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Laurie Ainley
Co-founder & CEO at Poplar Studio
Laurie Ainley is a seasoned product and engineering leader with over 15 years of experience founding and leading teams in startups across various industries including video, AR, non-profit, and gaming.
Laurie's expertise lies in building platforms that leverage technology to create impactful and far-reaching augmented reality (AR) experiences, with a particular interest in AR technologies and their potential applications.
Currently serving as the Co-Founder & CTO at Poplar Studio, Laurie is instrumental in developing a platform that facilitates the creation of AR experiences by connecting brands with a community of over 1000 AR expert creators. Poplar's client portfolio includes renowned brands like BBC, Disney, Warner Brothers, L'Oreal, and more.
With a background as the Product Director at Level Up Media and the Founder of Donative, an innovative charity fundraising platform, Laurie has a proven track record of designing and launching successful products to drive business growth.
Having been the 1st employee at Rightster (now Brave Bison), Laurie played a pivotal role in the startup's expansion to a team of 250 across 13 cities, culminating in an IPO with a market cap of approximately £70m.
Laurie's educational background includes a BSc in Computer and Business Studies from the University of Warwick.
In addition to his current role at Poplar, Laurie actively advises startups, manages side projects such as Charity Catalogue and Covers for Others, and serves as a mentor to individuals of various ages, providing guidance on coding and startup development.
Highlights
I’m excited to introduce Scaper, our new product that makes creating compelling product video ads cheaper and quicker than via traditional means - and entirely virtually!
📈 With the rise of video advertising opportunities across retail media networks, digital out-of-home screens, social media etc., the need for video production at lower cost has never been greater. Simultaneously, the capabilities of browsers to handle 3D graphics and video content have been rapidly developing over the past few years.
📹 This led us to develop Scaper, a web platform that allows product videos to be generated in minutes, not months. By working from templates that combine 3D models with other customisable necessities such as text, images, audio and 360 backgrounds, it's possible to create short form videos in the browser by simply dragging and dropping.
🤔 But this is more profound than just a change in workflow. By switching to virtual rendering, an updated brand identity, a new range of products or entering a new international market no longer represents a major content headache. And as a web application, it brings with it the benefits of fundamentals such as rapid prototyping, iterative development, dynamic content and personalisation at scale - available from anywhere without any professional software or expertise needed.
From a technical perspective, the application would not be possible without three.js, React Three Fiber and a number of other incredible foundational open source technologies.
Sound interesting? Join the waiting list on the website to be first to get access. We’re offering a free trial for a package of videos to be produced for a small number of brands this month - so get in touch if you’d be interested in this or know someone who would.
My thanks to Laurence O'Brien and the many people who have helped scape (sic) the product up to this point Ethan Oliver David Ripert Fred Soneya Nigel Morris
We’ll be sharing more about the features over the coming weeks so make sure to follow Scaper to come along for the journey.
#innovation #digitalmarketing #sustainability #marketing #startup #3D #video #product #motiongraphics #advertising #retail #brands
Gaussian Splatting (what?) is a revolutionary new technology that we’re currently seeing some amazing demos of, but we were keen apply it to a real world use case to explore its potential.
Fortunately, living in London we didn’t have to travel far! We paid a visit to The British Museum and captured a handful of artefacts without any special lighting setups or display conditions (roughly 3-5 mins per capture).
We processed the images using Luma AI and Polycam, and then cleaned up the results in PlayCanvas’ very helpful Super Splat tool.
Using our own video editing tool, we added a 360 background of the museum, added descriptive text, 3D elements and a narrative track, allowing us to create a video portal (in multiple languages!) to improve visitors’ experience and help advertise exhibitions to the public - all for a fraction of the cost and effort that would usually be required to produce this kind of content.
Gaussian splats are particularly interesting because they combine the best of both worlds from photogrammetry and NeRFs - real time rendering with high realism.
If you’re interested in learning more or chatting about this, get in touch with us at Poplar Studio – Powering virtual commerce! Additional props to Jonathan Stephens for the excellent content on his YouTube channel and kudos to Laurence O'Brien for his many contributions.
#gaussiansplatting #photogrammetry #3D #pointcloud #3dmodelling #AR #VR #museums
