A meeting with somebody involved in this revolution: Sylvain Ordureau, founder and president of the start-up Vizua.
Vizua comes from the gaming world, where the quality and comfort of the experience, latency, realism and emotion that technology brings are what makes a successful product.
What is the Vizua solution?
It’s a platform for optimising the management of cloud-based servers and graphics processors. It adapts to all types of visualisation, such as 3D imagery, virtual reality and augmented reality. (www.vizua3d.com)
What requirement does it fulfil?
We started by recognising that the number of users from digital universes, as well as the amount of data they exchange, is growing exponentially; all with new uses that require immediacy and security.
Vizua aims to optimise computing capabilities in the cloud to provide support for more services and more users per GPU.
We have developed two patents that allow our customers to access maximum computing power without having to use an expensive virtual machine due to the price of licences and power consumption. Vizua instantly loads the necessary files and applications to run them in the GPU memory: with no intermediate virtual machine, the costs and energy consumption are eight times less.
Who are your targets?
Our main customers are businesses that offer cloud computing architecture such as Microsoft (Azure), Orange (Flexible Engine) or Amazon (AWS). We also work with mobile equipment manufacturers and producers of tablets and virtual/augmented reality headsets.
Specifically, what can be achieved with Vizua technology?
The possible fields of application are very varied: medicine, industry, video gaming, architecture, defence, finance, archaeology, etc. Last December, for example, we were involved in a surgical procedure at a Paris hospital. Surgeons had HoloLens augmented reality glasses to view the CT scan of a patient’s shoulder in 3D, superimposed onto the patient’s own body. The necessary calculations were not completed locally in the glasses, but rather hundreds of miles away in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, equipped with our Vizua technology.
Meanwhile, three other surgeons based in Boston, London and Seoul were able to view the operation and interact with the French team, while 2,000 people followed it live on YouTube.
Another example is the war-ravaged ancient site of Palmyra in Syria. A digital representation has been produced using a drone from the company Iconem in order to restore it remotely. The produced file contains more than 500 million polygons, accurate to the nearest millimetre. However, thanks to the Vizua platform, archaeologists from around the world can view the site in augmented reality and work together while immersed at the site as if they were actually there.
How do you work with Orange?
We are among the start-ups that Orange supports within its ecosystem. It’s very important to be able to share our technological knowledge and it is, of course, an advantage to access the Vizua market.
What’s next for Vizua?
After its US roots – the company was founded in 2011 in Seattle – I am in the process of buying 100% of Vizua US to bring it back to France and hopefully make it a European entity. I see real potential in the development of the business ecosystem surrounding the Orange Cloud Flexible Engine, adds Sylvain Ordereau.
