Orange Fab: a final for 6 innovative startups

At the end of the pre-selection round of Orange Fab, the support program for young innovative companies of Orange Luxembourg and Orange Belgium, six start-ups have been selected. Who are they? Here is a quick presentation of four of them.

Who are the finalists of Orange Fab Belux?

This fifth season of Orange Fab wanted to highlight innovative companies that contribute to improving the consumer experience or creating new ones through their technological approach. More specifically, the program wishes to highlight and support players who explore the possibilities offered by virtual reality, augmented reality or even metaverses.

Among them, here are four pre-selected start-ups.

Urban Timetravel: time travel accessible to all

Urban Timetravel, a Luxembourg start-up, creates immersive cross-reality applications. In other words combining real experience and virtual reality for the culture and tourism sector. Their goal is to allow users to understand history through immersive experiences by using virtual and augmented reality. The idea is to reconstitute historical situations through digital technologies and to allow everyone to experience them as closely as possible notably through the use of sensors and tangible data present in a given environment. The aim is to make time travel accessible to all.

In this perspective, 5G should facilitate the deployment of such experiences in a mobile context.

Through Orange Fab, the start-up hopes to share its expertise with the operator to develop new applications. Beyond their ambition to create virtual reality projects in more cities, they want make their technology evolve into a product that will allow every content creator to design and offer their experience to their customers. Considering Orange's target audience, there are many use cases to explore.

withVR: virtual reality to accompany speech disorders

withVR is a Belgian start-up accompanying people with speech and language disorders. "Virtual reality allows us to offer them a safe space in which they can express themselves and practice speaking situations, as is possible with the SpeakwithVR solution. We provide users with the tools to allow them to work on their own goals, at their own pace," explains Gareth Walkom, who founded withVR based on his own experience. "I have had a stutter since I was six years old. So I'm very familiar with the difficulties that 234 million people around the world face. withVR helps create speech situations in speech clinics, so that those who need it most can benefit from the powerful tool that virtual reality provides."

For Gareth, the rollout of 5G, thanks to the performance the network offers, should make it easier for people to access the solutions that withVR offers, allowing them to more easily connect to the tools through a virtual reality headset. The 5G should also allow speech therapists, alongside users, to modify the proposed speech situations in real time and improve support.

"We need 5G to improve the experience offered to our users. Through Orange Fab, we saw a great opportunity to explore the possibilities offered by the new generation of network with regard to virtual reality technology," explains the founder. Beyond the services we offer, this program should allow both withVR and Orange to study and improve mobile virtual reality applications, which could be deployed in any environment."

Nirli: exploring the possibilities of metavers

Nirli uses technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, chabots, avatars and interactive web pages to address the industries need to educate and train more people. "It is about offering immersive and interactive educational solutions, using metaverse technologies, to accelerate learning," explains the start-up.

The rollout of 5G is expected to be a catalyst for the development and adoption of Nirli's solutions. "The applications we propose require low-latency connectivity and high bandwidth in order to be able to process a significant volume of data in real time," explains the start-up. Therefore, 5G should enable these solutions to be used anywhere, anytime, and provide new experiences for a wide variety of users in marketing, operations management, and human resources and training.

"By combining Nirli's knowledge and Orange's complementary expertise, we can create the next steps in metaverse solutions combining AR, VR, AI and 5G," the startup continued. More specifically, in partnership with Orange, the startup would like to be able to consider the creation of an immersive training platform, meeting the needs of industrial players to strengthen the employability of their employees and better support change. It would also like to work on a health and well-being solution, namely the creation of a B2C platform offering immersive experiences combined with remote virtual coaching. This would enable beginners and experts alike to adopt healthier habits on a daily basis.

Virtual Rangers: an immersion in the heart of the action

Virtual Rangers is a studio creating innovative experiences in new technologies founded in 2017. They design and produce experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality or in the metaverse in Luxembourg. In order to offer new experiences, they study the needs of their clients and design the resulting user experience. The main objective of the startup when developing a project is the user experience.

The development of 5G represents a real need for this project. Virtual Rangers develops solutions that require a quality mobile data network. The more the network is able to exchange large volumes quickly, the more they can enrich their solutions with new features and innovations.

The Orange Fab revolves around their areas of expertise. The Luxembourg startup decided to take part in the project because it is their core business and their daily field of activity: "Since the creation of Virtual Rangers, we have developed several areas of activity that could respond to new service offerings from Orange. In collaboration with them, we would like to create one or more projects to improve the user experience of its customers. For example, in the metaverse, we could design an online shopping service, or an e-sports broadcasting service.

See you in early June to find out the Orange Fab winner

On June 1, the six shortlisted start-ups will have the opportunity to present themselves and try to convince a professional jury of personalities from the world of innovation. At the end of this presentation, one of them will be declared the winner of this selection. This start-up will have the opportunity to work with the Orange teams to implement a concept that is aimed at the group's customers.

Two other startups will also be in the finals of this competition: Vizz and Poolpio.