It is indeed a rarity for an independent technology thinker and innovator to emerge from a system that is preoccupied with marks, grades and percentages. One such maverick who has literally personified the reel Phunsukh Wangdu (3 Idiots) is Anirudh Sharma, winner of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Technology Review’s Indian Innovator of 2012 Award.
Sharma’s Le Chal, a haptic feedback-based shoe for the visually-impaired, will change the way the blind would be able to navigate, ridding them of walking sticks and earphones.
The 24-year-old IT graduate from Rajasthan Technical University and co-founder of Ducere Technologies has come a long way from dismantling toys in childhood to envisioning technology that would transform human lives. “My objective is to see technology from a human perspective. We are lucky to have been born with sight, sound and smell. Can those who are deprived of these also enjoy technology? I say, why not?” That is Sharma for you, who was earlier working as research consultant at Hewlett Packard Labs in the Multimodal Interactions Group.
Formative years
“I was an ardent lover of toys in my childhood. I always played with straws and plastics, breaking and building up things. The environment I grew up in made me a tinkerer,” says Sharma, whose roots are in Rajasthan and Delhi. His father, a retired professor of English at University of Delhi, was strict with his academics, which made Sharma involve quietly in his passion of designing new things. “One can imagine how it must have been. So, I would involve myself in whatever that interested me. This is where the tinkering began,” he says.
Sharma confesses that not a single mobile phone of his lasts more than four months, as he’d have meddled with each one of them.
Life as a student
Taking a keen interest in the field of human-computer interactions, Sharma comes from a formal engineering background, with a specialisation in informatics engineering.
However, he terms his student days as ‘boring’. He says, “I figured quite early that engineering was too boring. That is when I started venturing out and designing things by myself. I would make designs one after another, and then work on prototypes with help from my friends.” Sharma has coined a new term to describe himself. “I am an inter-gineer. I want to combine human interactivity with engineering. Of course, there is no such word in English,” he laughs.
As a student, Sharma was inspired by open-source innovations. As a designer, he is self-taught. “I never received any formal training in designing. I drew inspiration from the likes of Steve Jobs, and I went on learning as I designed more and more,” he says.
The only prospect that kept Sharma in college was the opportunity to participate in tech fests. Sharma was a part of Sparsh, the tech group that swept almost all the awards at various college and IT fests.
Sharma also started a Linux user group in Rajasthan along with his classmate Shreekant Bohra. Today, Sharma claims, this group is working actively among several communities in north India for the One Laptop Per Child project.
He goes on to make a statement that would roll some eyes. “I was a backbencher. Classrooms were just not for me, and I never got any great support from my professors for the designs I had created as a student,” he says.
When asked how he was able to emerge a maverick out of a marks-based education system like ours, Sharma believes that one has to be a misfit to do that. “I was clearly a misfit. Our teachers need to encourage students to work on independent projects, and grade them on what they do independently. Right now, there is no incentive for students to work on their own,” he says.
So, what was his incentive? “Early recognition of my works from outside the realm of college. I posted some of my ideas on Natural User Interface (NUI) groups, and imagine the incentive when someone from the US or Ethiopia comments on your posts and appreciates the ideas!”
The shoe with ‘eyes’
Sharma’s most critically acclaimed innovation till date are the Le Chal (take me there) shoes for the visually-impaired, a haptic feedback-based shoe embedded with intelligent circuitry that makes navigation for the blind easier. Le Chal won laurels at TechShare 2012 and won him the revered MIT TR35 Innovator of the Year Award.
However, the first simple prototype of Le Chal took only six days to finish. “Well, yes. The six days involved hard brainstorming, writing a quick Android application, removing the vibrator from my Nokia phone and fitting everything into a sample shoe just before the presentation at TechShare in Delhi,” laughs Sharma.
Explaining how Le Chal works, Sharma says: “The logic here is poke-based interactivity. The person wearing the shoe has to speak into his mobile device the destination he wishes to reach. The destination is then recorded in the shoe’s chip, which will then vibrate (or poke) the person on the right or left, depending on the turn he should take to reach the destination.”
A major consideration that Sharma had for this idea was to ensure there was no obtrusion to the person. “Voice-based aids for the visually-impaired seem like a bad idea to me. What it does is to obstruct the primary sense of hearing, which the person uses to avoid traffic, people or obstacles in the way. My idea here was to create something that did not come in the way of their hearing,” he says. “I was sitting idle, and it struck me, ‘Why not create something that would help a person navigate, and embed it with something we use daily like shoes’, and then the idea was born.”
The important aspect here is Sharma’s approach to technology. “I want to humanise technology. I mean, technology should adapt to us. Humans should not adapt to technology. Why can’t a blind person enjoy technology?” asks Sharma.
For him, Le Chal fills a critical gap that was left empty for years. “In my view, there has not been a significant innovation for the blind since Braille and walking stick — almost 200 years ago!”
The future as an entrepreneur
Sharma is not the same person that he was back in college. His passion to help people lead better lives with technology has only increased with time, resulting in the birth of Ducere Technologies. Ducere means ‘to lead’ in Latin.
To aid Sharma, his friend Krispian (Kris) Lawrence has joined the bandwagon. “The initial idea of Le Chal did not involve any business prospects at all. Now, however, I feel it is time to take Le Chal out of its box. At Ducere, we are currently improvising on the prototype of Le Chal,” says Sharma.
Lawrence, who was working as an attorney in the US, has come back to India. “I spent a lot of time on prosecution of patent applications. I came back here to meet people like Sharma and help their ideas to foster out of the laboratory. My role in Ducere will be to strategise and also build an intellectual property portfolio, as we believe that Le Chal’s applications are limitless,” says Kris.
If all goes well, then the world will see a fully working prototype of Le Chal in three-four months’ time. “Even if one person is benefitted by our product, then it’d be worth all this effort. In future, Ducere will focus on addressing newer issues of impairment,” says Sharma
bharath@newindianexpress.com