Primary Job Title Co-Founder & Research Director Primary Organization Zappar
Location London, England, United Kingdom Regions Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Gender Male
Simon Taylor is a co-founder of Zappar, and the company’s Research Director. Simon graduated with a Masters in Engineering from the University of Cambridge in 2007. He went on to complete a PhD, also at the Engineering Department in Cambridge, entitled “Fast Object Localisation for Mobile Augmented Reality Applications”. Simon’s research focused on
the development of fast algorithms for locating known objects in live camera frames from smartphone devices. This research resulted in a novel approach to the problem offering far superior performance to existing published work of the time. The approach was first published at the Workshop on Feature Detectors and Descriptors held as part of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2009. A demo of the approach on a smartphone was also shown at the conference, receiving a “Best Demo” award. Further updates to the approach were published at the British Machine Vision Conference, 2009. The conference organizers selected this paper as one of six to be extended for inclusion in a special edition of the International Journal of Computer Vision, published in 2011.
Simon worked with Connell Gauld to integrate his algorithm into a full mobile app for AR content delivery. Together they founded Extra Reality Ltd in 2010 to pursue commercialization of their solution. After meeting Kirk Ewing and Caspar Thykier, they decided to form a new venture, Zappar, to offer a full AR content creation solution for big-brand clients. Simon has led the development of Zappar’s proprietary and patented Zapcode system.
