Ultraleap is joining ROLI
"Ultimately, Tom and I saw an opportunity to bring Ultraleap into ROLI, to build a truly defensible technology company in the music space. Today, I could not be more thrilled to welcome the Ultraleap team to ROLI."
Ultraleap is joining ROLI
Sometimes dreams do come true, even the wild ones.
The journey of ROLI started at the piano at the Royal College of Art Cafe. I was a design student looking for a project, sitting at the piano playing a familiar blues. I slid my finger from an E flat to an E, and up to a G, singing along as I did. The slide was not exactly legato, more of an attempt to create a portamento effect. And so, sitting there at the piano, I formulated my first dream:
What if I could sing with my hands? What if pianos in the future could understand my musical intentions?
I started to think about how my gestures were my musical intentions, but the instrument only accepted certain kinds of intentions. When I first set out to create this new product, I looked into computer vision technology. But at the time, it wasn’t robust enough to build into a consumer product, especially given that the requirements around precision and latency were extremely demanding. So I conceptualised a gestural piano called the Seaboard, using force-sensing resistors underneath a 3D surface that would transmit 3D gestures into touch signatures that could be translated into sound. The more I learned about music and technology, the more I returned to the same question again and again:
How could we create a new platform that understood how hands move and use it to revolutionise music learning and expression?
Human beings have extraordinary potential - for connection, for expression, for discovery - and our intelligence and humanity are uniquely embodied. In our lifetimes, we have seen the movement from low-bandwidth forms of interaction, where we shape ourselves, to computers, to increasingly natural ways to engage.
Music is a unique area of human life, universal to all cultures, and an area where many people feel a deep longing for self-expression and connection, but find the challenge of learning too great. It is also an area of human life where new forms of interactive logic can radically improve the learning and creation experience and unlock new opportunities. Done correctly, I felt, we could create an onramp that enables everyone to access the joy of music making, and enables experienced creators to push the boundaries of human expression in new directions.
But it was clear to me that the key to freeing the music is understanding human gestures. Music is the interaction of gestures and instruments. Human movement and touch, and human technologies come together with cultural traditions to produce meaningful sound. And this meaningful sound is a powerful force in human life, connecting us within, building connections between us, and connecting us to the beyond. I always felt that in time, vision technology would come to transform embodied music making.
For our first demo of the Seaboard Grand, we hadn’t figured out how to make a shippable product, but we had an impressive prototype, so we spent all night trying to figure how to pack everything up and a small team of us flew to Austin for SXSW. We exhibited right next to a small company called Leap Motion, and again I was transfixed by the idea of applying gesture to music.
What if ROLI could acquire Leap Motion technology and we could deliver a new way to understand musical gesture?
Around the same time, I met a young innovator who, like me, had also spun a technology out from a PhD. Tom Carter was at the time developing Ultrahaptics, an incredible invention to enable mid-air feedback using ultrasonic technology.
We became friends and I followed Tom’s journey with a lot of excitement. A few years later I heard Leap Motion was for sale and I thought it would be a perfect fit for ROLI to develop a new platform for gestural music, but Ultrahaptics got there first, buying Leap Motion and becoming Ultraleap. I was thrilled for Tom, but I thought:
My long-held dream was maybe never to be.
Not long after, we started discussing an extensive partnership, and I found that many of the things I hoped to do by acquiring Leap Motion could be done through partnering with Tom and his team.
Fortunately, ROLI and our new Airwave platform have grown into a core project for Ultraleap, and an application area for computer vision, with a huge addressable market today. Ultimately, Tom and I saw an opportunity to bring Ultraleap into ROLI, to build a truly defensible technology company in the music space. Today, I could not be more thrilled to welcome the Ultraleap team to ROLI.
And so my dream finally came true!
It means that we can build a much deeper integration, much faster product iteration and higher performance and quality. It means we can take on new challenges, building platform tools so that all instruments can benefit from the power of computer vision. And it means we have a truly defensible foundation with an extraordinary IP position to build a platform for the long-term.
One of the most exciting aspects of this acquisition is Tom joining ROLI as Chief Technology Officer and a new member of the board. He is an extraordinary technologist and experienced founder and leader who will bring new vision to ROLI. We share a deep passion for making digital worlds more human. We have been working closely with Tom and the Ultraleap team over the last few years, but this is nevertheless a key moment in our trajectory. Now we are one team, with a single powerful technology stack, and a big immediate and focused opportunity ahead. I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to work with such an exceptional group of people to shape the next era of embodied musical tools.
Ultimately, we want to free the music, and unleash the innate potential in each of us through deeply human, intuitive tools that make learning easy, fun, and more effective than ever before.
The most powerful tool in reshaping interaction is our imagination. But then we need brilliant minds to make those imaginations come to life. We now have a pathway ahead to reshape the interactions of embodied music and look forward to sharing more about the platform we are building in the weeks and months ahead.
From sitting at the piano and imagining a more expressive way to play, to now shipping breakthrough products around the world and working with world-leading technologists like Tom and his team, this is really a wild dream come true, and I’m so thankful to everyone, especially ROLI customers around the world, who have made this possible.
Now we will work together as a single team with a single, deep focus - to use gestural recognition technology and AI to transform the entire music learning and creation process - indeed, to free the music in us all.
Roland Lamb
Co-founder and CEO, ROLI
About Roland Lamb
Roland Lamb is co-founder and CEO of ROLI. He first had the idea for Seaboard while a student at the Royal College of Art, spinning ROLI out of his PhD. Roland has helped invent numerous innovations in music technology, including Seaboard, a pivotal role in establishing MPE, BLOCKS, LUMI, and most recently, the Airwave platform.
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