Team
We are a team of designers, engineers, innovators and medical doctors based in London, UK and New York City, USA.Leadership
Charles Leclercq has a background in video games, from 2009 to 2014 he worked for Ubisoft as a designer and creative manager on franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Tintin and Prince of Persia and worked in R&D on early prototypes of Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo WiiU.
Charles found video games interesting because they use storytelling techniques combined with visuals and audio language constructs that make gamers complete complex tasks while having fun and being immersed in a narrative. Great games always make use of new technologies in intuitive and user-friendly ways. What if those methodologies were used to solve real-life problems?
With this question in mind, CL attended the Innovation Design Engineering 2 years program at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London in order to collaborate with people from different backgrounds and spur innovation. At the end of the program he founded Kodama, an 3D/ XR-mouse that empowered anyone to create in 3D by freely manipulating 3D objects as if they were real. The interface was based on a magnetic field technology, CL patented. He then joined the Future Experience Technology team at the BBC R&D to lead the AR as a public service team which explored the potential of AR. During the Covid-19 lockdown, the team created an AR version of the famous Glastonbury Festival, where users could place virtual stages in their homes, gardens or parks and discover new artists by walking around their own curated space, as one would approach a stage, the music from other stages would fade away as the main stage would become louder. This experience highlighted the potential of creating audio experiences combined with GPS and spatial data, aka Audio Augmented Reality.
As such CL joined the former Horus Sight startup and rebooted the company into ARx: augmenting reality with meaningful audio for blind and low vision.
