Meghan Athavale, LUMO Interactive

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but  there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point. A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are  things like fun, engaging games. The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage. The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD. I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?  Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture. Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.  When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are. So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?  Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.  It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays. So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.  So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend