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Commercialising Research Tools – The story behind Clari-Fi
Clari-Fi helps to evaluate the visual clarity (i.e. perceptibility) of icons, images and text that are intended to be viewed on a mobile device. Clari-Fi speeds up the process of designing these graphical features, because it enables the visual clarity of these features to be evaluated on a large screen device, and uses blurring to simulate the challenges of viewing these features on a mobile device.
What are research tools?
“Research Tools, as a department within Cambridge Enterprise, was setup to help commercialise different types of tools through a licensing model where we nonexclusively license out to different companies. It was setup to help academics commercialise their technology, whilst giving them the freedom to continue working on their academic research.”
– Dr Sian Fogden, Commercialisation Manager (Research Tools)
Benefits of working within Research Tools?
“The benefit of working with Cambridge Enterprise is that they sort out the terms and conditions, the legal work and money handling, and in particular the liability, so that as a researcher I can get on with making the tool what I want it to be, and can leave them to put the contractual arrangements in place, to handle the money and to make sure the liability clauses are there.”
– Dr Sam Waller, Senior Research Associate, Department of Engineering.
What does the future hold for Clari-Fi?
“Here at the University of Cambridge we have a remit to make the world a better place, so what we then wanted to do was empower organisations, like Unilever, to be able to do these kind of assessments themselves.”
“We’d like to see Clari-Fi being advocated and used as the best practice technique for assessing the visibility of text and icons as they appear on food packaging, within adverts, on mobile phone screens, on billboards, and we want to use the generated revenue to support the existence of our inclusive design research group.”
– Dr Sam Waller, Senior Research Associate, Department of Engineering.