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.
In November the creation received the Silver award in the Digital Production / Interface and Navigation category at the El Ojo de Iberoamérica festival. "It's a product that encompasses all our capabilities," said the co-founder of The Electric Factory, Juan Ciapessoni, in a conversation with El Observador.
The goal behind the invention is to encourage the use of noninvasive technology among children and parents, "the human aspect of technology as a bridge to human emotion," Ciapessoni said.
"We believe that technology should be non-invasive and facilitate human and emotional relationships. In this case this invention fit perfectly in an industry hacked by tablets and smartphones like the book industry," he said.
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.
"To be competing in high-impact technology categories with companies like Airbnb and Microsoft is brutal," said Ciapessoni. The awards ceremony will be held on March 11.
Source: The Observer
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