The Booster Innovation Fund helps Kiwi’s invest in early-stage companies founded on cutting edge innovations being developed right here in New Zealand.
StretchSense is one of the 30 early-stage tech Kiwi companies we currently partner with in the Booster Innovation Fund (BIF) portfolio, who are breaking new ground by challenging industrial norms with trailblazing ideas in the areas of medicine, science, the environment and more.
This month, we spoke to Todd Gisby, Chief Technology Officer of StretchSense, when he popped into Booster HQ while he was in Wellington for the NZ Hi-Tech Awards.
StretchSense was a finalist in the Awards, recognised in the Most Innovative Hi-Tech Creative Technology Solution and Most Innovative Hi-Tech Hardware Product categories. (It was highly commended for the latter by judges!)
The Auckland motion caption engineering/tech company has gained recognition and huge demand for its specialised motion capture solution that combines stretch sensor gloves with machine learning, resulting in superior finger tracking for animators, game developers and film studios.
In the world of film, games, entertainment and virtual reality, hands are one of the most difficult parts of the body to recreate and emulate. Without capturing hands, it is a slow and painstaking process for animators to manually recreate hand movements on characters. Using StretchSense’s stretch sensor gloves makes the process more efficient, saving time, money and motion graphic designers’ stress levels.
What’s around the corner? Todd says he envisions everyone eventually using stretch sensor gloves as augmented and virtual reality become a part of everyday life.
How old is StretchSense? How many people work there? Has the team grown since its inception?
StretchSense was spun out of the Biomimetics Laboratory at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute in 2012. We were three co-founders who put $5k in each and went to work.
Initially, we sold sensors and design services. Then in 2018, we made the leap and launched our motion capture glove product. Today, we have the premium hand tracking solution for mo-cap and are up to around 65 people, globally, with offices in New Zealand, US and Scotland.
How did StretchSense start and what was it in response to?
As co-founders, we were frustrated that there was so much potential for the sensors we’d been working on for several years, but no one was seeking to commercialise it in a practical way. As the first real technology that could be both soft and precise, we were excited by the possibilities for a comfortable, human-friendly technology to be used to precisely measure human movement.
What makes StretchSense unique from other motion capture tech companies out there?
Our deep expertise in our unique sensor tech is a core element, but I think our greatest strength comes from our willingness to listen and respond quickly to our customers. Our drive to always push the limits of the tech and bring together a broad spectrum of disciplines – from garments to sensors to software – to create a great product.
What industries will StretchSense be working with and how will it be helping them?
We made our name in the motion capture industry, solving the problem of capturing hands accurately and reliably. Many attempts have been made in the past 40 years to solve this problem, but none had achieved widespread adoption.
Our timing was very fortunate. Big pressures for content creators to make more authentic and realistic content created a lot of market pull for high quality mo-cap technology, and through a lot of hard work, we were in the right place at the right time.
Our next step is hands for virtual reality training and immersive learning. Natural and intuitive interactions in virtual worlds massively increases the effectiveness of training, both from a social and a physical perspective.
What has been one of your biggest challenges?
Figuring out how to go faster! We are certainly not short of things to do that we know will add value to our business. The biggest challenge is prioritising what needs to happen next or figuring out how we can achieve things more quickly.
There was also that one time we made a demo of our tech research and flew all the way to San Diego to show it at a conference, only for it to completely fail the night before. Instead, we built an electrostatic motor out of a high voltage power supply, a mini shampoo bottle, a toothpick, a plastic cup, and a tinfoil burrito wrapper that became the talk of the conference. That was a pretty big deal too!
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What has been the biggest learning curve?
People don’t care how our technology works; they care if it solves their problem. If it doesn’t solve their problem, they don’t care why not – they just won’t buy it.
Coming from an academic environment where diving into the technical details was the norm, accepting that fun, long, detailed engineering discussions were counter-productive was something we were forced to adapt to pretty quickly.
Also, properly getting inside the minds of our customers and appreciating that just because something works, doesn’t mean it’s not a prototype anymore and it’s a product. It’s not a product until there is a good, robust user experience for the customer – and not just because it works when we use it!
What exciting things has StretchSense got planned next?
There are amazing things happening in VR/AR and the development of the metaverse(s). We are adding full haptics and tracking capabilities to our gloves, so you will only need our gloves and your AR/VR headset to fully interact with your virtual environment.
What do you want to happen next?
Everyone to have a pair of our gloves! They are comfortable and available in any style that suits you so you can put them on and forget you are wearing them. All the things we currently do with our phones and laptops are now done with AR or VR glasses and we’ll all be using our hands to interact and control everything.
How does StretchSense’s partnership with the Booster Innovation Fund support StretchSense with its goals and growth? What sort of things has the relationship allowed StretchSense to further?
As corny as it sounds, we believed the technology we helped develop had the potential to change the world, so to back that up we formed StretchSense to use it as the vehicle to affect change.
We developed our expertise by getting out there, doing it and learning as we went. Ten years later, we’re still going, and still in love with what we do. We anticipated that a market for immersive virtual experiences would become part of everyday life. Now it’s arriving, it's time for us to put our advantage to good use and help drive it into the mainstream. The Booster Innovation Fund has helped us shift up a gear to press our advantage. Speed of execution is key to our continued success.
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Read more about the Booster Innovation Fund (BIF) and some of the exciting companies it has invested in to advance early stage innovation – and see how you can support these young companies originating right here in Aotearoa.
Booster Investment Management Limited is the issuer of the Booster Innovation Scheme, Booster Innovation Fund (Fund). The Fund’s Product Disclosure Statements are available at www.booster.co.nz or by contacting your financial adviser.
