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Silicon Gorge hosts a fair number of companies who actually work with silicon, including Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, and others. As of 2014, more than a billion TV set-top boxes around the world were powered by chips designed in the area. A place with a history of engineering and creative talent (see: Brunel and Banksy), Bristol and Bath are becoming a particularly important technology hub, both on the regional and national level. The large corporations present in the area are complemented by a host of tech startups that are mushrooming like a fairy ring.

Some of the most interesting local startups were present at Venturefest Bristol & Bath 2015, an event that gathered more than 1,200 people on June 9 at one of the city's startup-oriented coworking spaces, Engine Shed, and the neighbouring Passenger Shed.

Here are a few of the innovations and products that stood out at the show.

Open Bionics: affordable prosthetic robotic hands

If we had to choose the most exciting tech demonstrated at Venturefest, our vote would go to Open Bionics, which works to offer affordable prosthetic hands for those who need them. The startup's CEO Joel Gibbard said that the usual price for a prosthetic hand today reaches $100,000, while the hand they're about to offer is only £2,000 (about $3,100).

Showing off the hand at Open Bionics' stand in Passenger Shed, Gibbard hooked it up to his own arm muscles, with sensors “understanding” when he wanted to move fingers. That's what you can see in the video below:

Video produced by Jennifer Hahn

The low price of the solution is achieved by the use of 3D printing and scanning. Gibbard explained that a significant part of the money spent by amputees to get a prosthetic hand goes for fitting, which can take months. Instead of doing that, Open Bionics scans the arm of the customer and 3D-prints an individual fitting socket using a flexible material called “NinjaFlex.”

At the moment it's only possible to flex all fingers of the robotic hand simultaneously, but Gibbard said his team will work on fine-tuning the sensitivity of the sensors to allow for more intricate gestures. The hand can hold a tray or another household item, as long as it isn't too heavy. The team identifies its target audience not only in private customers, but also academic institutions involved in relevant research programs.

Later, during a talk, an interesting thought expressed by Gibbard was that prosthetic hands do not necessarily have to be limited by the look of real ones. A sketch made for the company by an artist illustrates different ideas of how to augment them—from putting a compass on the wrist to integrating a microphone and speaker into the thumb and pinky finger, so that the owner could make calls using a certain gesture.

The company has actually done some steps in that direction: one of its first beta testers is the actress Grace Mandeville, for whom Open Bionics created a hand studded by Swarovski crystals.

Video produced by Jennifer Hahn

VRgo: the virtual reality... chair?

Unsurprisingly, virtual reality was used quite often by the exhibitors at Venturefest; by our estimate, there was about a dozen headsets seen around the event space. In the Startup Village, a rather cramped space where younger companies showcased their products, an Oculus Rift headset was paired with VRgo chair, an unconventional controller that lets the user to move in the virtual world by inclining in the respective direction.

The main idea of the chair is to free the gamer's hands to use different peripherals like a gun controller, or just their own hands to interact with the virtual environment. VRgo creator Joe Ryan said that the device is going to hit Kickstarter soon, with a price tag of up to £200.

A little disappointingly, the VRgo chair doesn't have any kind of haptic feedback, though Ryan promised to think about the idea of adding it.

Libraries.io

If you want to see a typical project created by programmers for programmers, that's Libraries.io for you. It's not about robotics, gaming or virtual reality—it “just” tracks almost a million libraries for software developers and is a comprehensive knowledge base for a software developer looking for building blocks for a new application.

In the first two months after the site was launched, it saw more than a million visits, said Andrew Nesbitt, Libraries.io founder and freelance Ruby developer based in Bath. The project has never attracted external funding (and apparently doesn't need any), and Nesbitt is not sure when he's going to start monetising it by adding advanced tracking and reporting features.

Fabulous Beasts: joining the virtual and real worlds

Back from IDEs and unit tests to the fun and laughter: as we mentioned earlier, Bristol is a place where art meets technology and engineering, which was illustrated by Fabulous Beasts, one of the emerging “hybrid games" that take place in both real and virtual worlds.

The game, which is about young gods building a brave new world, is played both on an iPad and on a Bluetooth-connected pad. Players build a tower of sorts by taking it in turns to place crazy shapes on top of each other, trying to maintain the balance. The pieces represent different species and are recognized by the game by integrated RFID tags.

Just like many other hardware-related projects shown off at Venturefest, Fabulous Beasts will be crowdfunded through Kickstarter. The team plans to retail it at anywhere from £60 to £100.

YellowDog: sell your excess CPU cycles for money

While slightly less outwardly exciting than robots or VR appliances, Bristol-based YellowDog definitely piqued our interest. The idea of the service, as explained by the CTO Simon Ponsford, is to help people utilize extra computing power and make some money out of it.

The typical scenario for a YellowDog user would be to run the service's client application on a laptop or desktop PC when it's not being used. The app would make the computer work on rendering tasks, commissioned and paid for by animation studios that are often in need of additional resources.

It's not something to get rich on, Ponsford said, but running YellowDog regularly can earn you up to £1,000 a year if you have a newer computer with a Core i7-class CPU.

Self-driving cars

Apart from the young and hip startups, Venturefest actually hosted quite a few bigger companies showcasing their projects and achievements, including Airbus, Toshiba, Rolls-Royce, Renishaw, HP and many others. Among them was an interesting project called the Venturer consortium, a product of cooperation between Atkins, AXA, BAE Systems and a few others, including the city councils of Bristol and South Gloucestershire.

The project is all about driverless cars—but not about building them. The goal is to create a versatile testing platform for general research into self-driving cars, or for smaller technology companies looking for a way to test specific parts of the autonomous vehicle puzzle.

The project also wants to act as an icebreaker for some of the complicated ethical, commercial, and legislative issues that need to be worked out before self-driving cars can hit the streets en masse. For example, what do we do with insurance? Who's responsible if the car had an accident while driving by itself? What changes if the human took control seconds before the accident? How will people react to driverless cars in different situations on the road—both passengers inside the car, but also pedestrians, cyclists, and other people outside the car.

If everything goes as planned with the Venturer project, Bristol will hopefully become the place where you're most likely to see a driverless car “in the wild"—according to one of the consortium's representatives, the driverless 4WD will regularly hit the roads in early 2016.