By: Lewis Dvorkin, Entrepreneur in Residence
My wife has many great sayings, none more true than this: “There are no accidents in life, only head-on collisions.” That is, some things come flying right at you because they’re meant to be — and you can’t get out of the way.
It happened to me last week, though it wasn’t immediately clear. At the kick-off session for CSUN’s 4th Annual Bull Ring New Venture Competition, I was corralled by two energetic attendees. One, a young computer programmer, said: “I build cool stuff (yes, he used a more descriptive phrase than that). You gotta see it.” Really, I replied. Why? “Just come to Lilac Hall,” he answered with a smile.
So, I did, and wham! It was the best kind of head-on collision.
First, let me tell you a bit about 25-year-old Danny Matook. His story of growing up without is not uncommon at CSUN, though his details are a bit unique. His mother, he told me, decided to leave Chicago for Los Angeles when she was only 14. She started out at McDonald’s, worked her way into a TV game show job, then the movie business. She had Danny and ended up raising him on her own. From the ages of 5 to 14, they were on the move. One year, it was LA. The next, Chicago. Then back to LA… and so on and so on, always living with a relative. “We never wanted to wear out our welcome,” Danny said.
Today, he’s involved with this cool program housed in Lilac Hall, a collaborative research lab focused on “health equity.” What’s that, I asked? Basically, it means finding ways to resolve the disparities that negatively impact various socioeconomic groups as they navigate our medical industry complex. Lilac is part of a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health for BUILD PODER. Okay, here comes a mouthful. It stands for Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity Promoting Opportunities for Diversity in Education and Research.
What I was lured into seeing quickly hit home. My wife’s 92-year-old mother, like so many her age, suffers from some form of dementia. This young man, who taught himself to code, is part of a development team building augmented reality games on Magic Leap to provide the elderly with what he calls “positive moments.”
That’s when he handed me a Magic Leap headset and its CPU on a shoulder strap. I started to “play” a game his team is developing called Phonado (as in Sharknado). Did you ever see Minority Report with Tom Cruise or Disclosure with Michael Douglas? Both were waving their hands or gesturing arms to move, stack or shelve virtual photos and files. Now you have an idea what Phonado is all about.
In Phonado, more than 100 photos of an elderly woman’s life were loaded into the game, along with her favorite music. The woman could move the photos around, enlarge them or reposition them with the simple movement of her fist. In other words, her life in photos was floating through the headset before her eyes to enjoy. I watched a video of her positive emotional reaction to the images.
Dementia patients, Danny said, can spiral upwards or downwards with positive or negative moments in their lives. That struck a deep chord with me. My wife and I got my mother-in-law something much more low-tech: a digital wooden music box loaded with big band tunes of her era. She just needed to lift the lid to start the music. The joy she got using it was heart warming.
I asked Danny about the business model. After all, Magic Leaps are pricey items. They are, he answered, but healthcare facilities can afford them. True, I said. Plus, I told him, my generation is quite willing to cough up some dollars to make our parents’ last days more peaceful.
His team has a lot more work to do — and many other ideas for augmented reality games, including one with an Axolotl, a Mexican salamander, acting as kind of physical therapist. I encouraged Danny to stick with the Bull Ring competition to help hone the team’s business thinking. Who knows, it could be one of life’s great head-on collisions for him.