About
The market for online training and education is already huge, and will continue to expand at an accelerated pace. Online training does not replace traditional teacher-pupil teaching, but should be seen as an addition. There are often circumstances in which a student needs additional lessons, which can then be done online and fully automatically, at a time and place of the student’s choice, and with or without collaboration with the ‘human-teacher’.
Recent technologies make online training increasingly attractive and efficient for students: 3D display of virtual worlds in which the student can play as it were, accompanied by a virtual avatar teacher. In this way, the student can understand a subject more easily and learn more quickly while “playing”. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will play an increasingly important role in this, and will drastically increase the learning efficiency.
ARIOLAS stands for:
Augmented Reality Immersive Online Learning Applications and Systems
These ARIOLAS applications will be aimed at the (global) market for online learning of a second language, primarily English as a second language. The total market for this is over 1 billion potential users, ranging from pre-schoolers to students in primary schools and higher education, and to people who need to be proficient in English for professional reasons.
ARIOLAS applications are already developed and they are built on the basis of the latest technologies in the field of 3D and VR and AR, immersive virtual worlds, avatars, and speech technology. Students and teacher/avatars engage in interactive spoken conversations, and learners thereby learn the correct vocabularies and pronunciation online in a playful manner on their smartphones and tablets.
FOUNDER
Jozef Lernout
Job Title
Jozef Lernout
Job Title
Jozef Lernout
ARIOLAS BV was founded in March 2022, by Jozef Lernout as A shareholder, together with a number of business friends B shareholders who jointly contributed the start-up capital. Jozef Lernout is a well known serial investor, and specialized in AI and Natural Language Understanding technologies. He is director of ARIOLAS BV and owns 1/3rd of the total number of shares, which are not diluted in case of an increase of the assets by additional sale of B shares. These A shares have double the voting rights of the B shares. Jozef Lernout also has founder’s responsibility. The B shareholders have no founder responsibility and their risk is limited to the contributed sums. The B shareholders together own 2/3rds of the shares. Additional working capital has been provided from regular sponsors and from buyers of convertible loans. Convertible loans owners receive a yearly 3 % interest, and can voluntary convert later into shares, with a 25 % discount versus share value. As such, substantial working capital was already provided and committed to ARIOLAS BV company (status end of June 2022) for sustaining all developments.
The activities and persons who should realize the objectives and developments and commercialization of the Ariolas applications are in the first instance led by Jozef Lernout. Part of the management and the developments will be done by internal specialists, but also by companies with a lot of experience in each sub-domain, such as Inniv8 (Mabalacat City, Philippines), and specialised gaming and 3D companies and academic institutions in Belgium and other countries.
The board of directors will gradually be extended and complemented by board members who bring in large sums, and/or who are represented by persons with appropriate skills and networks. The top management will be gradually extended as well, depending on sufficient working capital, and in order to reduce the dependence on Jozef Lernout as sole first director, and to ensure succession over the years.of the ARIOLAS applications
