"The Horizon 2020 project AXIOM laid the groundwork for the development of the first open source professional digital cinema camera that can be produced, modified and adapted by everyone. AXIOM is driven by a consortium of five organizations in three different EU countries: af inventions (Germany), University of Applied Arts Vienna (Austria), Antmicro (Poland), apertus association (Austria), and DENZ(Germany).
AXIOM is much more than simply a camera, it is an open camera platform. Whereas people are understandably cautious of buying camera systems which will be outdated within months upon their release, AXIOM cameras are built as a system that will evolve over time. They implement FPGA based designs and grant the opportunity to update interfaces, codecs, firmware and new functionalities via simple software downloaded directly to the camera. The AXIOM ecosystem, a forum for developers, producers, users and anyone interested to interact, will further serve as a hub to actively encourage and support collaboration.
Following the footsteps of very successful Open Source Hardware (short: Open Hardware) projects such as the ""Arduino"" (est. 1.4 mil. units sold) and the ""Raspberry Pi"" (est. over 2.5 mil. units sold), AXIOM is the basis for many future projects in the domain of movie production, educational, creative, prototyping, and machine vision. European ICT innovative creative industries SMEs and ICT SMEs in the imaging sectors can greatly benefit from the developments and outputs of the AXIOM project. AXIOM increases the competitiveness of the European creative industries by stimulating Open Innovation based on Open Hardware.
The AXIOM Gamma utilizes a modular hardware concept (the ""Open Module Concept""). The Open Module concept renders the AXIOM Gamma to be a fully extendible and repairable camera system, not to be outdated any time soon. Since this modular design also includes modularity of the enclosure, there is not just one single way the AXIOM Gamma can look like.
Even though Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) has been on the rise and shows a big success story (see Linux, Mozilla, Apache Web Server, Android, etc.) Open Source just recently entered the creative industries sector. The term ""Open Design"" was formalised in 2010 (""Open Design Manifesto"") and is most prominently used in the 3D printer ""RepRap"", which has been released already in 2007 under the GNU General Public License. Open (libre), extendable and fully documented creative tools are still not widely available – especially not in the field of imaging technologies. The Horizon 2020 funded project AXIOM tackled this through: firstly, the development of the AXIOM camera platform and secondly: by researching the wider implications of Open Hardware to stimulate and foster a European Open Hardware network. This resulted in the implementation of the first “Open Hardware Europe Summit”, which took place in Vienna, Austria as the final project presentation of the EU project. The Open Hardware Europe Summit featured international researchers and Open Hardware projects and contextualised the project findings in a wider international discourse, which will be lasting over the timeframe of the project."