LiberoVision secures funds, seeks more for 3-D sports replay

24 Apr 2007 | News

Investment & Partnership opportunity

 

LiberoVision, an ETH Zurich start-up company, has closed its first investment round, and is looking for more investment and partnership over the next few months.
 
At the close of LiberoVision's first investment round, Swisscom Fixnet acquired 8 per cent capital share in the company.  With the deal, Swisscom gets exlusive usage rights of the virtual camera angle technology in Switzerland for two years.  The company is also looking for further investment.

 

LiberoVision’s technology allows for close analysis of football games by synthesizing video pictures from fixed cameras filming across the stadium.  Within three to five minutes realistic virtual replays can be created of players from every angle, allowing for in-depth half-time analysis.  The technique does not require additional cameras or infrastructure in the stadium and does not interfere with production processes. 

 

“Although we have just closed our first investment round we will need additional funding for our company in the coming months,” said Dr. Stephan Würmlin, chief executive officer of LiberoVision, “Besides that we are also looking for licensing of interesting technology in video processing and for research partners or collaborators to further refine or extend our products.”  The company is “always looking for potential investors or partners to bring our technology and products some steps further,” he added.

 

Developed at the Computer Graphics Laboratory at ETH Zurich, Dr. Würmlin and Christoph Niederberger investigated the underlying core technology and implemented the first LiberoVision prototype for their PhD theses.  The software will be tested in this season’s Axpo Super League games and other Swiss football, and used by Cinetrade for Teleclub sports programmes. 

 
LiberoVision was founded in 2006 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich with the aim of creating and developing advanced media content enhancement tools, particularly for sports.  The company won the Swiss Technology Award 2007 and the Venture 2006 Businessplan competition.

 

With currently no comparable providers on the market, LiberoVision plans to expand to include additional sports such as American Football, basketball or baseball over the next few years.  As well as broadcasting, the technology has applications in internet interactive players for replaying scenes, with users freely navigating in a scene to generate their own perspective.

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