Making the SHIFT – alumni company turns drones into filmmaker dollies

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Perceptiv Labs, a startup founded by Waterloo mechatronics engineering alumni Neil Mathew, Yan Ma and Prasenjit Mukherjee, has launched its first product that offers filmmakers and others an affordable, yet advanced way to capture pans, zooms and fly-by shots with its computer vision technology.

SHIFT is a vision-guided camera motion control platform that enables filmmakers to capture high speed precision tracking shots when filming dynamic subjects, in a way that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to film by a human operator.

The user can pick a subject using a touch screen on a tablet or phone, and the drone will track the subject regardless of where the target goes, or where the user flies the drone.   

This makes getting the perfect shot much easier, and their demos look truly spectacular,” says Steven Waslander, a Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor.

The former students graduated from Waterloo’s undergraduate mechatronics engineering program in 2010 and went on to complete mechatronics engineering master's degrees. While at Waterloo, they were members of Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory led by Waslander.

Perceptiv Labs, which started at the Velocity Foundry in July 2014, is currently part of the Y Combinator, a tech accelerator program in San Jose.  On February 24, the day the company launched SHIFT, it landed $500,000 in financing from Vancouver-based Version One Ventures. The funding includes angel investors.