Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to The Pivot Point, a student-led podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant city of Las Vegas while exploring the transformative journeys of students, professors, and executives. My name is Bardia Eivazi, an MBA student at UNLV. Join me as I delve into the stories of those who have embraced change, overcome obstacles, and made significant strides in their academic and professional lives. We're more than just a podcast - we are a community dedicated to empowering student voices and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Tweet us @pivotpointunlv!
0:00:00
You're listening to locally produced programming created in
0:00:03
KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the
0:00:17
Nevada System of Higher Education. Welcome to the Pivot Point where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host Bardia. Let's get the ball rolling.
0:00:33
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Pivot Point.
0:00:36
Today we are delving into the startups grown at UNLV. Today I have a very good friend of mine, Osorodion Victory Igbenabar. He goes by Victory. Thank you for being here today.
0:00:58
Osorodion Victory Igbenabar, Founder, UNLV Thank you for having me.
0:01:00
Absolutely, man. So, you've got a lot of experience with this brand new startup that you've created recently. You have a lot of experience in software development, drone mapping and architecture, and your company is sort of the amalgamation of all of those. Could you briefly tell us about your career story?
0:01:17
Yeah, absolutely. So I studied architecture, studying from 2015. Actually started studying architecture in Macau, S-A-R, in China. And then eventually transferred as an international student to Las Vegas, to UNLV. Completed my architecture degree at UNLV, undergrad, and also a master of architecture degree. And while going to school, I also worked with an engineering firm, local engineering firm here, started working with a startup that did 3D visualization and software development, primarily doing 3D modeling, modeling buildings, roadways, bridges and all of that. And just sort of, you know, continued working through all of that path and did a bunch of engineering infrastructure projects and obviously studying architecture. That sort of tied into what I was working on as well. It wasn't primarily architecture, but it was still dealing with the design and build environment. So what is AeroAI? What do you do there? So, AirAI is actually a drone technology and software company. So, we use drone technology to provide data to our clients and we use software, game engine build software to turn that data into actionable insights, into information that clients such as architects, engineers, construction, real estate could use for their workflow.
0:02:45
And I've seen some snippets on your website, and I think you showed me one time when we met, that it looks kind of like a video game. It looks so cool. You're able to walk through a 3D model of a building that you're building in real life. And I just imagine how efficient that's gonna make things, how important that is gonna be for people to visualize it, and maybe even have like a meeting virtually while you walk through the building. Is that kind of the idea?
0:03:15
Absolutely. I mean, it starts with the modeling process, capturing that data first, right? Typically, guys like me who used to do the job of girls, architect, engineers, they spend time modeling existing conditions by hand, right? Using CAD modeling or beam modeling software, or they would get that data from other sources to understand the context of an environment before actually building on it. But drones really expedite that process in very high magnitudes, right? So you could capture very high resolution data within a fraction of the time that you would typically use to manually model that data and also use it to inform your design process, right? To make more designs that actually take into context, the context, right? If you're building a building within a specific place, you want to know how it fits within that contest, right? And then the software, the game engine software, really just turns that into a video game, right? There is already 3D visualizations that's primarily done to do 3D renderings and videos and pictures format, but we take it a step further, making it a little more interactive, a little more immersive, fun as a video game.
0:04:28
Yeah, so where did this idea come from? Was it when you were in China or when you came here to UNLV?
0:04:34
So, like I said earlier, I actually started working with game engines around 2018. Right, so I kind of got exposed while working at a local startup firm here to seeing some of the opportunities and the potential for using game engine, like literally software that's used to build video games to showcase architecture and engineering projects. But there's also a lot of tedious work that's involved with that, right? The process of creating the environment that you need to visualize. And so that idea really came out from me being already working in the industry, but seeing the opportunities that drones could bring to sort of facilitate that process. So I thought, hey, it would be really cool if we could use drones to do what I already do, spend a lot of time modeling by hand. So it really came the very first day I modeled my house with a drone in under three minutes. So this was a drone that we had acquired at the company I was working back then and everyone was trying to do R&D with it. It was very early tech and one of those days I was like, hey, let me try to see what this thing is really about. So I was able to take the drone out and capture my own house in under three minutes and this is something I knew would take a lot of time to do by hand. And then eventually, really at that point, so several years ago, I was thinking, if we could do this at scale, it would make such a huge difference. But that time was still very, very early. But that was when I started to really see the potential with combining drones and game engines. But it really all took off through the UNLV Personnel Innovation Challenge
0:06:23
that happened last year. Yes, I love how it started out small, like you had one little idea, you wanted to map your house, you thought it was so cool, and you could scale it, you could scale other houses, other buildings. So that's awesome. So tell me a bit about these drones, how do they map it? What kind of sensors or cameras do they have on them?
0:06:42
So they are basically flying cameras, flying computers, UAVs, on crewed aerial vehicles, or drones, right? They come in different shapes, sizes. You can have hobbyist drones as well as enterprise drones. But primarily, there's a process called photogrammetry. I don't want to go too deep into it, but it's an art and a science that has been around for a very long period of time. It's taking images at a specific point and measuring the distance between that to stitch together multiple images to make a 3D model. So we would use AI-generated pathways in drones to fly around to capture thousands or sometimes hundreds of imagery that is then stitched together in the software to create a three-dimensional representation of that area. So that's just one way, but there are different sensors that goes on a drone. Like I said, it's just photogrammetry using cameras. You could also use LIDAR, which is just drones with sensors that pauses light and then measures the distance from that light. There is also ground penetrating radar. There is drones that have thermal sensors in them for you to sort of map out the heat signature of surfaces and buildings and things like solar panels. So it's an aircraft, right? It's an aircraft that you need a license to fly, but it's not a manned aircraft or a crewed aircraft. And with that aircraft, all kinds of sensors are attached to them to sort of capture data that is needed to do certain kind of work.
0:08:18
Right, the drones that I flew, they're toys, but they're so much fun. And the fact that they're unmanned, you get to do a lot more. I think you get to add so much more to them and you can, like you said, employ a totally different type of function to them in business and in applications like that. So what kind of challenges did you sort of run into when trying to scale this from a house to a whole building?
0:08:47
I guess the challenge that every first founder faces, I've never started a business before. I've just seen the opportunity and the growing market and the potential that the technology could do but besides having an idea, bringing a product to market or building a team or everything else that's associated with having a startup. That was very challenging at the beginning, but it was also a lot of opportunity to grow and learn. I had a lot of help from just people that I've been working with in community, UNLV professors, fellow friends. So it was quite a little challenging to sort of take that idea from just an idea into a business and a product that we can then eventually build and putting a team together to build that. Again, drones, I mean, they're still, I think, in the very early stage, right? And the awareness wasn't really there initially. And the drone community is growing now in Las Vegas. But back then, I was the only person I knew that was doing what I was doing, right? So, had to make community building a big part of the startup journey. So, it wasn't just being a business, it's that we realized that if we wanted to scale, we would really have to push awareness of drones, push all the drone pilots to know that, hey, you're able to take more than just pictures with drones. You could actually do more. You can make point clouds in 3D models. So, it was kind of a little challenging at the early stage, putting a lot of that, it's still a little challenging, right, as we grow the ecosystem. But again, true, and then talent as well, right, on the software side, building the game engine talent, we did have to hire some outside resources on a per diem basis to work with us. But over time, we, being a UNLV-born startup, we've been fortunate to be able to hire students from UNLV to become part of our team as interns and eventually joining us to build that software. So it's been definitely challenging, starting a first business, but also finding the funding as well as the team to make that dream a reality.
0:11:10
It's drinking from a fire hose. It's really insane. But like you kind of did, you go in with an open mind and you start to learn and you start to know what your community needs. So I like that you started not only a business, but you started a community as well. I want to get to something that you mentioned to me a little while ago, was the drone flying events that you have here in Vegas. Tell me about those.
0:11:32
Yeah. So a year ago, my co-founder and I, Richard, we realized, hey, we really needed to make more noise about drones because we're so passionate about it. So we found refuge at Tech Alley. Tech Alley is a monthly technology meetup in downtown Las Vegas. So we host the Las Vegas Drones Meetup Group once a month at Tech Alley. And this is a group of just everyone who's interested in drones, FAA certified drone pilots, drone technologists, students, computer programmers, people involved in video games, business owners, they show up and we talk about everything drones. The legalities, concerns with policies, local and federal policies, we talk about technology, we do a lot of knowledge sharing. So we do that at Tech Alley once a month and every other month we also have these drone flyouts meetups where we find a safe and convenient area around the city to go out and fly drones with other folks. We've been doing that for about eight months now. We've grown the community to about 60 people. A given meetup would have about 20 people come out and fly their drones and share knowledge and just grow together basically. So yeah, that's mostly the events that we have to actively engage people to expose them to the technology, but also to just share knowledge amongst ourselves and contacts and even businesses and clients. That's one of the amazing things is you even see other drone pilots that do different things, working with certain people to collaborate on projects and it's quite honestly amazing. Or you see someone who knows nothing about a drone, a couple of months later, now they're certified drone pilots. It's very inspiring.
0:13:19
That's awesome. Yeah, I'd probably fall into that category of knowing nothing about drones, except for the fact that Amazon wanted to implement them in some way to deliver packages. I don't know what happened to that. But I really like your idea. I really think it's amazing. You can do so much with drones. I usually see people making videos of them on YouTube, but it takes it to the next level. You can map buildings, you can get 3D imaging, maybe even heat imaging, spectrographies, things like that, so it's awesome that you're working on that. Let's touch on something that you mentioned. So you have been given awards by Unreal Engine recently, which is awesome, and you recently won third place in the President's Innovation Challenge at Blackfire. Congratulations, that's awesome. What do these accomplishments mean to you for your company?
0:14:06
They mean a lot. For the President's Innovation Challenge, they meant the beginning of ARIA. It meant a lot. So it was an opportunity for me to test out and put this idea out there in front of a bunch of people who were judging us and trying to see what they think. And those people- It must have been nerve-wracking. Yeah, very, very nerve-wracking. Had to put a team together through a speed dating and had this burden of figuring out ways to diversify Nevada's economy after COVID. So I thought, hey, if we could have more drone pilots in this growing industry within the city, we could do so much more. do so much more. And we envision this emerging.
Transcribed with Cockatoo