What’s your background?
I learned my craft of creative thinking and innovation while at university in the 90s, embracing entrepreneurship to practice what I was learning and paying my way living in central London. Being fascinated by technology and the cultural changes that were all around us during that time, I took the opportunity to explore countries like Japan, America and Australia to see first-hand what was out there. After a stint in Northern India for 7 months I returned to London and applied my knowledge to creating a new type of what I call micro-architecture in the Orrb product. The concept was to bring a sense of peace, immersion and a calm clarity to people working in the busy corporate environments where technology had become all-pervasive – and privacy a thing of the past.
Explain your innovation in a couple of sentences
Orrb is an ergonomically designed space where you feel a deep sense of belonging, creating a lived experience with surround sound where you feel like you're inside the music, film or wellness-centred experience.
As an easy-to-deploy product, Orrb can be located within the workplace to offer bespoke, ongoing wellness and performance training support for employees. Carefully designed to provide a safe, private and nurturing space, Orrb provides an accessible, non-stigmatized space for reducing stress and enabling the employee to contribute fully to the long term sustainability of the organization.
What was your ‘penny drop’ moment?
I was presenting the Orrb at the Sightsonic festival in York for the first time and I wasn't really sure how people would respond to it. I had a few film and music pieces created by artists and the penny-drop moment was how they reacted to experiencing their own work inside the Orrb. Jumping out, the director excitedly told me how he'd seen things in his own short film he never even noticed before and the sound artist had red puffy eyes where her work had brought her to tears.
What’s been your biggest challenge with Orrb so far?
Timing. Orrb was first prototyped in the early 2000s and only now is the world ready for a wellness-enhanced entertainment platform designed to deliver Experience-as-a-Service.
Please share one or two highlights of your journey with us (i.e. breakthrough moments)
The first breakthrough moment was having Orrb feature in a Disney movie, which actually resulted in the second breakthrough moment of a conversation with McLaren of F1 and a subsequent engineering partnership with Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso inside my Orrb.
How are you working/do you want to work with corporates?
I'm currently working on several collaboration partnerships with global HealthTech and media organizations in the US. I see collaboration as the way forward because Orrb as an experience platform can bring together both hardware and rich media experiences into the same space.
What’s next on your roadmap?
I'm focused mainly on the US right now, proving the experiential impact potential of Orrb on the senses as we look to build the first full-scale Orrb - a circular corn-on-the-cob-like tower where 100 Orrbs allow people to embrace the experience economy that's surpassing millennials’ interest in owning possessions.
