Synthetic training data for autonomous outdoor operations
An autonomous machinery company needed training data it could not collect. Its machines navigate unstructured outdoor environments, and the hardest scenarios are the rarest ones. Unusual obstacles. Bad light. Weather that does not show up on schedule. Physical capture is expensive, slow, and impossible to control. Every edge case demands real-world conditions the team cannot reliably reproduce.
Slapshot built the environment instead.
Our film-industry artists constructed a parametric procedural world in Houdini. Every element is exposed as a parameter: terrain, layout, vegetation, obstacle population, weather, and time-of-day lighting. Covering a new condition becomes a configuration change, not a re-collection effort. The client validated photorealism against sample stills and 360-degree sequences before any large-scale render commitment.
Then we rendered at production scale. The first dataset delivered 2,500 equirectangular 360-degree videos at 4096 by 2048 resolution, totaling 75,000 frames focused on obstacle edge cases across full lighting and weather variation. Every frame ships with 32-bit depth, semantic segmentation, camera path, and render metadata.
That last part is the point. Annotation is built in, not bolted on. Depth, segmentation, and camera ground truth render alongside RGB. Zero labeling cost. Perfect ground truth. No human-in-the-loop bottleneck.
The engagement is structured in gated phases. The client approves each stage before the next begins, from procedural foundation through custom edge-case expansion. The end state is an on-demand API: the client submits a parameter combination, requests any volume, and retrieves annotated datasets programmatically.
VFX pipelines were built to make images that survive scrutiny on a cinema screen. That same discipline produces photoreal materials, accurate light transport, and variation beyond what simulation engines offer. For physical AI teams, it means edge cases on demand, at a fraction of the cost of field collection.
Slapshot is the video data company. Start at slapshot.ai.