Five companies made it to the finals of the Connecting People category of the Interactive Innovation Awards, a festival held as part of South by Southwest, a U.S. event and one of the most important in terms of innovation in the world.
Airbnb and Microsoft are two of the finalists in this category, and a Uruguayan company is competing with them: The Electric Factory.
In addition, the innovation company led by Avedis Boudakian, Andrés Guarino and Juan Ciapessoni is the only Latin American company among the 65 finalists in the 13 categories of the festival.
And he did it through the product Read to Me, a creation made for the Uruguayan company EME Content. Read to Me is a lamp that detects what is being read and brings words to life by projecting them in animation with sound. The product was created for parents to read to their children and the lamp identifies key words and projects them in animation on the wall.
EME Content sought to explore the future of book reading and came up with this augmented reality solution that is achieved through an Internet of Things device.
En noviembre la creación recibió el premio Plata en la categoría Producción Digital / Interfaz y navegación del festival El Ojo de Iberoamérica. «Es un producto que engloba todas nuestras capacidades», dijo el cofundador de The Electric Factory, Juan Ciapessoni, en diálogo con El Observador.
El objetivo detrás del invento es fomentar el uso de la tecnología no invasiva entre niños y padres, «el aspecto humano de la tecnología como puente de la emoción humana», dijo Ciapessoni.
«Creemos que la tecnología debe ser no invasiva y facilitadora de las relaciones humanas y emocionales. En este caso este invento calzaba perfectamente en una industria hackeada por tablets y smartphones como la de los libros», apuntó.
He added that the next step will be to make it no longer necessary for parents to read a book for the device to detect words from made-up stories and project them onto the wall, making the experience more immersive.
«Estar compitiendo en categorías de alto impacto tecnológico con compañías como Airbnb y Microsoft es brutal», comentó Ciapessoni. La entrega de premios será el 11 de marzo.
Source: The Observer
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