Melbourne mates match colours with smart SwatchMate cube

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 10 years ago

Melbourne mates match colours with smart SwatchMate cube

By Ben Grubb
Updated

Two years ago three Melbourne engineering students set out to find a way to solve the problem of accurately identifying colours on real-world surfaces, such as walls, as part of a university project.

This week the students, now graduates, are looking to commercialise the product they came up with, launching a crowd-funding campaign on the Australian arm of Kickstarter.

The SwatchMate cube.

The SwatchMate cube.

Their product, SwatchMate, is a small, portable cube device that captures the colour of any surface. Using Bluetooth, it sends the colour data to a smartphone or directly into Photoshop.

"Think of it like [the music-identifying app] Shazam, but for colour," say the founders.

How the SwatchMate cube works.

How the SwatchMate cube works.

So far the SwatchMate co-founders – Paul Peng, 24, Djordje Dikic, 25 and Rocky Liang, 26 – have raised more than $12,000 of their $55,000 goal for the Kickstarter project, with 36 days to go. If Kicktraq – a site that predicts how much a campaign will get – is anything to go by, the team will exceed their goal by more than 446 per cent, with more than $245,000 at the end.

Backers are being asked to pay $85 for the cube, while a limited amount of 100 are selling for $75.

Peng said the idea of SwatchMate came about when renovating his parents' home.

"We had to match the colour of a wall which had been scratched and needed to be repainted," Peng said. "And obviously we'd ditched the paint can ages ago and lost the swatch name."

Advertisement
The SwatchMate app displaying different colours.

The SwatchMate app displaying different colours.

To identify the colour, he and his parents had to "chip off a bit of the wall" – about the size of a palm of a hand – and take it to Bunnings to be sampled and identified using a spectrophotometer.

"It wasn't really the ideal outcome and wasted a lot of time, so I just thought there's got to be a better way of doing this," he said. "This was a project for some other time ... and that some other time came up when we had the opportunity to do this year-long project [at university]."

The SwatchMate founders Djordje Dikic, Paul Peng and Rocky Liang on a visit to Sydney.

The SwatchMate founders Djordje Dikic, Paul Peng and Rocky Liang on a visit to Sydney.

Instead of accepting a project suggested by their lecturer, the co-founders decided to "do something ... more innovative".

That project was the first iteration of SwatchMate, which was "a pretty big and clunky device".

The SwatchMate app and cube.

The SwatchMate app and cube.

Despite its size, the SwatchMate won design and commercialisation awards and received first-class honours – the highest honour awarded for a university project.

It also received $20,000 from the university's accelerator program, Melbourne Accelerator. That money helps fund co-founder Dikic's living expenses among other things.

SwatchMate founders Djordje Dikic, Paul Peng and Rocky Liang.

SwatchMate founders Djordje Dikic, Paul Peng and Rocky Liang.

Dikic works on SwatchMate full-time, while Peng works in the finance sector and assists with the start-up after work. Liang assists while juggling the start-up with a master's degree.

"It's a bit hectic at times but you've got to live with it," Peng said.

Peng describes the SwatchMate as a "real-life eyedropper tool". In image-editing programs, an eyedropper allows you to identify a colour displayed on a screen.

The cube uses LEDs to shine light onto a surface. The light bounces back and hits photodiodes – a type of photodetector capable of converting light into either current or voltage – in the SwatchMate enclosure. Information from the photodiodes is then processed by a tiny onboard microcontroller which sends the identified colour to a smartphone or PC via Bluetooth.

Peng said the SwatchMate identified colours "as accurate, if not better than the naked eye".

"In technical speak there's a Delta E figure that people throw around – which is essentially the colour distance between two points – and generally if it's less than 2.5 the naked eye can't tell the difference between those two colours. And generally we get a reading of about 1," he said.

SwatchMate was, to some extent, better at identifying colours than traditional colour-matching methods, he said.

One such traditional method is taking a picture of a surface and uploading it to a website or using Photoshop to identify its colour, but even then it's not very accurate due to lighting conditions. The other method, previously mentioned in this article, is using a spectrophotometer at a paint store.

View the SwatchMate Kickstarter video:

"It's definitely real," Peng said. "The app design that we have in the Kickstarter video was a draft, so it wasn't actually as it looks on that. It's kind of been video edited to make it look a bit prettier, but essentially the basic functionality and stuff – absolutely [that is real]."

Peng said the SwatchMate was suited for do-it-yourselfers, renovators, creatives and designers.

The team aims to ship the device by June next year, although Peng believes they can do this sooner.

If the project reaches its funding goal, the SwatchMate would be made in Dandenong, Victoria, he said.

Most Viewed in Technology

Loading