In the past ImmerVision kept a relatively low profile, choosing to devote its time and effort to research and development. Today the company is coming out of the closet, so to speak, unveiling two Java-based multimedia products, which are covered in VRMag’s companion article, “PURE Player PRO for Java”.

In this interview Artonne and Rouvier-Nini discuss the company’s history, its half dozen worldwide patents, R&D activities, and the recent launch of ImmerVision’s first panomorph lenses for the security market. The duo also addresses the company’s much-discussed proof of concept Flash player, and plans for the future.

First off, let’s discuss ImmerVision and its history. How did the company get started in France in 1999? Can you tell us about your background and the genesis of your interest in panoramic imaging technology?

[Jean-Claude Artonne] It is quite difficult to summarize in a few words the fruit of six years of passion and perseverance of the group of French researchers and engineers who have been with us since the beginning.

The origin of this venture came from the merger of my former business in real estate and my interest and knowledge in technology. I believed that there was, and still is, a real lack of efficient, easy-to-use and cost effective solutions to create and publish quality virtual tours. Therefore, in 1999 I decided to invest lot of time and money to gather a group of specialists to find a solution. We rapidly came to the conclusion that the key to the solution is to establish strong foundations on both ends of the process: the capture and the visualization.

For a long time people sought only to correct images captured with traditional wide-angle lenses without looking at the problem under another perspective. In fact, to correct the distortion of a lens you must unwarp it with a digital process; therefore, why settle with a lens that has a constant angular distribution on a circle and utilizes only a portion of a camera sensor? The ImmerVision team researched a way to use more pixels on a rectangular camera sensor and to increase the resolution in specific areas of interest. The panomorph lens concept was born out of this assessment at the end of 2000 and new and more powerful unwarping algorithms were developed.

We then understood that we had a high-value asset in our hands and therefore I decided to sell my former real estate company and to reinvest all proceeds in ImmerVision.

What were the reasons behind your move to Montreal in 2003?

[Jean-Claude] There were several reasons that motivated this move. First, ImmerVision was in a key fundraising round just before the 9/11 event froze the investment market. That forced us to rethink the strategy in order to continue the project and preserve our research efforts. With that in mind, our key people decided to enter into a new startup phase. This is proof of another important strength of ImmerVision team: its resilience! In fact, ImmerVision management has the strong ability to adapt its development plans in respect to available resources in order to stay on track with the initial mission and goal.

I want to take the opportunity of this interview to thank and congratulate those pioneers who worked very hard to deliver you this new generation of viewers. A particular recognition to the people who are still with ImmerVision since 2000: Mathieu Villegas, the architect of ImmerVision viewing technology; Benjamin Blanc, who orchestrated the development of PURE Tools and software for security applications; Valentin Bataille, Pierre Konen and Sébestien Delaroque, who are all talented engineers and software developers. My outmost gratitude to Pascale Rouvier-Nini, our CEO for more than a year and half. She is both a remarkable business negotiator and a management expert. Pascale joined ImmerVision as an investor and key partner in 2000. We are now privileged to have her leading ImmerVision to its success.

So, why Montreal? Forty percent of our customer potential is in North America. Montreal is also close to Quebec City and Rochester (NY), two important locations for optical sciences. Furthermore, it is recognized worldwide that Montreal fosters one of the largest pools of talents in imaging technology (just think of companies such as Discreet, Softimage and Ubisoft who have established their most important development sites in Montreal). Finally, Montreal is a French-speaking city, which makes it easy for French people to integrate into the North American lifestyle.

Today you are officially launching your PURE Players and last month you launched your security solution, is your company entering a new phase of development?

That is correct. I will let Pascale answer, as she is the one who has led the company from an R&D organization to a profit-oriented business.

[Pascale Rouvier-Nini] After having validated and patented its technology and after having industrialized its hardware and software products, ImmerVision has entered the commercialization phase. This past year, besides seeking financial investments, I have set up the commercial structure and recruited key management people to assist me in growing ImmerVision to become the worldwide leader in panoramic imaging technology.

Can you elaborate on the six worldwide patents that ImmerVision holds and how they are incorporated into your technology?

[Pascale] Most of these patents are on the hardware side.

Three of them address photography and multimedia applications: compact devices to support cameras with an integrated rotator, automatic North recognition systems, and automatic color calibration devices.

The two most important ImmerVision patents describe a new generation of wide-angle lenses that are totally different and more efficient than regular fisheye lenses, but no terms existed to identify them correctly. Several scientific publications and conferences have covered this new optical design approach. The technical and generic name identifying this new family of lenses is “PANOMORPH”. It is a contraction between panoramic and anamorphous.

So what is a panomorph lens? It’s a lens that has a wide-angle field of view and a non-constant angular resolution in order to create more resolution in the main interest areas, like the surrounding view for security if the camera is positioned as a dome, or the horizontal area if it is for a frontal view, or in the center if it is required for some applications like one we are working on for the space industry. Also the footprint on the sensor can be different from a circle in order to use more pixels on the sensor than a fisheye. The shape of the footprint can be an ellipse or more complex as we explain on our website in the R&D section.

ImmerVision owns the intellectual property on any lenses with characteristics similar to the panomorph.

The last patent describes an optronic device embedded in our lenses that allows automatic software recognition and calibration of the lens making it as easy to use as a standard lens. This eliminates the need for a parameters data file for each camera. Security installers simply attach the lens to a standard CCTV camera and the software component, which can be easily integrated in any DVR, will do the rest of the job.

ImmerVision has already a rich intellectual property asset and will add several other patents coming from our ongoing R&D.

How would you break down your current R&D budget amongst your three core markets: security, video conferencing and multimedia? Moreover, which of the three markets do you believe has the most growth potential over the next five years? From your perspective, where do you anticipate the greatest growth potential within the panoramic multimedia market over the next several years?

[Pascale] ImmerVision R&D focus is on its core technology. That means that any advancement made on our viewing algorithms for multimedia applications have a direct influence on 360° video surveillance applications. Furthermore, ImmerVision’s innovations for security applications directly address some videoconference needs.

Therefore, it is difficult to answer your question as is. I can give you a general answer on our current and upcoming developments. Multimedia is a key strategic market for ImmerVision’s growth. Our goal is to continually invest to make editing and publishing of panoramic content easy and efficient by providing the best viewers, players and tools on the market. We have the ambition to create and offer a new powerful and multiplatform standard file format for panoramic imaging.

We can’t find any official statistic on the number of VR photographers in the world but several companies in this industry estimate that the number of professionals worldwide is about 50,000. With the decrease in price for high resolution cameras, the increase in performance of the latest professional stitching software and the strong demand for more quality content for corporate presentations and entertainment, the number of VR photographers will certainly more than double during the next five years. I predict the same for the hundreds of thousands of web designers around the world that will also become potential customers for professional panoramic imaging technologies.

Another interesting fact is that today you can easily find stitching software in all digital camera packages from major brands. Some of them already have a strong marketing message about panoramic functionalities, like Kodak, which has just launched a compact digital camera with two sensors and two lenses, one for standard pictures and another for panoramic ones with a 90° field of view and embedded stitching software. Another example would be HP that allows you to print your panoramas on some printers directly from your camera. These are important signs that panoramic technologies are growing in popularity and with the increase of user friendliness and decrease in prices, panoramic technologies will attain mass market penetration.

Now, to move on to other markets.

We have just launched our first panomorph lenses for the security market, a market that has seen increased demand since 2001. A survey from Datamonitor forecasts that the CCTV business will grow at a speed of 55% each year between 2003 and 2007. In the UK, the most advanced country for video security, Urbaneye estimates that there is one camera for 14 persons! Although for surveillance applications, global vision with no blind spot is a critical advantage, the adoption of panoramic cameras is very slow. The main reason is that the costs of current solutions are too expensive and require very large bandwidth networks and proprietary equipment to support mega pixel video. Since ImmerVision’s panomorph technology is the only one that can be used with standard and already installed cameras and networks, we are confident that our security lens sales will boom. Industry specialists, integrators and customers introduced to ImmerVision panoramic security technology are excited after seeing that our panomorph lens, for less than USD $750.00 retail, provides the same quality on a standard 320K pixel NTSC or PAL camera as does a cumbersome 360° IP camera system equipped with a fisheye or a mirror system on a 2M pixels camera, which costs thousands of dollars. ImmerVision’s patented optical technology allows us to offer at least 30% more pixel coverage on the sensor and up to 2.5 times higher angular resolution on the surrounding area, representing approximately six times more efficiency on a surface compared to all other solutions on the same size sensor.

Even though ImmerVision’s core technology is ready for videoconferencing, we planned to address this market next year. The goal will be to offer a new generation of 360o panoramic PC cameras at an affordable price for the mass market. These panoramic webcams, named WebCube, will allow real freedom of movement around the camera for several users at the same time. There are hundreds of millions of computers that are not connected to a camera and video telephony is only at its beginning. Therefore, we also believe that this market will be a very good business opportunity for ImmerVision as our strategy is to license this technology to major brands that already have strong commercial exposure.

Another market we have not yet discussed is R&D itself. Just imagine the benefit of a panoramic camera to replace your car mirrors; no more blind spots. And this is only an example; if you think about it you will quickly understand that everywhere you require a panoramic view could be an advantage! We consider ourselves technology providers, so we will work to implement our technologies everywhere possible, for everyone who needs to see more.

Our motto is: “ImmerVision enables”.

Does ImmerVision plan to launch a panomorph lens for photography?

[Pascale] This represents a large investment in order to develop such a lens that produces a perfect image on sensors up to 10 mega pixels. We estimate that the required potential market to launch such development could be reached in two to three years for this kind of lens.

ImmerVision stirred up a bit of interest with its Player for Flash proof of concept; do you believe we will see a “PURE Player for Flash” in the near future?

[Pascale] There are two stages in a development. The first one is the proof of concept and the second is the development of a commercial product, with all that includes: coding, testing and support. There is a big distance to cover between these stages and it requires large investment.

ImmerVision has already publicly shared demos or beta versions to gather feedback from the users’ community. Feedback has been very constructive and often we get WOW reactions, like when we showed the first fullscreen high resolution Java player, today still unique, or the first smooth spherical viewer on pocket PCs. Sharing with your users’ community a proof of concept is a common non-expensive way to understand the needs of your market. However, it is also a double-edged sword because you create expectations and users may become impatient to get the new release.

ImmerVision management is now studying the market for a future PURE Player for Flash. Our goal is to offer panoramic Players that allow viewing the same file on almost all platforms; it is just a question of time, priority and cost.

We chose to address the Java platform first because Java is already a cross-platform solution with a very large distribution and requiring no plugin installation. Users will now have the choice between the PURE Player for Java and the PURE Player PRO for Java, which we are pleased to introduce to you today.