IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2020 - 104

Professional Development

€dlmoser (right). Photo
Figure 1. emotion3D's CEO Dr. Florian Seitner (left) alongside his CTO Dr. Michael Ho
courtesy of emotion3D GmbH.

can serve as differentiators between models or
be sold as add-ons. . . one day there might even
be an App Store for cars!
Tell me about the Technology
We have invested several man-decades developing a highly-specialized software stack that
lies at the intersection of embedded systems,
deep learning, and automotive domain expertise.
Our technology is a multilayer architecture
that goes from images to end-user applications.
On the bottom layer are deep learning algorithms
for pixel-level image analysis that are optimized
to run on low-resource processing platforms common to the automotive industry. Computational
models deliver low-level features to the next
layer, which identifies key structural features,
such as the location of body joints, the head
pose, and the driver's hand and eye orientations.
These can be exploited for multiple top-level
applications, such as drowsiness detection, either
using our off-the-shelf, or custom-built modules.
What's your Product?
The product is a software development kit
(SDK) comprising analytical modules for camerabased 3D understanding of the car interior. We
deliver patent-protected IP in the form of software
binaries that can be integrated by our clients.
The bottom layer of the 3-level architecture
is implemented in such a way that all features
needed by subsequent layers are computed
only once--which means that after the system
is integrated, each additional application can be

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provided at minimal computational cost, but sold
to the end-client at a significant margin.
What is your business model?
We are a "Tier 2" supplier to the automotive
industry and operate a classic SDK model, namely
with nonrecurring engineering costs charged to
the client for customization and integration, then
a license fee based on the volume of cars the modules ultimately appear in. This first part is important for two reasons: first, it allows us to get close
to our customer early and validate demand as well
as understand their priorities, and second, the
time to market in the automotive industry can be
long, so we are able to generate revenue early on,
without waiting for the license revenues, which in
many cases takes years--and not many small companies have the financial means for this.
Do you have any advice for first-time tech
founders?
Focus, focus, focus! I would advise founders
to start by specializing on one industry and customer group: find a niche you can dominate and
where you can differentiate your product from
competitors. A common error for tech entrepreneurs is to believe a priori that they understand
what the customer needs--they do not! In contrast to my younger self, my motto now is "Let
customer demand drive everything."
Tom Wilson is currently the Chief Technology Officer
with Concured Ltd, Montre´al, Canada. He was a shareholder in emotion3D from 2010 to 2015. Contact him at
tomwilson@ieee.org.

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2020

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