10 questions to a founder : Hack The Visual

There are many hackathons around the world allowing engineers to play around with API’s they might not otherwise  have access to. But none are exclusively focused on Visual Tech…until now. From the brain and hard work of Floris van Eck and Vincent Leeuw comes Hack the Visual, a 48 hours extravaganza of code, pixels,  deep learning, metadata and image recognition that promises to break the mold of what we expect from images. We sat down with creator Floris van Eck as he puts the final touches to the event.

What is Imaging Mind?

Imaging Mind is a futurist agency and visual culture community dedicated to uncovering the future of imaging and how it manifests itself in technology and society. We drive innovation in the visual space by facilitating meaningful interactions between startups, corporations, researchers and artists in a narrative driven platform through a combination of community building, events, scouting, publishing, and incubation. For this, we offer a narrative driven platform and related services, making sense out of contemporary developments in visual culture, entrepreneurship, exponential technology and design, focused around the future of imaging. Our community provides access to over 500 imaging startup founders from around the globe and hosts Meetup groups in London, Amsterdam and Berlin.

I run Imaging Mind together with my co-founder Vincent Leeuw, who I have known for over a decade. Vincent is a game designer and writer by trade. As such he is more connected to the results of imaging in video games, virtual reality, and computer-generated imagery. He’s worked on a Dutch MMORPG, several promotional games and gamification projects.

Imaging Mind is based in Amsterdam – in the FreedomLab Cross-over Innovation Campus (Freedomlab.org) which is a really inspiring and creative environment to work from. We share our offices with many visionaries from different industries and domains.

What is your personal background?

My background is in International Business, but I have always dabbled in the visual space with many side projects. I studied for a while at the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, did some filmmaking and documentary projects and am a frequent visitor and admirer of (interactive) art exhibitions. I also wrote a lot about video games and game culture. I am someone who is strongly drawn by the ‘fresh and new’ – always on the lookout for the next big thing. I would describe myself as  a ‘visual explorer of the information age’, scouting for emerging trends and disruptive technologies with a heavy emphasis on new media and contemporary visual culture. That’s why I find these times so exciting: technology allows for very cool personalized and contextual installations and experiences. And then there is the internet. It turned all of us into a creator, a publisher. Digitization and the internet democratized photography, filmmaking, publishing, and art. It gave us an (mostly) uncensored voice. Just take a look at internet culture to see what I mean by that: GIFs, memes, Vine, Instagram, YouTube – imaging is the true universal language.

Ever since we started with Imaging Mind we wanted to do a hackathon around visual culture. The key focus of our project is to make imaging experiential – to not only talk, but do! We have been pitching this hackathon idea to corporations for a while now. Thanks to the support of Canon, it is finally happening now!

The goal of Hack The Visual is to find new perspectives by connecting different types of visual data to each other – and to all other types of data. Music, geo data, and open data are some that spring to mind. How can a CCTV picture be used to help people beyond surveillance? When can we use a camera to activate the coffee machine? How can we use satellite imagery for visual intelligence? How can generating vast amount of photos lead to new insights and add context? This and more is what we want to try to uncover during 48-hours of Hack The Visual.

Why London and not Amsterdam, where you are based or Paris, Berlin?

To be honest: I think all of those cities are great. And please add New York and Seoul to that list while we’re at it. London is the biggest European startup hub and an exciting city to engage with at the moment. They have some great metrics going for them: highest number of startups in Europe, highest number of female founders all over the world (25% of all sign-ups for our hackathon are female) and also the highest amount of venture capital available to startups. This is important since we hope that some of the teams continue their hack into a startup.

Who should participate?

Anyone with a passion for visuals regardless of whether that stems from a technology or an art perspective is welcome. If you can create, design, program, or feel visuals, we encourage you to join Hack The Visual. So far we have a very diverse field of applications with many nationalities and skillsets.

You already have great partners, can other companies volunteer their API’s?

Absolutely. We have some truly outstanding API partners with fantastic APIs, but we are open to work with other companies. We are really focused on creating an awesome event and experience for our participants and any company that adds value is welcome. We don’t charge API partners money – we just ask them to provide value and some cool prizes!

What do you expect to see from this event?

That’s the million dollar question. Sometimes I try to imagine what people will cook up during the weekend but the possibilities are endless. The visual space is really exciting at the moment. With the sheer variety in skills and diversity of our participants, I am sure they will come up with things that I could never imagine. And that’s the idea: to really push the boundaries and surpass what has been done before.

Canon, a hardware company, is your main sponsor. Why the association?

We have been working with Canon for a while now. Canon is a very traditional Japanese company with a focus on hardware and hardly ever a first-mover, but they are without doubt one of the leading imaging companies in the world. If you look at their R&D Technology Highlights report  you can see what cool stuff they are cooking up in their labs.

Last month Canon acquired London-based start-up Lifecake with the goal to accelerate the development of their digital consumer services proposition. They are very aware that digital services are key to staying relevant in the consumer space. The Hack the Visual event will help them build relationships with more talent in this space and they are very keen in exploring how they can help nurture and grow teams after the hackathon. Through Imaging Mind, they found a platform to engage with this ‘brave new startup world’.

What would be a sure sign of success for you at the end of the Hackathon?

The biggest sign of success for me would be that people walk out with their head exploding – completely overwhelmed and excited about the possibilities and opportunities in the visual realm. Ideally, we hope to have 25 teams competing of which we expect around 20 to make it to the finish line. Realistically, we expect that out of those 20 hacks, 2-3 are interesting and mature enough to grow into a startup. This would be the validation of our vision that when closely looking at contemporary (visual) culture, interesting new applications can be found!

What is a recent visual tech that has impressed you ?

That’s an incredibly hard question to answer since there is so much going on right now. Satellite imaging, auto-follow drones, personal robotics, the resurrection of virtual reality, new progress in augmented reality, computational imaging, game engines being almost indistinguishable from real images , advances in machine vision… just so much to choose from. I think robotics are super interesting since they combine many exponential technologies (e.g. telepresence, artificial intelligence, big data, machine vision, robotics). I would classify satellites and drones as a form or robotics or autonomous vehicles as well. Robotics will be a leading force in the transformation to imaging as a service as the leading business model.

Uber and Airbnb are great examples of the shift from ownership to access in other industries. Just like we order a Uber through an app, we’ll soon order a portrait, selfie or video through an app. Let’s say I am climbing in the Alps. I would just summon a high-end drone through an app which would fly to me, take some awesome incredibly high-res photos and videos which will be on my phone or computer when I get down the mountain (or instantly streamed or shared when programmed to do so). That world is quickly closing in on us. People already pretend that they are movie stars (capturing and sharing everything) and soon their shots will match what Hollywood is doing.

Some really interesting products in the robotics space are the Jibo Personal Family Robot, the Lily Auto-Follow Intelligent Camera Drone and the Nixie wearable wristband drone. They all signal a paradigm shift from social and connected to intelligent imaging.