Mash.Me: Soon You Could Be Able to Animate Any Character Imaginable (With a Xbox Kinect)
Using the Xbox Kinect is becoming all the rage since Microsoft started embracing the talented folks playing with their technology. But what if the technology could with a little tweak be used to power any character you imagine? Mash.me wants to do just that with a Kinect web application for video recording with realtime motion-capture and green-screen effects.
The founders, brothers Darian and Vedran Skarica, had one of the most intriguing pitches at last week’s Seedcamp Zagreb held at the Croatian capital and attended by the brightest regional startups and mentors, as well as guests from Google, Paypal and other well known technological brands and investment firms.
For those who don’t know Seedcamp, it’s a british startup incubator that invests in startups to help them grow, both with a financial investment of 50,000 pounds as well as access to their vast mentor network that teaches the startup’s founders everything they need to know.
Well, Darian and Vedran know they need to get their technology in people’s hands. Their initial plan was to go to the US to grow the company, but multiple mentors stated that they should develope their product first as well as establish a product-market fit.
The basic idea behind Mash.me is to let the average users animate characters by moving in from of their Kinect, a household piece of hardware most people can afford. Actually, when compared to the technical and animating skills as well as expensive hardware needed to animate any other movie, the cost of a Kinect and Mash.me seems tiny.
Casual users will be able to use Mash.me to animate characters in real time, with their current niche being gamers that would use the technology for screencasts and game replays.
Animate – With Your Hands!
The initial revenue model is to sell 3d models of characters to users with some of the characters also being an advertising platform for movie and game studios as well as comic book publishers. Say you’re Marvel and you want to promote the new Avengers movie. You could create a Hulk character and put it up on Mash.me for people to use in their movies, creating a lot of free publicity.
The challenge with this is of course that the studios believe these characters are worth a lot more than to simply be used in some startup’s character arsenal and the Skarica brothers are well aware of this challenge, as they share with the .Me blog:
Technology-wise, the algorithms are very demanding as they need to provide a fluid user experience. Business-wise, it will be challenging to connect with the movie industry. But, we’re already on the right track to overcome both challenges. 🙂
The good thing is that they have extensive experience in similar projects, building a large 5 meter multitouch wall, a multitouch table as well as an augmented reality presentation engine for use on Croatian national TV. While this project is a product, the Skarica brother’s seems capable of creating something a bit different than your average web startup.
