Safe drone flights everywhere
Tinamu Labs wants to revolutionise sports broadcasting by providing safe and precise drone-based multi-camera systems. The ETH spin-off was founded by Tobias Nägeli and his colleagues Samuel Oberholzer, David Lanter and Daniel Meier in 2018. We interviewed Tobias.
Who are your customers?
Our target customers are sports and media production houses that need to deliver more and more spectacular camera shots in order to retain audiences. Sport productions such as golf, motor sports and ski racing offer excellent opportunities to enter the market with our flying multi-camera system. Our long-term goal is to establish drones in sports coverages of stadium sports such as American football and soccer. For evaluation reasons, we have just carried out tests in cooperation with Fox Sports at the LA Memorial Coliseum. However, this is just the beginning. Delivering stunning media content in the sports world should open the door for movie productions. At a later stage, we want to replace heavy equipment such as cranes or dollies with our flying camera system on film sets.
How can sports broadcasters benefit from your solution?
Drones enable entirely new and spectacular cinematographic shots that are currently either impossible or extremely expensive to produce. However, such drones are piloted manually at present and, therefore, they involve massive safety risks and overheads since they cannot be flown accurately and repeatedly. Moreover, orchestrating several cameras simultaneously, as required for multi-camera productions in movies or sports, is almost impossible.
Our hard- and software prototype VirtualRails turns drones into precise, safe and easy to use flying cameras. The technology is independent of GPS or other costly motion capture technologies. VirtualRails allows every camera operator to use multiple flying cameras on pre-defined flight paths safely. Even without any drone-related experience, these paths are plannable and can be repeated infinite times. Thus, we enable sports broadcasters to create spectacular and never seen before image content such as individual player tracking or race car tracking. This opens up entirely new opportunities in content creation and fan engagement: You are not only watching, you are in the middle of it.
Drones offer unique possibilities to create stunning images, but so far, their use in sports broadcasting is limited due to safety and repeatability issues. We can offer a solution that turns commercially available drones into reliable and safe flying cameras, which will save a lot of time and money.
What are your advantages?
The technology developed at Tinamu Labs will fuel the robotic revolution in the high-end film and entertainment industry.
We are competing with drone service providers that deliver aerial footage to sports broadcasters. However, their drones are prone to human error and cannot guarantee the exact repeatability of camera trajectories. Furthermore, we are in competition with heavy camera equipment such as cable suspended cameras and cranes. However, they have limitations regarding speed and motion, and the installation is resource-intense. We differentiate by providing the best aspects of both competing offerings: The flexibility of drones with the precision of heavy equipment. Last, but not least, the development team of Tinamu Labs has the advantage of 25 years’ experience in drone control and computer vision.
What are your goals for 2020?
In early 2020, we will close our seed investment round to accelerate the commercialisation of our solution and to add bright, talented people to our team to cover top-tier sports events. We are fully convinced that our flying multi-camera system will revolutionise the way we experience sports broadcasts in the future.
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