Sofia from BlackShore: “I don’t think I would’ve done anything differently”
The European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centres (ESA BICs) have been catalysts for innovation, fostering space-related entrepreneurship. These centres provide essential support, resources, and guidance to start-ups and individuals with groundbreaking ideas.
This article highlights the inspiring journey of Sofia van ‘t Woud. Sofia, with the help of ESA BIC Noordwijk, transformed her academic project into a thriving business. The ESA BIC programme enabled Sofia to establish her company, BlackShore, and develop an innovative Earth mapping game that leverages satellite imagery for various applications. This story exemplifies how ESA BICs are instrumental in turning visionary concepts into impactful solutions, driving progress in the space industry and beyond.
The beginning of BlackShore
When Sofia van ‘t Woud was creating a computer game with satellite images of Mars for her master’s thesis, she knew she had found her passion. Freshly graduated, armed with her thesis paper and a first version of her game, Sofia showed up at European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) in Noordwijk. “I knew nothing about companies, I knew nothing about entrepreneurship, and I knew little about ESA. All I wanted to do was to continue with Mars” Sofia recalls.
Levelling up in Satellite Imagery
Sofia quickly learned that the real need for satellite imagery was much closer by, right here on Earth. After successfully applying to ESA BIC in 2011, the incubator helped establish Sofia’ company, BlackShore. Throughout the programme, she further developed her initial approach into an Earth mapping game, supplemented with e-learning and players receiving points for correct identifications. With the vast amounts of satellite imagery available, applications here include food security, to understand climate change, or efficient farming.
The game acts as a crowdsourcing platform for citizen science: players explore satellite images and need to identify certain characteristics, such as terrain features, crops, or anomalies. Each new satellite image offers a completely different environment for the player to explore. Using the power of the crowd, this allows for large amounts of data to be added to satellite images.
One of Sofia’ personal highlights was getting to experience the capabilities of her game first-hand: at Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, US, Sofia joined five other analog astronauts to simulate a Mars mission in the rugged desert landscape. Using her crowdsourcing platform, Sofia asked the players of her game to map the area around their analog “space” station, which included similar terrain features to a Martian environment. She is proud of how this proved her technology: “The people were mapping with the game at home, finding anomalies, and then in the station we could visit those locations in the Utah Desert. This was really cool, because they were actively steering us as astronauts, and then we could send images back home to the crowd from these coordinates. It really worked!”.
Mapping a Changing World
With her technology proven to successfully identify points of interest, the game has also benefited from the improvements in satellite image quality over the past decade. While in the game’s early days, players were working with 50 centimetre resolution, this has since improved to 30 centimetre resolution. The first time using these higher-resolution images was particularly exciting for Sofia: In a project by the African Development Bank, new pumps, roads, and dams were built in Niger. When they asked the crowd to map the changes between 2016 and 2021, these were clearly visible. “You could actually see people going to the markets, you could see some prosperity, and that is really nice. The crowd loved to map that” she adds.
Alongside the changes in image quality, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) also have implications for the game. In a project with ESA, Sofia’ crowdsourcing platform helped train an AI to measure the impacts of climate change on durum wheat production in the Mediterranean. She is proud of the project’s outcome: “250,000 data labels, released as open data. This is free data for researchers to play with, or you can also now in theory use those labels to create your own fake worlds or simulations of climate change”.
In the Cerberus game client- interface we represent Earth in 3D as our own ‘metaverse’ whereas we use hexagons as units of analysis. With our technology we can standardise and grid entire planets.
Learning Along the Way
Being able to learn new things and develop skills further is something Sofia highly values about her entrepreneurial journey through ESA BIC. From her time during – and after – her incubation period, having an office on location helped expand her view of the space industry. While it has not always been easy, challenges along the way and leaving her comfort zone are what helped him grow: “I don’t think I would have done anything differently. Things were unplannable and that’s actually what I like, I just like this adventure”. However, she warns about not internalising the difficulties that come with being an entrepreneur: “Maybe you do not want to show to the potential investors you are vulnerable, you are struggling with things, and maybe you don’t want to share it with your friends or your family. I think it is still very important to pay attention to your mental health and get support if you need it”.
Looking into the future, Sofia knows what her dream is: to go back to the game’s roots and develop applications for the game on Mars. “There are also interesting things on Earth, but my real heart is over there” says Sofia. For now, she is happy that she can further spread knowledge about our planet: “I get to educate people about Earth and that is what I like. The e-learning part is really important. We are actually teaching people quite difficult things about the planet”.
This article was written for the occasion of the 20 years anniversary of ESA BIC in Europe.
For the full overview of this celebration, go to the LinkedIn group by clicking on the button below.