends. The project developed organically from there. Today, Lynx Laboratories has transformed that project/lab into a product: the Lynx A Camera, a 3D capture device that can digitize the shape and motion of an object the camera is trained on. The group calls it "structural capture and next-generation photography." According to Slaughter, the core research was done at the university, but the group has taken that further with an invention spawned from the underlying technology. "Our company is focused more on productization now," says Slaughter, who counts his former PhD supervisor, Vishwanath, as the company's secret weapon. "He is an extremely talented mathematician, and his contribution has been in solving theoretical-based problems that have popped up," Slaughter says. Lynx Laboratories opened its offices in Austin last summer, and with a National Science Foundation grant early this year, is now self-sufficient. To help secure funding for the camera, the team turned to one of the more popular methods of funding at CG W M ay / June 2013 ■ 27

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