In 2011 two young Oxford academics came up with a potentially game-changing positioning technology developed from tracking badgers in Wytham Woods, just outside Oxford.
Nine months on, Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni -- along with CEO Jean-Paul van de Ven -- are in "the early stages" of trying to raise £1.2 million for their spinout, OneTriax. They are ready to go public with a technology that they believe is so far ahead of the game as to have "no competitors".
Using very low frequency fields, their technology can work out your position in three dimensions in a building or underground using only a single transmitter (no triangulation here) and the smartphone in your pocket. And while it may help you find your friends on Saturday, it might also -- more importantly -- make the difference between you living and dying after an earthquake.
Markham is the EPSRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, and Trigoni is a lecturer in the same department. Industry veteran Van de Ven has been brought in as CEO as part of the support given to the pair by ISIS Innovations, the university's own tech transfer specialists.
From the "cat got the cream" smiles of the two young academics when I met them and Van de Ven at North Oxford's upmarket Portobello Restaurant, it is clear that they have a pretty good idea of the potential of what they have developed -- and what's more, that the first round fundraising must be going well. Though they deny they are already dreaming of their first Ferrari. "For us it's not about becoming rich, it's that this technology has the potential to change the world, as it has the ability to change the way positioning is done," says Markham.
This is a big claim, he accepts, but he believes it is deserved: "This is a disruptive technology as it fills the gaps where existing techniques don't work, or not well."
For Van de Ven it is a technology that appeals to for investors because it "ticks all the boxes". "Disruptive technology -- we've got that. Global market -- we've got that. Clear need -- we've got that too. After all, it's not a solution seeking a problem; it's a solution to a problem."
Even though the use of low frequency fields dates back to the early days of radio and is "well understood", this is the first time it has been applied to positioning. Markham's and Trigoni's backgrounds were in wildlife tracking, and "the genesis of the project" was the need to find a solution to the "big problem" zoologists faced in tracking badgers, namely that there was "no technology" that allowed us to follow the positions of badgers underground. "So for certain parts of the animal's life we just didn't know what was happening," said Van de Ven.
And while "there was no eureka moment", there was nonetheless a growing realisation of the possible wider applications of the technology that they had developed, a potential that they believe other researchers in the field had missed.
Its big advantage, according to Markham, is that "very low frequency fields just pass through obstacles as if they aren't there" and, and as a result, "you don't need line of sight with a transmitter in order to work out where you are".
This means that you don't need to triangulate your position with the signal from a number of different transmitters: "Our technology can work out your position in three dimensions from a single transmitter. It can even tell you which way your device is facing," Markham adds.
While "most technologies are only checking the magnitude of the signal -- the signal strength from each transmitter -- to work out distance", the distinctive feature of their technology is that the receiver is not just measuring one number but "vectors, which give you magnitude and direction". This information is unique to the receiver's position. "So with the knowledge of this vector field we can establish our position with a single transmitter as it is obviously stretched and scaled depending on how far you are relative to the transmitter."
Even better, this technology can easily be integrated into existing smartphones, as most of these phones "already have magnetometers or electronic compasses to work out the orientation of the screen", whose sensors with "just an upgrade" and "slightly more advanced processing power" could be used to pick up and analyse these vector fields.
In addition to positioning, the technology can also be used for transmitting data and even two-way communications in "harsh environments" to help save lives, such as allowing rescuers to communicate with miners trapped underground; or, more prosaically, to offer shoppers discounts while they wander round their local mall. The ability to communicate larger packets of information like a film is something "they are working on".
Markham accepts that there are challenges involved in scaling up this technology from tracking badgers to saving lives, because "low frequency fields vanish quickly, so we need to develop some very clever signal-processing algorithms so that we can pull the signal out of the background noise".
Yet this is a problem that should be fairly easily overcome: "We are not just looking for a radio signal; we are looking for a signal in 3D, so we have a much richer target to look for," says Markham, and "we have already developed the basic software."
Similarly, he feels that "we should be able to improve on the 30cm accuracy we had while tracking badgers" as the technology improves, that is any case magnitudes better than wi-fi.
And even if the communication is "slightly slower" than other alternatives, "it's solving a different problem, as none of them would be working at all where our technology is being used".
Jean-Paul van de Ven is confident that OneTriax will be successful. "It has a very good momentum," he says, since, "like us, people recognise the potential", and this evident he believes in the contact they have had with "major players" from both the mobile and the mining market.
Within four years, "we will have smartphones manufactured with our technology," Markham believes. "We think it is achievable."
And that really will be game over.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
