Urban Hawk was founded in 2017 to explore novel means of processing and simulating GIS data. This journey, alongside client work ranging from postal delivery to Satellite applications, led to the development of Polaron – World Engine, our flagship real-time 3D simulation tool. Polaron offers edge-based real-time simulation capabilities where traditional 3D engines fall short.
Polaron as a SaaS product and a Standalone solution
Urban Hawk is the company behind Polaron Polaron offers a SaaS solution and Standalone software. The SaaS model is accessible via modern web browsers.
Urban Hawk complements Polaron with diverse software skills and capabilities to refine and develop solutions across various business needs. This includes shipping, fuel management, pathfinding, collaborative tools for real-time decision-making, and tackling complex, multivariate problems.
How Urban Hawk Utilizes Polaron
Polaron started as an experiment into Splines and Signed distance fields and some of these capabilities underly the engine’s performance and scale. However when we began to look at shortfalls in EOS and GIS systems vs Game Engines – we pivoted into Voxels as a tolerable trade-off against different capabilities – working to combat the weaknesses and accelerate and augment the strengths that Voxelised Simulation provides.
It’s little surprise to us that OpenAi – makers of ChatGPT have acquired a voxel based environmental metaverse company – since the capabilities of a fully dynamic environment far outstrip the race to aesthetics and the compromises this requires.
Leveraging backend functionality to power Polaron and for Polaron to augment existing services:
- Urban Hawk collaborates with clients to expand the scale of the simulation environment, accommodating client-specific needs.
- Simulation tools are great augments to other types of data including graph and big data challenges. Anything that’s routed in space.
- Simulation also permits consequence of action and analysis.
Integration into a Bespoke or Private System:
- Urban Hawk works on data integration, schema investigation, and efficient data handling, creating custom modules for data export.
- Simulation data often quickly becomes sensitive or bespoke. Much like Ai or ML – simulation needs a lot of data to function accurately – and that data needs to be processed, cleaned and secured.
- Running Simulation En-Prem not only provides resilience but also allows for the work to remain secure and offers the ability to scale up into a private cloud or leverage very large GPU / CPU arrays and server farms to sub-divide very large, multi-scale or multi-variate solutions.
- Ai / ML beyond the public domain – and running on private datasets is arguably one of the largest commercial benefits of contemporary times and Polaron offers a compliment and indeed a boost to these systems.
Polaron Marketplace & Early Access to both the standalone and SaaS model:
- Urban Hawk aims to build a community that removes barriers to using GIS and Smart City data. Users can access the marketplace for maps, agents, and engage in a mapping, planning, and simulation community.
- This also allows a marketplace of innovations and capabilities to support both the commercial aspects of the product as well as allowing deep customisation. In time we may even choose to open source some components to facilitate this along similar lines to Unreal, Unity and GIS systems.
- We don’t do everything – so a marketplace for data, connections, models and capabilities as well as interoperability into other systems makes sense as a means to grow and provide the best experience.
- Blending data from OSINT, Public and EOS sources alongside commercial data tends to drive progress, sophistication and we have ambitions to write back some output to Open Source capabilities (where it is non-proprietary) in a similar theme to the Open Building Footprint data released via both Google and Microsoft (subject to consideration).
Not just simulation
Urban Hawk’s Broad Skills Urban Hawk can offer a wide range of skills to address challenges, including economics, web technologies, automation, analytics, computer science, data science, machine learning, and more.
This breadth of experience allows us to pursue areas of interest that border or augment simulation. Be it Graph Databases or the application of Physics, game and Ai / ML applications into the tool.
By design – we prefer to makes tools and services that have more than one function – but have clear lines between our product goals and that of our clients – to preserve their commercial advantage, IP and more.
Urban Hawk’s journey to Polaron as a product and service.
Urban Hawk by the Numbers Urban Hawk, an SME founded in 2017, has achieved notable milestones on the road to Polaron.
- 300 Vessels: Tracked and mapped as part of the STM program for the EU to analyse fuel, time, cost, and CO2 savings.
- European Space Agency: Urban Hawk has previously undertaken work for the ESA on a range of data and processing challenges.
- 5G Victori: A Horizon 2020 consortium looking at real-world applications of 5G and ultra-low latency.
- Circa £350,000: Multi-year contracts for R&D services and edge-based processing services.
- Computer Vision: Urban Hawk has built and trained custom computer vision models for various applications.
- App Development: Urban Hawk has developed applications to scan and perceive environments using COTs gear.
- Postal, Delivery & Operational Refinement: Urban Hawk provides retained services for a major delivery company, optimizing last-mile delivery.
- Semantic Segmentation & Machine Learning: Urban Hawk’s technology allows for the rapid interpretation and tagging of objects within a scene.
Simulation applications and capabilities
The Power of Simulation Simulation allows modelling of the real world and impact assessment. It enables multiple iterations to implement the optimal solution, monitor progress, and make refinements.
Urban Hawk Can Enhance Your Services Working directly with Urban Hawk unlocks the full potential of Polaron and provides custom capabilities, training, integration, and support tailored to your needs. Several examples of how Urban Hawk can enhance your services include:
- Creating custom models
- Analysing time and series data
- Integrating alerting systems
- Providing explainable machine insights
- Automating data updates and feeds
- Offering data caching and distribution
- Enabling the use of external data
- High-performance hosting options
- Compatibility with Windows and Linux
- Easy connection to external services and data stores
We welcome all sorts of engagements and Urban Hawk welcomes various opportunities, from exploring cutting-edge technology and challenges to commercial opportunities.
Feel free to contact us for inquiries or collaboration.