From a young age, Nathan Irving has demonstrated entrepreneurial spirit. Even endeavors that began as a joke within his high school friend group became branded content within his school and adjacent communities. One day, a colorful inflatable ball rolled into his yard after a storm, and he and his friends started carrying it with them and referring to it as “Party Ball.” Despite this seemingly insignificant moment, he made the ball a known entity in his community, and eventually a brand, selling t-shirts and other merchandise with the ball on it and its associated name to many people within the region.
Once he attended college, Nathan began to focus on software development and imaging science, and he immediately gravitated to the niches of the field where few other students were exploring. This gave him a head start at developing technologies where there was little market competition, and few people in the spaces with the know-how to become that competition. While AI consumed the attention of many other entrepreneurs in the image-processing space, Nathan obtained a core understanding of the technologies and algorithms AI models struggle with, giving him a leg up as a developer once the public attention for the new technology dies down. With a few colleagues, he developed a utility called PANCAKE, that uses a statistical assessment of a photo the user is editing to produce a “smart preset” that can adapt the user’s final edit to other images, despite the new images having a different appearance to begin with, providing consistency and speed in their editing workflow. He is working to bring this project to market, making both a consumer image editing platform and a utility that other software companies can implement into their platforms. Similarly, with all his business endeavors, Nathan focuses on producing technologies that simplify professional tools, opening his tools to the consumer market.
To remain up-to-date and to make connections with like-minded peers, he has attended pitch competitions at the Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as entrepreneurship dinners. The aforementioned PANCAKE, for example, was brought to a technology development competition (the Traver Hack-a-Jam-a-thon), as well as to Tiger Tank, his institution’s biannual pitch competition. Here, he has received feedback and insight regarding how to go about future business ventures.
Nathan has also demonstrated entrepreneurship with his Capstone project. For many fields, a device known as a spectroradiometer is essential to measure the power of light as a function of its wavelength. All existing models of this device, however, use a series of intricate and expensive optics to take their measurements. He is developing a new device that takes the same measurements, while bypassing these costly components. This device greatly reduces manufacturing costs, enabling its affordability while maintaining profit margins, driving out competition and pushing the technology into the consumer space.
In addition to his collegiate work, Nathan develops mobile games, and has turned this into a business, integrating advertisements into his games and publishing them on his website, the App Store (iOS) and Google Play (Android). He strives to create arcade-style games with intuitive user interfaces, expanding his audience beyond the scope of technologically-savvy gamers. His games are all reduced to one touch or directional controls, making them ready-to-play and repeatable without requiring instructions or a heavy learning curve. While still adhering to this rule-set, each game also gets progressively harder, further preventing the games from getting boring when played many times, ensuring customer retention.
To remain innovative in the videogame space, he has also developed software that enables users to seamlessly create multiplayer servers, merely by pressing a button and having friends scan the automatically produced QR code. He understands that many individuals want to play games together, and that the processes other companies have developed to achieve this are not conducive to passive game players. In a similar attempt to bring more advanced gaming technologies to a broader consumer market, he has implemented the QR scan-in mechanism on his web games as a quick and simple way to use mobile phones as game controllers, bringing the modular party game culture associated with the Nintendo Switch to users who do not own that equipment.
Regarding his future entrepreneurial endeavors, Nathan Irving is joining the Traver Creative Technologist Founders Program. He is working to bring a product to market by developing a software utility that assists creatives in their work. The product he is developing is an application that uses a mobile phone with a camera, to scan an uncalibrated computer monitor, automatically generating a calibration profile that the user can apply on their computer, allowing their monitor to adhere to a standardized encoding. Graphic and UI designers know that their content will be translated to many unique displays, and ensuring that their own display can reproduce color properly adds consistency to how their content will appear. While monitor calibration tools already exist in the professional market, they are quite expensive and often complicated to use, especially for an individual who cannot afford to hire an imaging engineer to calibrate their device for them. Despite this, many designers would still readily calibrate their displays if possible, and using their phone to achieve the color measurements they can not otherwise obtain removes all hardware costs from the consumer end, making this a consumer-accessible goal.
While previous ventures have proven successful, Nathan is excited to continue to produce and deliver tools focused on consumer access to otherwise complicated professional technology. With his future projects, he has taken on larger responsibilities, and expects to grow from them, both personally and through the success of his businesses.