The conference room was surprisingly full.

Turns out, a lot of people were jonesing to get out, and the amount of precautions they had taken made about three hundred attendees feel safe enough to go to the event. 

Lala and Jen had considered going on stage together: they had taken some courses for public speaking, and they wanted to present a united front. But, at the last minute, Jen decided that Lala would have been better as the face of the company. Lala felt like she had been put on the spot a bit, because she had, but she was not extremely surprised: Jen didn’t love attention. Bar was more suited to talking publicly about the project. And Jen liked having mystique. Projecting mystery was a legitimate strategy, but it was time to show off the goods.

March 6 2021, at 11:00 am, the keynote officially started.

Lala took the stage; Jen, Bar, Simon and David watched her from the side of the stage, still surprised by the amount of people that showed up that day. The conference hall was as full as it could be, given the restrictions. 

The walls surrounding the crowd were filled with markers; they were painted with light paint, not clearly visible to the naked eye, looking like some kind of subtle design element in the room, which nobody quite noticed. 

Lala walked on stage, where everyone politely clapped for someone they had never seen before.

Hello, and thanks for being here. Thanks for taking a leap of faith. We know that this looks like a big event. Maybe too big for a startup. And maybe this is why you’re here. To try and make sense of whoever would have the hubris to put together this big a show while having zero track record. That’s fair. My name is Lala Smith, and I am the CEO of Clear Eyes, a company that I co-founded with my technical partners, Jennifer Yamato, Bar Leich, Simon Tremaine, and David Blunt. Our goal is simple: it’s to revolutionise the way the planet interacts with technology. We are about to give you a glimpse of the end of the smartphone era. Please put your headsets on.

She could hear some scoffs from the crowd, even some laughs. She had expected this because the idea of an era ending is not something we accept until we are already past it. 

But as the people in the room started to put on glasses to preview the experience, the laughter came down. Lala could see what they were seeing: an entirely new layer of lifelike reality suddenly showing in front of their eyes. The walls were now surrounded by screens, and they showed a level of fidelity that even the most plugged-in experts in the room didn’t believe possible. Sure, some of them had tried Magic Leap, Google Glasses, or VR platforms with very decent headsets. But Seventh Sense had a completely immersive field of view. They could barely tell the difference between reality and what was being projected by the system. 

Lala’s voice echoed in the room, while the virtual screens started to show the company logo, rotating.

As we humans become increasingly reliant on our connection to digital technology, we lack a way to connect to it in intuitive, immediate ways as powerful as the ones we have to find our way in the physical world. Millions of years of evolution have gifted us with very well-honed senses, so beautifully designed that we give them for granted, more often than not. But now that we have taken charge of changing the world, we need to design our ways to adapt to it. Our solution is to engineer a way to expand our senses.

This is what you are experiencing right now: we call it Seventh Sense. It is a human interface for the digital world. It’s a way to give people power over their virtual lives, to be completely connected and linked to it: to be in control of it, instead of being controlled by it. It’s augmented reality specifically designed to be useful to our day-to-day life, and to the ways we interact with each other and the world around us. 

You are wearing the eyeglasses version of the system because it’s the only hygienic solution in this specific situation. But the main way people will use this is going to be with contact lenses.

Everyone in the crowd started to see their field of view slowly change. They could see some tools appearing instead of the screens: a clock; a notepad, a calendar, and a contact list.

If you like video games, you can think of this as a Heads-Up Display for the real world. A system that will allow humans to close down on their power imbalance with the computers that are shaping our lives; to take back the power to use the data we collect and share in ways that can empower us to live better and become part of a connected world we can collectively shape and improve. We want you to be able to see the invisible forces that shape our lives, our societies, our interactions. This is a chance for us to go beyond Big Brother by absorbing its power into our day-to-day life, and to share that power among ourselves. Just think about the most basic of ideas: Have you wondered how much energy this room is using? Or any room?

All of a sudden people could see the energy expenditure in the room; and see how much each outlet, light and electrical appliance was impacting to it. It was immediately clear, and easily readable.

This kind of awareness can be expanded to every aspect of life. A lot of our day-to-day life is made of percentages, numbers, odds; and data that our intuition alone is terrible at judging. With Clear Eyes, everyone will be able to supplement their intuition with a layer of digital awareness: You will be immediately able to tell if the price of a product is lower or higher than average, anywhere you are. Once presented with a choice that involves probabilities - like taking a specific route to work, or betting on something - you would immediately be able to see the odds of success for that action. Most decisions in life have consequences that can be only calculated with a range of odds. Now, that understanding will be an immediate part of everyone’s life. 

And we can go beyond that, as well.

With a click of a button, Lala allowed everyone in the room to share their heartbeat with everyone around them.

Now, this will seem a bit… too intimate. This is an option that users will be able to opt out of, of course. But we believe some of us will decide to share this, at least some of the time. By observing people’s heart rates and some other factors like sweat levels and facial expressions, we can highlight the mood of each one of the people around us; if someone you love is sad, or depressed, we can react to that - either with sympathy or by challenging them to get out of it. Think of it as an empathy booster. To allow people to connect with others. We have tried this before, and we noticed something… interesting. You might be starting to notice the same thing now.

Jen was observing the crowd from a distance, curious and a bit worried. This was a feature that they managed to add later in the process: it was her idea, and it ended up working so well that it took everyone by surprise. But she had known all along that it might have been disturbing, or too much, for some. But what they expected would happen, was happening.

The heart rate of the people in the room started to synchronise; as if everyone started to connect with everyone else’s rhythm. People, little by little, noticed this happening, and Jen could see most of them were smiling, happily, at the experience. She saw Lala outline a timeline for the release of the product, and she loved seeing how her confidence was growing now that the entire room was sold on their concept. Especially given how ambitious it is. 

One thing that we want to make sure you all understand is that we are not planning to make this system something driven by the monetisation of the experience itself. We will sell a device, and that’s the business model. We have seen too many companies abandon their original mission in pursuit of growth. We are not going to do that. We want to give people a way to make mindfulness, awareness, the experience of living in the moment and embracing life, something easier than before; we want to tailor that to every kind of brain, making people embrace their neurodiversity in ways that it would be impossible with a different system. This sounds like a lot, I’m sure. But we know it can work.