Geomerics - Advancing Technology Through Innovation

Graphics and physics middleware company Geomerics has secured a grant worth some £100,000 from the DTI’s 2006 Technology Programme.

Geomerics, a Cambridge-based company specialising in advanced graphics and physics technology, will further develop its revolutionary lighting technology for animation in a collaboration with Cambridge University funded by the Department of Trade and Industry.

The two-year collaborative research and development project will be funded with £180,000 from the DTI’s Technology Programme , with Geomerics receiving £100,000.

Welcoming the new partnership, Science and Innovation Minister, Malcolm Wicks said: “The UK has a proud history of innovation in science and technology. We believe that we must work with industry to develop the marketable products and services of tomorrow, so that we can maintain our position as a leading global economy. That’s why we’re supporting Geomerics on this project, which provides a great opportunity to harness the UK’s world class expertise and use it to boost our economy and our quality of life. This partnership should help establish British industry as the world leader in this area and be an attractive proposition for investors.”

Geomerics’ CEO, Chris Doran, said “I am delighted that we been awarded this grant. Our company philosophy is to be a driving force for bringing new technology to the games industry, and this grant will help ensure that a key component of our research and development roadmap gets off to a flying start. And we could not ask for better partners than the Cambridge University Engineering Department, which has driven many innovations in this field.”

As games and interactive entertainment evolves, one of the biggest challenges facing developers is that of generating greater realism. Geomerics has already taken a major step in this direction with its revolutionary lighting technology, which incorporates the effects of all of the bounced light in a scene, leading to a dramatic improvement in the level of perceived realism.

The next step is to embed characters realistically within their environment and solve two separate problems. The first is ensuring that the underlying skeleton animation is realistic and captures the subtle nuances of human motion. Potentially this requires storing vast amounts of data, which is why compression schemes with fast decompression at runtime are essential. Once the skeleton is moving correctly, the next problem is to ‘skin’ it realistically and then light it correctly so that it is believably immersed in its environment. This involves solving a range of problems, from how to construct the skin envelope around a skeleton, through to how to dynamically compute the self-shadowing of the character at runtime.

Geomerics and Cambridge University will be applying their expertise and IP in the field of ‘geometric algebra’ to tackle problems in animation. Geometric algebra is a powerful mathematical language, which has been applied successfully to a vast range of problems, from motion, capture to cosmology. It is perfectly suited to solving the sorts of problems routinely encountered in producing dynamic animations.

Back to news page