Les Echos | According to the newspaper, silkke is making the creation of digital avatars accessible to everyone
The Nantes-based startup has just unveiled its mobile avatar-creation booth at Roland-Garros.
This portable, modular booth took four years to develop "in the utmost secrecy”, says Edouard Deslandes, the company’s founding CEO, who raised 800,000 euros for this phase. Another capital raise of 500,000 euros is currently underway.
How does it work? About a hundred photographic sensors, triggered simultaneously, scan the person in less than a second. Post-production processing automatically creates the articulation, giving the digital copy the ability to move.
Until now, this technology has been the exclusive domain of expensive studios, notes Edouard Deslandes, who aims to make it accessible to everyone by renting out his booths in amusement parks, shopping malls, airports, and more. “About fifty major clients have already expressed interest in the technology,” he adds.
With the capacity to scan 60 people per hour, silkke aims to “create the world’s largest database of avatars.” But these figures “are the exclusive property of each user,” notes Edouard Deslandes, who also plans to provide “the infrastructure, applications, games, and virtual worlds” in which these avatars can interact. He also plans to open his platform “to all developers to enable them to create applications compatible with the avatars.”
The company aims to reach a production capacity of about 100 cabins in 2017, in collaboration with industrial partners in Angers and Dubai.
