Magic Leap: When the Virtual World Truly Helps You to Live in the Real World

I kinda have a 'crush' on this start-up. Why? Because when I read their manifesto, I feel close to their ideas, they are answering issues I have (and have been talking about in this blog for a while). They say that their idea is 'based in the belief that people should not have to choose between technology or safety, technology or privacy, the virtual world or the real world". They have realized that "current technologies we use to access the digital world limit, or even take us away, from the real world" and that "the future of computing should be derived from respecting human biology, physiology, creativity, and community". 

So exactly what is their idea? They want to use technologies as a companion to human beings, delivering really unique experiences that one can even consider as magical. In order to do so they use augmented reality and more precisely "head-mounted devices which superimpose 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects, by projecting a digital light field into the user's eye" (Wikipedia page). They created what they call "a Dynamic Digitized Lightfield Signal™", which basically generates highly realistic images and then place them into the real world.

Credits: Flickr (Eddenghien)

Your possibilities are infinite with such a technology. But I heard they are planning to use their tool for instance for children in hospitals: so that they feel less alone or scared, they will create dwarfs that could be their complete companions, following them everywhere. It's like having an imaginary friend but you get to see him!

What I also like a lot is that they seem to be a funny team: they call themselves 'computing hobbits', 'software ninjas', 'artificial intelligence gurus' and so on. And they are actually looking for 'wizards' right now, quite a lot of them, so please go help them, engineers in this world!

Credits: Flickr (Henri Block)

Though it's true there is quite a lot of mystery on this start-up. Yes they have raised more than $500 million but what are they using it for? They haven't shown anything close to a real prototype so far. And I hope they will keep up to their manifesto, because so far the only video they showed gives the idea they want us to use their product for a first person shooter game, transposed in real life!

Another thing I want to highlight is that, to me, living with something on top of your head all the time is not exactly what I call living in the 'real-world'. Magic Leap has to be careful not to forget what its intentions were in the first place.

So I guess my relationship to this start-up is kind of a love/hate situation: I'm a bit perplexed and I don't trust it completely, but at the same time I really want it to work.

Eagleman Laboratory: You Have Nerver Seen Such a Thing

Oh my this is probably the most mind-blowing thing I have ever seen. Seriously. I guess the best thing to do for you is to watch the following video, so that you can understand what I'm talking about:

So this David Eagleman (well he certainly inspires as much respect as eagles do, and seems free as a bird), wants no less than to "change our experience as humans"! Yes yes, he wants to expand our senses, I mean wowwww

He learned about something discovered for the first time in 1969, something absolutely crucial: your senses do not depend on where your eyes/ears/tongue etc are, they depend on which signal (electrochemical) goes into your brain, in any way whatsoever it uses to get there. Yes your eye gives a clear signal to your brain of what can be seen, but if this same signal comes from another part of your body (let's say your booty of course), your brain understands it as well! I told you you would be amazed.

A few studies have been done and they showed for instance that blind people could get something very close to vision itself, with signals coming from a little object on another part of their body: "they [blind people] get to see through their tongue"explains Eagleman. They could even throw a ball in a basket!!! I didn't realize how much can be done for blind people with new technologies, it's impressive.

Eagleman and his fellow researchers in the Laboratory for Perception and Action at the Baylor College of Medicine, are focusing now on deaf people. They are looking for sensory substitution for the deaf. They came up with a possible solution to hearing problems: a vest that produces signals you brain can understand. As someone speaks, the sound is being translated into dynamic patterns of vibrations on the vest someone else (or himself) is wearing. The person wearing the vest is able to understand the words, after of course a bit of practice. How cool is that!! Plus it's 40 times less expensive than a surgery (the only other option for deaf people).

Credits: Dario-Jacopo Lagana' @Flickr

Despite this success, Eagleman does not stop there. He wants to expand our 'senses' even more: now you get to feel on the vest data coming directly from the internet. This still needs more experimentation but it is already impressive. Eagleman wants us to experience and feel information (and especially big data), more than reading it only. But it's also giving us the ability to do things we never could: for instance knowing instantly what hundreds of people say on Twitter, and get the overall impression (if they're mostly positive or negative in their tweets).

Okay there are a few drawbacks, well mostly one: it's a bit too crazy for us, at least for our current state of mind. I mean it jeopardizes deeply human nature and how human beings see themselves (especially the religious ones). We are playing here with nature itself and by changing how our body works, using technology, it makes us loose our specificity as humans, makes us look a bit as robots.

So we'll see how it goes on, but definitely a situation worth watching!

Mubser: When Visually Impaired People 'Recover' Their Eyesight

Credit: Flickr

Mubser ( مُـبْـــــصِـــر ) is another example of a start-up that could truly revolutionize the life of many people. Besides it's not everyday I talk about an African start-up! Mubser was founded by Khaled Shady in Cairo with three other computer engineering graduates from Menoufia University. Its mission is to assist visually impaired or blind people in their everyday life, with a navigational aid tool that uses ingenious technologies.

How does it work? The pilot product, SensifyTM (only a prototype so far), is a wearable belt working with a Bluetooth headset.Thanks to a 3D depth camera, the product is able to recognize many common obstacles (walls, chairs, tables, staircases, ...), and then to notify the user through an inbuilt audio device or by making vibrations. And this is only the beginning, Shady's dream is to add more and more features so that blind people can almost completely imagine their surroundings. "It’s about the future for them; that’s how I keep thinking about the platform itself. So in the next five years I see Mubser as being the sixth sense that they depend on", says Shady.


Mubser is the kind of start-up you really hope to grow. Its CEO is only 22 years old (about my age) and it's impressive he gets into something that difficult. The story behind its foundation is moving: Khaled Shady wanted to help a close friend who, because of a car accident, lost his eyesight at the age of 15.This can happen to anyone and so suddenly, it's scary! Mubser is now incubated at Venture Lab at the American University in Cairo, but their biggest issue according to the CEO is that there's no manufacturing industry in Egypt. Hence they are trying to find partners in the USA or China but it's not an easy thing to do.

Since it's not exactly a piece of cake to get a guide dog, creating technologies that could quite replace them is a really good thing. Of course you could never replace the happiness of owning a dog but you could still truly help blind people.

Further reading:

http://mubser.com/  (there's pretty much nothing on the website yet)
http://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/young-ceo-invents-navigational-technology-for-the-blind/34327/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2014/02/13/seven-innovative-products-from-africa-you-should-know/
https://www.facebook.com/mubser/

Grove Labs: a Garden in Your Flat

Ooohh I can tell your curiosity is aroused by this title. I was also quite excited myself when I read about this start-up. What if I told you you could grow these at home?

Credits: Flickr

And when I say "home" I'm not talking about a house in the countryside, I'm talking about your little flat right in the center of a big city, with no balcony. What is she talking about? Don't worry I'm not smoking these plants I'm telling you you could grow at home! I'm simply amazed by Grove Labs, an American start-up, creating a living ecosystem in your home.

Two MIT students, best-friends and roommates, Jamie Byron and Gabe Blanchet, had a very interesting idea in 2009: create a new way of growing food, avoiding conventional agriculture, that could be implemented right inside people's home. It is called an 'aquaponic garden' and it "is a method of producing food by cultivating a rich ecosystem of fish, plants, and microbial life" (Grove's website). They built their first aquaponic garden in their own fraternity room, and within a month they harvested kale, beans, lettuce, and herbs. The fishes make a fertilizer for the plants and the plants filter the water clean for the fishes!

Since then, they learned how to successfully start their own business (e.g. by taking a summer start-up accelerator class at MIT) and how to brand it, hence the change of name from 'Bio Tower' to 'Grove Labs'.
After that, they got bigger and bigger, and there are now about 30 people in their team, including 'Business & Customer advisors' as well as 'Science & Tech advisors'. They are now prototyping and people can already order their own Grove Labs ecosystem as 'early adopters'. The company is starting with Boston and plans on developing across the USA, and later on, worldwide (let's hope so!).

Just imagine it: eating healthy vegetables and herbs that come directly from inside your flat, and improve the quality of air! Having home grown vegetables used to be the privilege of people owning houses and gardens or at least big balconies. And now this could set up a new deal, for potentially everyone in every country. However let's not get over-enthusiastic, if you have a 10 m² flat you won't be able to get a Grove Labs aquaponic garden, they're not doing any magic.

Here's a video that explains everything:

Further reading:
https://grovelabs.io/
https://grovelabs.io/our-story/
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/18/7242771/grove-labs-wants-to-put-a-tiny-farm-in-your-kitchen/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31593626/

Spritz: No Biggie, Just a New Way to Read

Remember when reading looked like that?

Credits: Morguefile

It has changed a lot over the last decades but hopefully books are still read by many, –let’s say most of the– people. There is always an ongoing debate between people using actual books and people reading them online/on their e-reader/on their phone or tablet. 

Today I’m introducing a new way to read, no less than that!! It might change your view on e-reading. This start-up, whose product was first released to the public in February 2014, is called Spritz. Funny name I must say, which is definitely the opposite of what the 3 co-founders look like (well they’re scientists…)! Anyway they invented a way to read A LOT faster, and without any training. 

How does it work? They make you read without moving your eyes! In their “redicle” they put one word at a time with one letter in red. This letter is the “Optimal Recognition Point”, usually in the middle of the word, which enables you to understand fast and easily the entire word. They start with a speed of 250 words per minute which is a little bit faster than the average speed of 220. But then you can go up to 1,000 words per minute (I’m definitely completely lost there but you can try). 

It’s simply amazing and impressive. And the good part is that you remember what you have read. But it’s true I am not sure I could read a long text with this. You can “pause” the scrolling text but it’s not quite the same thing as when you’re slowly loosing track of what you’re reading in a physical book. I mean your mind can decide to digress, your concentration to take a break. They you realize you’ve been thinking of something else and you go back a few lines earlier and start to read again. With Spritz you can less easily let yourself ramble. 

Though, this start-up might revolutionize our lives. It has already enabled Emails and SMS messages to be read using Spritz technology, but also digital books and news articles. Social media are next on the list. Here’s the link with all the applications using Spritz today: http://www.spritzinc.com/where-can-i-experience-spritz/

And here’s a video of how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xxyDVBGHL8

The company's website: http://www.spritzinc.com/

f.lux: Wanna Stop Messing Up with Your Eyes??

I have never been a huge fan of technologies. Oh that's actually a lie. I remember myself as a kid, getting excited of all the new technologies. Especially for instance being jealous of my father because he owned this phone:

Ericson T20, credits: http://www.ixbt.com/mobile/review/ericsson-t20-to-t28.shtml

Funny fact, I thought back in those days that this screen was a color LCD even though it had only one color.

I also spent many afternoons having fun on PowerPoint, using all possible animations as well as these little fellows:

Credits: Clipart, PowerPoint

Then I got excited for my first cell phone and my first Windows Movie Maker videos. Since then, all my enthusiasm for new technologies have kept slowing down to the point where it started to be actually negative. I mean I have started to fear new technologies more than I am enthusiastic to discover them. I feel completely overwhelmed and scared of the room these technologies have already taken up in our lives and will continue to take.
So that's why I am so much looking for ways to slow down these trends and find alternatives. 

In today's article, I looked at means to fight against what screens do to our health. Nothing really new or transcendent here, but as you know the blue light generated by screens prevents you from sleeping. Unless you're like me and you can sleep every where at any time even if you just had 3 hours of computer-viewing! 
Many international researches have indeed showed similar results, you find sleep more easily after reading an actual book for instance than looking at a smartphone or computer. 

How to avoid this annoyance?
Orange is the complementary color of blue so you should see orange light instead of blue!
What to do if ever you don't own one of these cuties:

Credits: Flickr

It's simple, just download f.lux. This start-up founded in 2009 by Michael and Lorna Herf (husband and wife or brother/sister that's the question!) is helping you a lot. How? By changing the color temperature of your screen depending on the time of the day (at night, more and more orange). This not-too-heavy-software replicates better natural daylight on screens. It works with PC, Mac, Linux and Iphone/Ipad.Because it knows your location, the app can tell what time the sun rises and goes down every day and can therefore adapt the lightning/temperature of your screens. Your eyes will be a lot less tired and yourself as well. We are in front of screens basically all day so better make this experience a bit less painful for your eyes and general health.

Credits: Technology Voice, http://technologyvoice.com/2011/10/10/flux-releases-ios-app

Warning, though: people using f.lux found themselves liking it so much, thinking it was so surprisingly effective, that they got quite addicted to it: they now have issues using computers and phones that do not integrate this technology.

One last thing, what I also like about this start-up is that they try to be really transparent and to actually improve your life. For instance on their website there is a big section dedicated to support/FAQ. Moreover in order to help you they agree to put themselves in jeopardy regarding Apple. f.lux is not available on App Store yet because Apple has not allowed it so far, thus the app has to force its way using jailbreaking. This is what f.lux's website says about this:

"Because f.lux runs automatically as a background process, and due to the low-level access needed to change your colors correctly, we cannot currently create an app that Apple will approve. We are hopeful that we will get support from Apple in the future as more people come to know about f.lux and love its benefits"

Further reading:



https://justgetflux.com/
https://justgetflux.com/research.html
https://justgetflux.com/faq.html
http://technologyvoice.com/2011/10/10/flux-releases-ios-app
http://www.opticianonline.net/new-software-utility-better-replicate-natural-daylight-screens/
http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/07/f-lux-gets-updated-to-work-around-your-personal-sleep-schedule/

Glowee: Electricity? Like I Care!

 Have you ever heard about lights working with bacteria? Well now it exists! That’s what Glowee, a French start-up, –yes, French people can be innovative! –, has created. This newbie yet future game changer was founded by two brilliant and young women (about 25 years old): Sandra Rey and Maëlle Chassard, with the help of Karim Kotobi and, later, of Gilles, a biologist. The story begins in 2013 when they take part into the contest “Prix Artscience 2013” and win the prize. They took as a starting point the fact urban lighting is local councils’ #1 expense. In order to end this situation, they looked at ways to produce light without electricity. And thought: “why not by taking advantage of nature”? A few organisms have the magic ability to illuminate themselves: that’s bioluminescence. You can do something with that!

How is that even possible? They managed to create bioluminescent stickers with microorganisms living in them. They are encapsulated in little bubbles where there is everything they need to survive: a liquid where they can enjoy their life and as well as food of course. This lighting is especially intended for shop windows. They decided to start their company and named it “Organight”. They changed the name later on for Glowee, which is rather sexier and easier to remember, don’t you think?

Credits: Glowee (official website)

Then, oh boy, things escalated quickly for the two co-founders. In less than two years, they awoken many people’s curiosity and appealed a lot of partners, including Google. Not bad! And as if it weren’t enough, they also won the Parisian session of the Elevator World Tour (last January, less than a month ago). This contest is held in 9 cities so far, with 100 start-ups in competition in each location. It consists in delivering a one-minute-speech about your start-up, in a famous elevator. The French session takes naturally place at the Eiffel Tower. Eventually, they won the contest and thus earned $100,000 of investment!

The Glowee team celebrating victory @Elevator World Tour, Paris January 2015. Credits: La Tribune

Why go for these stickers? It reduces your electricity bills and light pollution for everybody, since its luminescence is close to a night-light or a candle. Moreover it is a great opportunity for your brand. Yes because you are now a formidable environmental-friendly and responsible brand. And people look at your window even at night, which improves your visibility. Plus you get to choose the shape of the stickers you want! Oh and did I mention the whole things is transparent in the day light so people can still see what’s behind your window? Of course there’s also a very valid argument: it will prevent you from being a bandit. That’s right, a law of July 2013 in France forbids shop windows lighting at night.

Okay I might a bit over-enthusiastic for this start-up. Let’s talk about the drawbacks: the biggest one to me is green. Yes there is only one color so far and it’s fluorescent green. And I don’t like green at all. But let’s talk about other more objective issues: how can they be sure to always find enough raw materials? They make the living organisms breed in their lab. Thus, wouldn’t there be a time when they might have too many orders for too few raw materials? I’m not sure these living things multiply that fast… And if they do, they might lack space to actually store all these organisms. Another key issue is the lifespan of such stickers. The first prototype will last only 24 hours.

Though, I guess all these questions are being answered right now, while Glowee is undertaking a 6-month-lab session.

There’s actually a reason I am writing about this today. The start-up really needs to be in demand and deserves to be known. Glowee first products will soon be on the market, around July 2015. Their goal is to supply whole commercial streets so that 1 street lamp out of 5 can be removed. Imagine all what we can gain from this, starting with a better respect of the environment and a reduction in lighting expenses. Though they’re not restricted: they are looking at many other opportunities including roads, airports, areas where there is no electricity …

We will definitely hear more about this so far really successful start-up!!

A summarizing video:
https://vimeo.com/115693812 



Further reading:
http://www.glowee.fr/
http://www.lefigaro.fr/entrepreneur/2015/01/24/09007-20150124ARTFIG00013-cette-start-up-vous-eclaire-grace-a-des-organismes-vivants.php
http://www.latribune.fr/start-up/20150123trib68d49fdda/elevator-world-tour-glowee-la-start-up-gagnante-de-l-edition-parisienne.html