Meet our CODE_n CONTEST Finalists 2016: Kinemic from Germany

Kinemic develops software to control and interact with digital devices – from smart watches, to smartphones, AR glasses, and PCs. All it takes is a few hand and arm motions. The CODE_n CONTEST finalist is currently developing its first finished products with major German enterprises. Later, the plan is to license the patented technology to OEMs and other software developers. Chosen for the Connected Mobility cluster and based in Karlsruhe, Founder Tomt Lenz and his team can call the new.New Fesitval they’re home game. Read all about the young company here:

What is Kinemic all about? How did you come up with the idea?

Tomt: Our main goal is to enable truly handsfree interaction with digital devices. Our gesture and hand-writing recognition technology is based on years of research at the university and we all saw the tremendous potential in the technology. There was also huge public, media and industry interest so it didn’t take that much brainstorming 😉

“Digital Disruption“ – that’s the motto of this year’s CODE_n CONTEST. What makes your solution innovative, what makes it disruptive?

Tomt: Concerning the innovation part: One of our founders, Dr. Christoph Amma, invented AirWriting, a -so far- unique capability to enter text just by writing in the air. As to the disruption part: Currently there’s no way to easily integrate this input method or gesture control into any application and we’re planning to enable this.

You’re one of the 13 finalists in the Connected Mobility contest cluster. Which challenges do you think young companies have to face in this sector? How do you handle these challenges?

Tomt: A major challenge for us is that we need to innovate above and beyond what the major companies are doing (e.g. Google, Apple, etc.) in the field of gesture control and we assume that most companies in this cluster face a similar situation, maybe facing other established companies or technologies. We’re solving this by really delighting our customers, which is something we don’t think others can do as readily and also by serving and extending our market segment for industrial applications, which to others might be more of a “niche”.

In which industries do you see the most potential for gesture controlled devices in the future? Where can they create the most added value?

Tomt: We estimate that a really broad range of industries will benefit from gesture-controlled devices, especially as we target Augmented-Reality glasses for which we think gesture control will be a quintessential component. That said, we’re currently working with companies in pharma, automotive and general maintenance sectors and obviously think these hold plenty of growth opportunities.

Where they add the most value is a very interesting question to us because in many regards we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in terms of possibilities.

Thanks for the interview, Tomt!