The Secret Life of Everything
Lumen, an augmented reality tool designed by Arvind Sanjeev, sets out to do just that. The device looks like a garden variety flashlight, but shine Lumen on the objects around you, and those objects come alive, revealing useful information, passcodes, wayfinding directions, and even touch-screen control dials.
Shine Lumen on the face of a sculpture you stumble upon in a park and it comes alive, telling you why it’s historically significant, about the artist who made it, and maybe something about the patron who ponied up to plant it there. Flash it on a door with a keypad lock and it reveals the code to gain entry. Watch a video of Lumen in action.
Lumen was hatched at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, where Sanjeev graduated in 2017. Trained as an electrical engineer back home in Kerala, he had been a serial entrepreneur in India, but found the potential for growth for hardware companies to be limited there. He wanted to give his ideas a more durable foundation in design thinking, so when a friend at MIT’s Media Lab recommended the Interaction Design Programme in Copenhagen, he booked a trip North.
One of his classes was taught by James Tichenor and by Joshua Walton, who works at Facebook Reality Labs/Oculus Research. Sanjeev was struck by an early admonition Walton delivered to the class:
We will have failed as a species if everyone ends up wearing headsets. “Reality is plenty,” he said.
Then Walton issued a challenge: Could we give people the same kind of superpowers they feel with a headset, but in their natural environment? And could we make that moment shareable with others?
“That provocation really made me think,” Sanjeev says. He started writing a piece of science fiction that took up the challenge of creating an immersive augmented reality without a headset, and the idea for Lumen was born. But could he actually make the concept work? “I had this engineering mindset,” Sanjeev says. “I used to think ‘I’ll never be able to pull that off, it’s not possible.”
Sanjeev started sketching. With a lot of help from his classmates and some tinkering in Raspberry pi, he “made a crude prototype that you couldn’t get through an airport scanner.” Then he gave it to people to see what they’d do with it. Lumen became one of the most celebrated final projects at the school. It won a prize from Museo Marino Marini in Florence, which is interested in developing the concept, and an IxDA award in February and was a finalist for the 2019 Danish Design Award.
Sanjeev wants to stay in design-obsessed Scandinavia, where he now works for the Malmö-based design outfit, Above, but only if he can also bring what he’s absorbed back home, too. So, last December, Sanjeev helped to set up and run CIID’s summer school in Kochi, India, where entrepreneurship is catching fire. According to a Randstad Workmonitor survey, 83 percent of of the Indian workforce would like to be an entrepreneur — far higher than the global average of 53 percent. “Participants were really transformed by it,” he says. “I’ll have one foot here and one foot there. I would like to incubate a startup here and stay in Denmark, but still haven’t figured out how to navigate that with my VISA.”
How does he feel about the idea of winning such a prestigious award in his adopted country? “I try not to think about that because it makes me anxious, but I’m super excited that I’m a finalist in the design capital of the world.”
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For Danish Readers
Alexa og Siri er ganske gode til at repondere direkte på dine ønsker og kommandoer, men mon de også har andre skulte talenter? Hvad nu hvis alt i vores omgivelser kunne svare, hvis bare vi vidste hvordan vi kunne aktivere denne respons? Lumen, et augmented reality objekt designet af Arvind Sanjeev er svaret på dette.
Mest af alt ligner Lumen en stor lommelygte, men lyser du på objekter i dine omgivelser, vækkes disse til live og afdækker historier, koder, retningslinjer og endda tastaturer, som gør at du kan kontrollere og få adgang til deres funktioner i miljøet.
Lyser du med Lumen på en skulptur kommer Poseidons eller en anden græsk guds ansigt til live og fortæller dig en historie om, hvorledes han blev kongen af havet efter at have fået tronen af sin far Kronos. Skulpturen vil også fortælle dig om den velhavende mæcen, der oprindelig bestilte dets tilblivelse.
Lumen blev udtænkt og designet hos Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), hvor Sanjeev blev uddannet fra i 2016. I februar vandt projektet en pris i Seattle i IxDA Awards og er nu blevet shortlistet til Danish Design Award. Her kan du se en video, der viser, hvorledes Lumen blev designet og dets funktioner.
