The company:

We are a small start-up (sort of).  We’ve been doing sports video archival since 2011 as a not-for-profit community service.   Our focus has been capturing track & field (and cross country) races and events.  We do a lot of post-production using those 15-25 cameras that capture the meet.  That post-production led us to believe that we could get some of these post-production effects into a live production if we had certain tools.

Quiet Machines, a for-profit effort, is the outgrowth of that need.  We formed Quiet Machines LLC in March 2017 in order to develop autonomous camera control heads, capable of following sports action on their own.  Without athletes having to wear anything special.

The Product Idea:

We are a 2 or 3-man crew at these meets.  We need camera heads that can move the cameras (pan & tilt).  And, we need control components in those heads that can control the zoom on the camera.  And, we need the head to be (eventually) smart enough to pick out the runners on a track and follow them.

We believe that “smart” cameras will eventually be a standard in the web-casting business.  We think that opportunity is so large that we can start this effort in the public domain and still find healthy profits to feed back to our not-for-profit.

Our state of development:

Frankly, we’re very new at this and don’t yet have adequate technical help.  But, we are former business people who are now returning to the for-profit world and we have capital.  We want to seed the vision and we’re willing to spend some money to get it done.  We currently have a very high-level engineer who has the knowledge and experience to do this.  However, he has a regular job and a young family.  He can only guide the effort.  We need people who can move this ball downfield.

The mechanical side comes first.  We currently have a modest test bench for testing motors using vendor-provided tools.  So, we need someone who knows motor control.  You know - speaks motor commutation.

And, we need electrical guys (or girls).  People who play with circuit boards either for a living or for fun.

But, the biggest single trick to all this will be the software folks.  The visual recognition / computer vision experience.

If you can do any one of the three, we want to talk to you.

CONTACT:
Tom Gimbel  TomGimbel@sbcGlobal.net