Volumental

Refreshing those latent graphic designer skills by drawing a stylistic icon in Inkscape. But, what will it be used for? Stay tuned.

So those monochrome flat and rather think icons are really in style these days. All the larger software companies are using them, not to mention tumblr. I really love it, so many UIs these days are focused on content rather than on shiny icons in the interface that you don't care about. They remind me of the metro signs here in Stockholm, they are soon 60 years old, but still feels great. I don't say they feel fresh, but rather has a timeless hint to them.

Like all hipp startup we needed some toys in order to relax over valuable but overworked brains to keep ahead in the competition. Moritz has ordered great foosball table that arrived today. It's a top-of-the-line table from german manufacturer Fireball. Made out of solid steel and pure engineering know-how it is a delight to twist the rods. It's an amazing feeling for any foosball enthusiast to play on a table with such high level of feel. 

Sharing some unpacking experience photos below.

Exciting

Figuring out how stuff works without an instruction.

Ready for the first game!

Using WPF and C# allows for very rapid and powerful development of desktop applications, but can lack in performance. In our quest to create world changing awesomeness we also need the raw performance power of C++.

Getting them to cooperate is not always the simplest task. We either have the P/Invoke route or the C++/cli route. The former forces the tedious task of creating pure C-interfaces to avoid name mangling to mess up symbol referencing.

When wrapping an existing library already exposing a pure C-interface I prefer to use P/Invoke, but otherwise C++/CLI is very handy. It's an ugly language, yes, but it gets the job done.

Summer party at our incubator STING on 24 June, with a Mexican-Swede theme complete with Tequila, tacos, a music quiz, and Swedish drinking songs! (Photo credit STING)

May flowers around the office

    Lots of office dogs, both Volumental's Echo and Noppe (below) and our neighbour startup Watty's Zelda.  

 The 6th yearly Geek Girl Meetup Unconference was an inspirational event bringing together 250 geeks, 40 speakers, cool gadgets, and workshops in everything from coding to creating bead coasters.

http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/

This is very exciting news for Volumental! That Google is 3D mapping the planet shows how soon and how awesome the 3D future will be, and raises the world's interest in 3D scanning and computer vision. We are proud that Volumental cofounder Alper has been heavily involved in this visionary project, as team lead for NASA JPL's partnership with Google for Project Tango. His involvement will offer us invaluable experience and market understanding, as well as an extensive network going forward in the 3D revolution. 

When working at Project Tango, I've learned a million, from programming to how to execute projects. It's amazing to have witnessed something like Project Tango going from 0 lines of code to fruition. I look forward to even harder challenges.

 - Alper Aydemir, Volumental CSO and cofounder

Google is focused on large spaces and navigation to 3D map the planet. Parallel to Google's Tango project, Volumental has been developing state-of-the art 3D solutions for our nearest environment - for easily and precisely scanning people and small objects in 3D. This includes a whole set of different techniques and challenges than Google's project. Furthermore, there will always be a need for customised applications and products for businesses needing 3D data, and that is exactly our strategic focus.  We considered becoming an early developer for the Peanut/Tango platform, but decided against it for now as room scanning is outside our focus, and the platform is not yet ready for 3D scanning people and objects. 

We have had some stability problems with our dear web plugin. Anyone who has developed web plugins knows it is pretty much as mess. Also testing on various platforms and OS’s makes it very hairy and time consuming to create a stable and solid product.

As we are only a small startup with limited resources we decided to do the best of the situation and work on a small desktop application for Windows that can be used to upload recordings made with a depth device to the Volumental servers for reconstruction of some cool 3D models!

This involved refreshing my c# skill that have been lying dormant during the fall. While it is a really cool language allowing for rapid development of stable end user products, I do miss all handy command line tools of Linux.

In the end hopefully the experience for our users will improve!

Volumental tops the Year's Hottest Web Entrepreneurs 2013 list! We are ranked #1 of 25 cool companies chosen from over 200 nominees.

Volumental is honored to be included in this group of great companies, which in previous years include Spotify, iZettle, Funded by me, Tictail, Polar Rose (bought by Apple) and Kenet Works (bought by Yahoo). Other great companies on the list this year include Memoto (Narrative), Foap, Plotagon, Instabridge, and many other stars. You can see the whole list at internetworld.idg.se.  

The list is what Internetworld calls its “State of the Swedish Internet”-speech (to paraphrase the American President's yearly State of the Union-speech). They choose companies which they expect to explode during the coming year.

We were chosen with this motivation: 

“The one trend that really has taken off in 2013 is 3D-printing. We now hear visions of a 3D-printer in every home, and a future where it is possible to print an entire building. Sprung out of a research project at the Royal Institute of Technology, this year’s winner has entered a completely new niche in a rapidly developing industry. It’s an endeavor coupled with great risk and few guarantees, but also a project of tremendous possibility.” 

Rasmus and Caroline on Skype at Webbdagarna in Malmö. Photo courtesy of Tomas Skoglund

Two of our founders joined Swedish Internetworld's Web-days (webbdagar) in Malmö over Skype to hear the great news. Thank you Sweden for the support, this ROCKS!

We’re working hard around the clock to deliver our Scan-2-Print app. Our goal is to make it super easy to quickly print what you’ve just scanned using our 3D scanner. An important step in this direction is to create what is known as a watertight mesh. This is because 3D printers can only print watertight meshes. 

Here are some screenshots showing our current progress on making watertight meshes:

  The pictures about shows a 3D scan of Caroline featured on our website reconstructed with our software modified for creating models suitable for printing. The 3D model is a bit blocky on the backside, but we’re working on that too. If you'd like to look at the original scan, please go to our Popular Models page.

Our next step is to segment out the most important part of the 3D model. So you can choose if you e.g. want to print only Caroline in the foreground and not the background. We’re still looking at what is the best way forward here. We think by using the largest model in the scene or using the 3D scanner camera positions to decide what object is interesting could be a way forward.

In any case we’re excited about making the Scan-2-Print app come alive! I’ve already started pondering on what I will print when it’s done. :)

The Swedish King and Queen as well as the Portuguese President and his wife, think our 3D scanner software is great! We were one of three Swedish startups selected to present hot new tech as part of the Portuguese President's visit, which focussed on innovation.  The event was at Ericsson Studio, Ericsson's showcase for new technologies, in Kista Science City. We scanned Hans Vestberg, Ericsson's CEO, and passed around a 3D printed statue of Volumental colleague Mikael to the distinguished audience.

The two other ventures presenting were DoReMir, automatic music scoring, and RATS, cutting-edge digital theatre. 

You can see pictures and read more about Portugal's Presidential visit on the President's page: http://www.presidencia.pt/?idc=10&idi=78281&idl=2. 

Caroline scanning Hans Vestberg (thank you Mia Lund for the picture):

The delegation at Ericsson Studio (from the President's webpage linked above):

I'm super psyched to be part of such an awesome, exciting and thriving young startup like Volumental! My name is Samuel Carlsson and I'm guest blogging for today. I'm a tech guy so this will be rather...techie, I hope you don't mind! (You've been warned!) My first day at work was last thursday so you could say that my journey with Volumental has just begun!

We started off this morning with a company strategy meeting so that everyone is clear about the team's goal and vision. It feels great! I believe that all companies should adopt such a practice too. In my opinion, it really helps to create synergy within the team and pulls everyone along in the same direction.

How time flies! It’s been a month since we started our Kickstarter campaign and I’m proud to announce that we’ve successfully raised a total of $27,632 in funding for our all-new 3D Scan-to-Print web app!

Certainly, we would not be able to achieve such amazing results without the help of all our awesome supporters for believing in Volumental and helping us to spread the 3D revolution cause! 

Firstly, we like to thank our amazing 174 backers for contributing by funding our campaign! Every single one of you have played a significant role in making Volumental’s 3D Scan-to-Print app a reality.

At the same time, we want to acknowledge and thank all writers and bloggers for the great press coverage and valuable publicity that has brought in so much attention to Volumental and the campaign itself.

So, now that the campaign is funded. What’s next? We are in the midst of planning for the developmental phase of the web app now and it’s going to get busy over for us in Volumental. Our development team has just drafted a roadmap and we’re excited to get started!

So the day we’ve all been working hard for is here! Volumental launched our very own Kickstarter Campaign on 1 August 2013 to develop our upcoming Scan-to-Print web app! For this cause, we are looking to hire a dedicated developer for the project as well as some upgrades to add extra juice to our cloud infastructure.

Having a sophisticated 3D printer is simply not enough to produce great 3D prints; you need to have high-quality 3D models to begin with. Moreover, creating 3D prints from complex 3D models can be a tricky process of complicated computer programs coupled with tedious iterations. We are changing all that with our new 3D Scan-to-Print web app!

Imagine making a 3D model with just a depth camera and your browser, there is virtually no limits except your creativity.

Basically, the Scan-to-Print web app will enable the isolation of objects from your 3D scans, which allows you to transform the 3D model into a water-tight and closed, 3D printable model. The water-tight model is then downloaded and sent off to an online printing service that is ready to print! This new app will be perfect for those objects that you’ve always wanted to 3D print but were inaccessible due to either 3D modeling difficulties or the restrictions of desktop 3D scanners.

How are we going to achieve this? We will need a funding of $20,000 to fund the project and its development. With a successful campaign, we estimate that this awesome app will take 3 months to develop by the hired skilful developer. Once the app has been developed, our beta backers will have the first-hand opportunity of testing out the new web app, before launching to the public!

As a backer, you have a range of pledges to choose from. From a $10 pledge of obtaining 1 free 3D print of your choice to a $2500 pledge of unlimited scans for 2 years and meeting Volumental co-founders in Stockholm too!

Volumental just reached another (small) milestone! We are proud to announce that we have hit 100 'likes' on our Facebook page! 

Continue to spread the word about Volumental and keep the likes coming! We have a whole bunch of upcoming and exciting happenings to share with everyone. We know you'll love it! 

Last week, Volumental was invited to The Economist, Digital Horizon 2013 conference. The event was held in KTH library and was attended by our CEO, Caroline and Business & Marketing, Ernest.

It was a great opportunity for us to showcase our product and certainly, we had a great time 3D scanning the attendees of the event too! 

Just a brief overview about the conference: "At Digital Horizons, we explore the opportunities, challenges and threats of our digital future, focusing on current trends and their impact in 5, 15 and 30 years. How will technology change the way that companies compete and consumers behave?"

The 2-day conference included keynote speakers from Google, Spotify and Microsoft. It was a great chance for us to listen, learn and knowledge-pool from these successful companies in the digital and tech industry, especially about the advent of 3D technology and it's potential future.

Indeed, we are very encouraged by the positive feedback gathered from the conference about what Volumental is doing now! And surely we are continually striving to provide you with the best 3D scanning and 3D modelling experience ever.

On 24 May 2013, Volumental was specially invited as one of the most exciting tech startups in Sweden for a meeting session with Fleur Pellerin, the French minister for Small and Medium Enterprises, Innovation, and the Digital Economy during her trip to Stockholm to gain inspiration for a new tech startup hub in Paris. We are definitely excited to meet with her too!

Atop Kista Science Tower - one of the tallest building in Sweden, towering at 32 storeys and 142 metres high - our CEO, Caroline met with the minister, Fleur Pellerin, the French ambassador of Sweden, several journalists and Kista Science city executives. But of course, not forgetting the other Swedish startups that were present: Jin from Movintofun, Astrid from Berries by Astrid, and Alex from Mosync. 

Several insightful discussion topics were raised, such as technological trends in gamification and health. Ms Fleur Pellerin agreed with us that although the simplification process in technology can be increasingly complex, the primary purpose and importance of delivering new technology should essentially make life easier and more convenient for everyone. Just like Volumental, we make 3D scanning as easy as counting 1...2...3...NOW START SCANNING!

Oh, did we mentioned that we managed to get a 3D model of Ms Fleur Pellerin with Volumental's 3D-scanning service and she thought it was really cool! (We think its really cool too)