January 28, 2026
Aditi Majumder insists you come visit her lab in the UC Irvine CalIT2 building. Not out of ego or salesmanship, but because words and videos can’t quite do her team’s work justice.
After seeing it in person, it’s hard to disagree. Because what Summit Technology Laboratory (STL), has built is more easily experienced than explained. A football game projected onto the curves of an actual football. Times Square swelling around you in full wraparound projection, every flickering light and ad brushing your shoulder. Projected images of D.C.’s monuments ripple over a breeze-blown tent, yet the images stay perfectly aligned.
This isn’t the augmented reality (AR) we’re used to expecting. Gone are the bulky headsets and shaky overlays, along with the disorientation and isolation that often came with traditional AR. At STL, the startup Majumder founded out of her lab in the Computer Science Department in UC Irvine’s School of Information and Computer Science, it’s reality that’s the display. STL’s technology transforms the physical environment into the screen itself by enabling the projection of the digital content onto surfaces of almost any shape or size, using AI-powered computer vision to automate a process that once took hours.
What If Projection Just Worked?
“Projection mapping has been around a long time,” Majumder says. “But it’s remained too complex, too expensive, too fragile. We’ve solved those pain points and then some more.”
Her company’s core platform, Artemis™, is a software system that automates the entire projection mapping pipeline. It uses advanced computer vision, a form of AI that enables machines to interpret visual information, to scan physical environments and layer them with crisp, precisely aligned projections in a matter of minutes.
Despite the complexity under the hood, the system is remarkably user-friendly. It doesn’t require markers, LIDAR scans, or tedious calibration, just a few cameras, some projectors, and the push of a button. It’s practically plug-and-play. What once took engineers hours or even days to calibrate, can now be handled in minutes.
Just as important, users don’t need specialized hardware or technical training to engage with the system. With a simple laser pointer, they can navigate a projected map, zoom in to examine fine-grained details, or zoom out to understand broader context. The interaction feels natural and closer to gesturing than operating a machine.
That simplicity has broad applications across industries. In museums, staff no longer have to rely on engineers to create immersive exhibits. In advertising, pop-up installations that once took days can be deployed in minutes. In military training environments, simulations that used to require fixed infrastructure can now run inside tents, on domes, or on mobile displays. When disasters strike, response teams can project real-time data directly into the field, where it matters most. And as educators look to immersive classrooms to make in-person learning more compelling, STL’s system helps by blending projections smoothly across room corners, solving a problem that has long been a technical hurdle. Instead of relying on static slides, teachers can now wrap students in fully immersive content that brings lessons to life.
“We’ve worked hard to stay hardware agnostic,” Majumder says. “It means we can scale easily and use what the customer already has. That reduces cost dramatically.”
STL claims that Artemis reduces system calibration time by 98 percent and lifecycle costs by over 80 percent, savings that matter in any resource-constrained setting. For the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, STL has developed expedition-ready prototype systems for immersive command-and-control, simulation and training. Built at high technology readiness levels via SBIR contracts from Department of Defense, STL is now in the process of seeking deployment opportunities in different defense units in remote and austere locations.
From Lab to Launch
Majumder didn’t start out planning to be a startup founder. She was content as a computer science professor deep in the academic trenches of projection-based display systems, authoring books, securing patents, presenting papers. “As a professor, it’s easy to settle into what you know.,” she says. “But building a company? It quickly shows you how much there is to learn in areas you’ve never had to think about before.” That lesson came quickly. For the STL team, customer acquisition proved unexpectedly difficult. Even with clear, compelling evidence, many potential customers found it hard to take a chance on something new. “Sometimes you walk in with a solution, and think the technology will speak for itself,” she says. “But we learned that people don’t always adopt something just because it works. Change is hard.”
So is running a company.
Much of STL’s momentum has come from within UC Irvine itself. The company is based at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) incubator, a space designed to bridge research and commercialization. “G.P. Li has been incredibly supportive,” she says about CalIT2’s director. “He gave us a home.” So was now retired senior licensing officer Doug Crawford at UC Irvine Beall Applied Innovation, who she describes as her “biggest champion.” Senior licensing officer Benjamin Chu has also helped guide the company through its early stages. “Their support meant all the difference,” she says.
STL has also become a sought-after site for UC Irvine students to get hands-on experience in cutting-edge projection systems. “We have a lot of students working with us,” Majumder says. “I love seeing that spark in their eyes when something clicks. It’s exciting to hear their fresh ideas, and it’s a great opportunity for them to get mentorship on a big campus.” That mentorship has real staying power. Sasha Sidenko started as an intern after transferring to UC Irvine and liked the work so much, he offered to keep volunteering after his internship ended. Eight years later and after wearing many hats, he’s now a full-time project engineer at STL.
Another former student, Muhammad Twaha Ibrahim, also stayed on. He led the research behind STL’s Tent Display project, which showed how the system could remain precisely calibrated even as the projection surface moved. His work extends beyond military applications, but also in high-stakes settings like remote surgery, where patients and instruments may shift moment to moment. As the first research of its kind, Ibrahim’s groundbreaking research won UC Irvine’s 2023 Grad Slam, a competition celebrating exceptional graduate research with high social impact. His contributions remain central to STL’s development of dynamic, real-world applications.
Chasing the Holodeck
STL’s public-facing projects are already impressive. They’ve powered a 360-degree dome experience at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, created an immersive 4K IMAX-like installation at Discovery Cube in Orange County and Los Angeles, and helped build flight simulators for Regent Seaglider pilots that surrounds them with ultra-high-resolution visuals on a curved, 230-degree screen. The screen on which the simulator is deployed can be a smooth cylinder or even a container like environment of a trailer for a mobile unit. But what STL dreams of next is something even more immersive. It’s the kind of thing you’ve seen in science-fiction: Tony Stark swiping through glowing blue gadgets in Iron Man, Tom Cruise manipulating floating screens in Minority Report, or the crew of the Enterprise stepping into the Star Trek Holodeck, where entire virtual worlds come to life around them. “We want to build the ultimate 3D experience,” Majumder says. “That’s our north star.”
Cameras would face the users and track their position, gaze, and gestures in real time. As a person moves through space, the system would adjust the projected imagery accordingly, creating an experience that feels truly three-dimensional. Users could interact with projected content directly by reaching out to move objects, zooming in, or manipulating scenes with their hands. The company anticipates that, if progress continues as expected, a working version of this system could be developed within the next decade.
In the end, Majumder sees STL not just as a company, but as a platform for research, for student growth, for collaboration across wildly different sectors. It’s also something that feels much more personal. “I’ve been told I run STL more like a mothership,” Majumder says, laughing. “It’s not just about pushing forward on the tech. You’re steering everything in the company from culture, morale, the emotional temperature of the team.”
These skills have carried over into other parts of her life and have changed Majumder in ways she hadn’t anticipated. “Building this company has made me more empathetic. It’s changed me, not just as a researcher, but as a mother and human being,” she says.
When asked about what keeps her going, she says, “It’s a strange thing. You start out building software. And you end up building people.”
–Jill Kato
