Colour me happy: How an ambitious Dulux AR project resulted in a glossy finish at the UK IT Industry Awards

AkznoNobel, String and Tessella share the inside track on their victory

There's probably no finer proof that the UK IT Industry Awards throw up some interesting and varied victors than the 2014 winners of our Innovative Mobile App Award, AkzoNobel, String, Tessella & Webcredible who were awarded for the Dulux Visualizer app.

It was an app that proved simple, yet highly effective, and later assisted at least one member of the Computing team to redecorate their own home.

The free app, available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, allows a user to view a room through their phone's camera, but overlay new colours onto the wall in an AR (augmented reality) style.

The app takes into account factors such as light conditions and household furniture, and still manages to create an accurate representation of what the walls will look like covered in Dulux colours.

Corinne Avelines, global head of digital & ecommerce at Dulux parent firm AkzoNobel, explains the origin of the project.

"We had the concept in mind for a while, but it took time to find the ground-breaking technology we required to make the experience exactly the way it was supposed to be," she says.

"So it stayed in the docks for a couple of years, till we finally found the cutting-edge technology to enable it to be an extremely cool and fulfilling experience for consumers."

David Hughes is a project manager at analytics and consultancy firm Tessella, who were tasked by AkzoNobel to find a company with the technological chops to make the dreams a reality.

"We've been involved with Dulux for more than a decade, doing all kinds of different colour visualisation projects," explains Hughes.

"Before the Visualizer app it was the Dulux Select Colour app, which just allowed users to select colours and schemes and check products."

Hughes explains that the Visualizer idea went back so far that Tessella had even experimented with a prototype on feature phones. But phone processors were slow and their cameras were not up to scratch.

"It was the technology really coming of age that helped," explains Hughes.

So now, in the iPhone age, it was time for Tessella to up the ante. It had already been casting its eye around the world for promising technologies and AR components but in the end, only one fit AkzoNobel's requirements.

"We found a few companies doing this stuff, but there was only one that could really deliver on the technology," says Hughes.

Describing itself as a company of "visionaries, dreamers, software engineers and cyberpunks, working together to create something wonderful", String is a company that certainly does not lack confidence in its own abilities. On this occasion, however, those abilities matched the self-image.

"Other [solutions] only 'sort of' worked," says Hughes, referring to the AR colour-changing techniques which String had built to work in mobile devices. "And then only under ideal conditions. There are always situations where there are problems, but compared with the other offerings it was a generation ahead."

Paul Skidmore, director of product at String, explains the history of the technology that made AkzoNobel's app complete.

"We've been in the space for quite a long time, and we were already developing our [AR] technology when Dulux came to us to talk about the Visualizer. We believed we could deliver that service."

The difference that separates String's technology from the majority of others of its type is that there is no need for image markers - for example, QR codes or actual printed images that would need to be placed on target surfaces as reference for the device's camera.

"We were looking for technology to take us to the next level, so it was more about understanding the environment. If you imagine you had to print out image markers and stick them on walls, you'd limit accessibility and make a poor user experience," says Skidmore.

Axo Nobel in fact commissioned a feasibility study before the project and, as Skidmore explains, a "breakthrough" led to cutting down 18 months of development to nine via "real-time segmentation of environments" in order to isolate walls from household objects and properly analyse lighting conditions.

The Dulux Visualizer app has now been delivered to the iOS and Android platforms and - apart from a store option to buy paint directly through the app - it is largely complete.

Interestingly, it's been written largely in a rare and aged programming language.

"We needed an SDK for both systems, and then we had to integrate that into both the iOS and Android versions," says Skidmore.

"However, because it's really computationally expensive to keep the [virtual painting] process going, and remembering everything [the camera] sees in terms of lighting and moving - if you pan the camera away and back again, it's still all there in memory - doing that at 30fps requires speed, so a significant portion of the work was done in Assembly, which most people don't do these days as typically it's not needed."

Phones are more powerful than they used to be, but still have their limitations. "So we had to go down to the bare metal of the processors," says Skidmore.

While the app does not yet offer a shop function to directly buy paint, the effect presenting a potential customer with an accurate picture of the actual shades of Dulux paint on their own walls can't be underestimated.

"We're trying to assess our landscape in terms of corporate behaviour, and this app allowed us to tackle a very important problem, which was the colour choice. Our research had proven that a lot of consumers - unless they are very creative people - don't always feel confident picking their own colours," says Avelines.

And three million downloads - and counting - paint their own picture of success, as well as a huge leap forward for AR technology, and a significant business investment for AkzoNobel. A well-deserved victory indeed for some very forward-looking companies.