Marcus Richards
It’s hard to think of many industries or sectors that cannot benefit from improved vision in visibility challenging situations.
With particular interest in the Space and Space exploration sectors, SpaceVee has developed a core technology that makes improved vision in visibility challenging situations possible using normal cameras and even past photos.
Tell us about yourself?
By nature, I’m a problem solver, by profession I’m an engineer, a techie and business development professional. I am deeply interested in all things related to Space exploration, life beyond Earth, dinosaurs and Time.
Combining aspects of these interests into SpaceVee’s core technology has been time happily spent since 2007. I decided to form a company to encompass a business based on the technology. I chose SpaceVee (Space Visualization Technologies Ltd.) as ‘some other guy’ had already used SpaceX!
The technology can now be applied to as broad a range of sectors and applications as vision enhancement for underwater vehicles, human-driven vehicles, self-driving vehicles, AR goggles, drones, satellites, planet and moon rovers etc.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Spend less efforts and time completing and chasing startup accelerator applications and more on finding ground-proofing partners.
What problem does your business solve?
Humans and our machines need to work under a wide range of visibility challenging conditions, they need better solutions than is currently available.
Poor visibility conditions can be the cause of darkness or very low light levels, dust, rain, ground and falling snow, haze, smoke, fog, on-coming dazzling headlights and more.
The result can be dangerous for humans, business, society, missions, machines and more. It can be catastrophic in other ways also.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Search and rescue missions often come up against visibility challenges, as do drivers in poor weather conditions or one dark roads, self-driving vehicles have similar challenges but worse.
How can they distinguish lane lines or road signs fully or partially covered by snow or which have been vandalized for example?
How can Space exploration missions use existing images to see through surface dust of Mars or Europa in their search for proof of life existing elsewhere apart from the Earth? The potential cost-savings run into multi-million dollars.
What is your magic sauce?
My enduring belief is that when we look at things differently, we see differently then we discover. That paradigm led me to discover the algorithm for the core technology of SpaceVee.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
To gain co-creation partnerships and funding to finally achieve some of the huge possibilities offered by SpaceVee’s technology in sectors such as Space, Automotive and Entertainment.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
It has been very difficult to find and gain access to the large corporations and agencies that can clearly benefit from SpaceVee’s Vision platform and technology.
Surprisingly, it has also been extremely difficult to make any inroads with the organizations that one might have thought would have loved to at the least, explore the possibilities such as UK, Europe and US based agencies responsible for future advances in Space and Space Exploration.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want to hear from large corporations and government agencies that have identified improved vision in visibility challenging environments as key to their projects. We would also love to hear from business angels and family offices that see it as important to get involved at the leading edge of the Space and Space Exploration sectors business.
We offer demos and trial accounts. More information about what SpaceVee offers and will in the future can be found at https://www.spacevee.com .
