Navigation through touch: the haptic tech startup mapping an accessible future | Kevin Yoo

KY: 00:00

There's a nice yacht design that makes people like ten percent happier. And there is impactful humanitarian design that would literally one hundred and eighty degrees change someone's life. And this is what we're doing.

TS: 00:15

Welcome to Made For Us, the show where we explore how intentional design can help build a world that works better for everyone. I'm your host, Tosin Sulaiman. On the final day of the Twenty Twenty Four Paralympic Games in Paris, Spanish marathon runner Elena Congost was disqualified after her race took an unexpected turn. Congost, who's visually impaired, briefly let go of the tether that connected her to her guide, just two metres from the finish line, as she tried to keep him from stumbling.

Many blind and visually impaired runners compete with sighted guides, and it's common to see them running side by side, connected by a short tether. At the Paralympics, the rules are clear, the athlete and the guide must remain tethered until they cross the finish line. Letting go cost Congost the bronze medal and about thirty-three thousand dollars in prize money.

And she wasn't alone. In another race at the same games, Australian runner Jarryd Clifford was also disqualified and stripped of a bronze medal for dropping his tether moments before the finish.

But what if there were a way to avoid these kinds of frustrations, both in sport and in everyday life? A way for blind athletes to run untethered and for blind and visually impaired people to move through the wild with greater independence? It's a question that's occupied my guest, Kevin Yoo, the founder of Haptic, for the past decade.

Kevin and his team built HapticNav, a navigation app, and the Wayband, a wearable device, that use vibrations to guide people to their destination. Imagine not having to rely on visual or audio cues. You only need your sense of touch.

TS: 01:57

In Twenty Seventeen, the technology enabled British runner Simon Wheatcroft to become the first person who's blind to run in the New York City Marathon unassisted. And Kevin believes it could help many more athletes like Simon.

KY: 02:10

In the future, we want to make it so that blind runners can run alone on the tracks and they can show their full potential, not the potential of their guide.

TS: 02:20

In this episode, we'll look at Haptic technology's own potential and ask whether this could be the future of navigation for all of us. And next week in the season finale, we'll continue the conversation with Kevin's friend Marcus Engel, the man who inspired him to start Haptic. Make sure you don't miss it. Now here's my conversation with Kevin.

KY: 02:44

My name is Kevin Yoo. I am the CEO and founder of Haptic. At Haptic, we are creating a universal language through touch. So Haptic technology has been relatively rudimentary for many generations. It's almost kind of been confined into notifications, which has been odd to me personally. So when I started developing this technology about 10 years ago, I realized that there was a lot of potential.

It was kind of almost untapped technology that could use a lot of investment and R&D and innovation. So I took, for example, navigation as the main challenge due to my friend becoming blind from a car accident and going through a year of rehabilitation, telling me a lot about the challenges around navigating without sight. It was very, really hard to feel you had independence and freedom when you couldn't just look at a map and start going to places for the first time ever.

And that stress and anxiety of feeling lost was very prominent. So I started to develop this technology with my friend in order to overcome that barrier, really. It's an information barrier. A universal language is a very important terminology that I like to use because, you know, we have languages, we have ways of saying a lot of different information. But if you tap somebody in the shoulder or give somebody a hug, that's relatively the same across the board of old cultures. So I want to create something like that for haptic technology that really feels natural. You take it, you feel it, and immediately you know exactly what it's telling you.

TS: 04:25

And I guess most of us who own a smartphone use it for navigation, but as you've said, that communication is entirely through sites and through audition. So that's essentially what you're trying to change.

KY: 04:38

That's correct. That's one of the major challenges that we're tackling. And navigation, because it's a tool, right? We should all, as humans in the world, have the capability to navigate freely and independently. So if some segments of the population is excluded from that, it felt very odd to me. So yes, the first tool base that we're creating, the foundation really is navigation through touch. And our application HapticNav does exactly that.

TS: 05:07

You talked about how the sense of touch has been underutilized in tech products and historically hasn't been invested into. Curious to get your thoughts on why that is.

KY: 05:17

So back in the day before wearables came out, I was inventing this, which is called the Wayband. So the first product that I invented, it was before the Fitbit, the Pebbles, the Apple Watch. It was really one of the first OGs of wearable tech. And that's kind of where haptic technology really came to, right? Like smartphones, of course, we have it. And again, it's based on notifications only. And even with Razer and all the other flip phones, we did have haptics, right? But again, it was just a tap. People didn't really invest into it as much as the screen because the touch base screen came out. You know, there's a lot of innovation that really blossomed the TV era, the iPad era, the smartphones. And through that, think people just gravitated towards getting the highest retina display, you know, really just putting a lot of emphasis on this category of optic.

But with touch, there definitely lacked a lot of education and books and religious information, data points on how we can control and adapt to new haptic experiences because we were not used to it. People were not thinking about touch as a communication channel that we could really emphasize and work on. And because we can't turn it off, I think that's also the main thing. We cannot turn off touch and it's also still the biggest organ in our body, technically speaking, it should be a lot of research and a lot of incredible technology that's all over our body that can give us information without having to be distracted up here. But we were just not adapted to it as humans, is my opinion.

And so when I met with the author of the book, Touch, actually, we spoke a lot on this. He's a professor in Johns Hopkins, done an incredible amount of research, really pushing the frontier of haptics in a different way, in a philosophical way. And one of the things that he stated was, if I were to ask you what is your most important sense on your body. People will just close their eyes and immediately imagine a life without it and say, yeah, it's definitely going to be my sight. And touch will become almost like a hidden priority for them. But in reality, if you don't have the sense of touch, most likely you will die. You will never feel what's going on. You won't feel when you're injured, et cetera. Like you will just live a very numb life and then eventually you will have a very short span of life.

Without sight, you have full capacity to really enjoy life and fulfillment through other senses and touch really. So braille, et cetera, a lot of things come back down to touch. So that's how I got to learn a lot about the importance of touch. And because we don't live with the absence of it and we can't actually turn it off, people don't see the value in it. And that's, think the differentiation between the senses up in our head, compares to the senses as literally all over our body. So the development of it, I believe is going to really dramatically go up as the bandwidth on our eyes and ears become more and more overwhelmed, especially with VR AR systems. Let's say you have an AR glass in the future. It's not going to be the way that we want to live our lives constantly distracted and bombarded. I believe we will feel the information. We'll choose what we want and then have it displayed. And then from there we will react.

TS: 08:35

Right. That's really fascinating. And so let's talk in practice about how the product works from the perspective of a user. So someone can download your app. How would they use it to get from A to B? Is it kind of like Google Maps, but instead of visual and audio cues, they’re guided by the sense of touch.

KY: 08:52

That's exactly right. So the way that I love to explain it is it's like a compass on your skin. It's free on the app store and I want to keep it free forever due to the fact that it's like a tool, right? Google Maps is free. Apple Maps is free. It's a tool for humanity. So HapticNav has been an app I've been developing for many, years. So it's kind of like Google Maps. It's just a navigation tool. But when you select the location or pin, for example, my phone will begin to vibrate automatically.

And so my phone is vibrating very, very hard at this moment at the opposite of where I'm supposed to go. And as I rotate towards the direction, like a compass, it becomes weaker and weaker, and then it will gently stop. And now it's giving me a gentle tap telling me that I'm going the right direction. So this vibration that gives you orientation is the main IP and technology that I was able to really hone in on almost a decade ago. And it was very new. Nobody really understood navigation through touch. I said that, people would imagine buzz, buzz, buzz for left turn, buzz, buzz for right turn. But this is a very intuitive kind of hot and cold system that allows you to feel very gradually exactly the orientation that you need to face, which is very useful for, let's say, finding a vehicle. If you're trying to find a ride sharing company like Uber and Lyft and Curb, now the car is arriving, you know exactly where the car is.

And for people that are sight impaired, they can't look at the car, know the color of the car, and or look at the license plate. It's not just a nice to have becomes a lifesaver. And for people that are sighted that are going to wrong cars and or having a hard time finding them or dangerous places, they can now use haptics to do that as well. So, you know, of course, for general navigation, it's a game changer. so that's been, you know, literally providing independence and freedom for people that have not had it through Google Maps and Apple Maps and for new companies that are emerging like ride sharing services and also public transportation, also event spaces. We can adapt HapticNav to unlock navigation for everyone.

TS: 11:05

And in terms of how the technology knows where you're going and how to get you there, from what I understand, underlying all this is what you describe as the haptic corridor. Can you sort of explain in quite simple terms what that is, how that helps to get you to your destination?

KY: 11:22

So haptic corridor is also term that we used a lot during our endeavor at the New York City Marathon. And so as we had professional blind runners run in the marathon, like New York City, we had them experience our technology haptic naps the first time. And we said, what do you feel? How would you describe this to somebody who is blind and that would close their eyes and imagine and usually just kind of walk a path for a couple of miles even.

It was that it felt like they were in a virtual corridor where you are on the right path, you know, and as soon as you go off the pathway, will feel this virtual wall and they will get stronger and stronger and vibration as you deviate off the path.

SW: 12:08

The way the Wayband works is it creates a virtual corridor just slightly wider than the human by plotting the route in using GPS coordinates and machine learning and then through haptic feedback ensures you always stay within this virtual corridor.

TS: 12:26

That's Simon Wheatcroft, the marathon runner, in an interview with the Discovery Channel.

SW: 12:31

The way you know you're actually in the corridor is you get no feedback. If you know you get no haptic vibrations that means you're going in the right direction, everything's fine. As soon as you step out of the corridor you then get a little haptic notification to say, it's gone wrong, step back into the corridor.

TS: 12:55

So if I'm using it, I can use my phone or I can also use the way band or I can use it via an Apple watch.

KY: 13:03

All of the above. So you can use Epic Nav with Android, iOS, Apple Watch. Now officially we're testing with Pixel Watches and our Wave End as well. So of course I'm to be very biased, but Epic's on our devices the best because we designed around that as the core. However, we make sure to partner with third party companies that obviously are the market dominators like Apple and Google. And so we get to more or less be a software company at this moment, license our technology, and make sure that Google Maps, Apple Maps, Uber, et cetera, get to really adapt it in all of their devices.

TS

And you referred to the New York City Marathon and that was something that I wanted to talk a little bit about. So could you tell us about that event?

KY: 13:44

Yes, that's one of our greatest achievement just because it takes a lot of sometimes crazy people to get together to say, Hey, this sounds absolutely insane. Let's do it. So that was one of those moments in Twenty seventeen. We just had our article launched on tech crunch and it was the first time the world heard about happy navigation and what we do. And Simon is the blind marathon runner. He was working with IBM at the time, doing an ultra marathon run in the desert using this audio sensor.

So it would kind of do the same thing, but it would beep instead of vibrational feedback. So the beeping noise, obviously you can imagine gets annoying, especially when you're running and you're kind of trying to meditate, you're in your head and you hear this beeping noise to give you small information about, you know, tracks and left and right. So he stopped the race midway. He said, I can't do this anymore.

He reached out to us through TechCrunch and said, Hey, I think that this is the solution. This is a minimal communication with technology I have never felt before. And I would love to use your tech to run the New York City Marathon. What do you think? And we were just like thumbs up. Hey, I just made this thing. It just gets you around the corner of the building, but let's do this. We had everything. You know, we had the tech. We finally had somebody that was ambitious enough and the event, the New York City Marathon, one of the biggest, I think it is the biggest marathon probably in the world.

So as I also ran the marathon myself, I had to make sure the technology was all up to par until the very last moment. lot of sleepless nights, a lot of training. I'm not necessarily a runner, I'm more of a tennis player. You have to do what you have to do. Of course there were challenges. It was tough. We thought we did all the testing necessary for the marathon day to ensure that nothing could go wrong. But of course you haven't turned all the stones.

Of course, I'm just literally tweaking things as we're running. Like it was, it was a hell of crazy, but overall we did it. And yeah, that's how we made history.

TS: 16:03

So typically blind runners would run with a guide if they were running a marathon and sometimes they'd be tethered to a guide physically. But the goal of this marathon was for Simon to run unaided.

KY: 16:16

That's correct. Yes. So as we approached the marathon, I was also running with Achilles International. So I learned a lot about how blind runners compete in Paralympics and run and train. And yes, they're literally tethered to a small little rope on their fingers with a sighted runner. So if I was blind and I was running with a sighted runner, literally we have to run in synchronization together. So that pairing is very, very important.

KY: 16:46

And the speed in which you run is also really, really important. So you rely heavily on the guide, not only for navigation guidance, but on speed and athletic abilities and everything. So it's a lot of pressure. The rope is not only kind of a hindrance, but it's also kind of a, it's just kind of sucks, right? You don't want to be tethered to anybody when you're trying to run. You don't want to be waiting for a guide. If you want to just train for a couple of hours.

So really in generally like we wanted to accomplish the mission of really freeing people, right? Of training, of competing and the future we want to make it so that blind runners can run alone on the tracks and they can show their full potential, not the potential of their guide.

TS: 17:34

And you said that this marathon was also your first marathon. And I'm just curious to know what that was like for you, what was going through your mind that whole time and have you run a marathon since?

KY: 17:45

Yeah, first and last, I'm kidding. I think I definitely would love to do another marathon, but my experience was so altered because of the stress they came with developing a technology beforehand. And it wasn't just a way band. It was also a chest strap that was doing proximity sensor detection that was also outputting through a haptic. So Simon had both of these technologies on in order to avoid obstacles and also to understand navigation information.

Again, like the testing process and potential failures were just looming in my head and I didn't get a lot of rest, which again, kind of need if you're going to run like 26.2 miles. But in the end, it was phenomenal because I did train. Luckily, I was capable to do this and I knew that if I didn't go run with him, at least like behind him, he was obviously tracking forward all on his own. He was just using the tech fully free and just zooming through. I was like, Simon, you got to, you gotta wait for me because I don't know what's going to happen after the half point. So, but I was literally running behind him. He was guiding me practically and he was just like, yeah, this is working. So I felt amazing at the beginning for Simon, for myself, for the company, for humanity. And at the end of it, you just, you just get carried by the, I don't know, just by the noise of the audience.

TS: 19:11

That's an amazing story. It sounds like you created this very bespoke solution for one user essentially, but that must have informed how you went on to develop the product further. Can you talk about what changed after that? What impact that event had on your company?

KY: 19:27

It's interesting to have all the news articles pretty much like cover you because it works, right? And we didn't pay for a single thing. It was just like Apple sponsorship, right? Like Forbes, like, you know, discovery and the Ted talk came after that and then so on and so forth. So it definitely planted the flag on who we were, on what we were doing, our mission and what haptic was. So what it morphed into was Haptic became a universal language that truly can change the lives of everybody in the planet, not just for blind and visually impaired, for everybody. And that was really important to me. And because I started it with this kind of more personalized mission, I knew the core kind of true north I could go towards.

And, you know, I got offers from different companies, the military, et cetera. And eventually, all of them, I had to come back and say, hey, listen, this is my mission. This is the goal of the company. And if you cannot fit into this right now, I don't think it's the right fit. So sticking to that definitely was a challenge, but also at the same time built the longer term mission and the team that also came together from that was more powerful. You know, we, we all understood that this is not a fast, you know, cash cow. This is not a fast exit strategy. So we really, really cared about this deeply. And yeah, the press release and such really got us the first major investments, got us to the National Science Foundation grant, it legitimized everything that we've been working on.

The fact, you know, new technology is taken even now more than ever with a big grain of salt. New app comes out every like five seconds or something, probably. And there is just so much competition in the marketplace. So the way that we stuck to it, it's been almost a decade. And I like to say this because it's kind of funny. When I see a skateboarder in the park and this, you know, person does a kick flip or a huge jump, everybody's around and they're like, that's nice. But if you really look at it, you're going to think to yourself like that person practiced that for probably like 10 years to perform perfectly. And I feel like that's what we're doing now. took us a long time to get here, but the entrepreneurs kick flip is truly like, you know, surviving and thriving and really sticking to the mission. That's our performance. So I guess like what it did was it just made everything concrete, gave us a solid ground to stand on. And then for us to really work with the big companies and say, hey, look, we're not just doing this for the press of the marathon, et cetera, but we're doing this to change the world. And we just happened to have made history.

TS: 22:09

Let's talk some more about that mission and your initial journey to becoming an entrepreneur. Because I remember hearing a podcast where you talked about your original ambition, which was to be an artist. I think you also worked as a furniture designer. So how did you come to the conclusion that haptic technology was going to change the world?

KY: 22:30

Yeah, that's an interesting path, right? I didn't just think of haptic technology as a child and say, Hey, mom, dad, this is what I want to do. So I grew up going to art at a young age when I was like five, six, I started oil painting, both, both my aunts are artists. So I had a lot of creative genes, I guess. And over time, as I grew up, I got into sports and got into tennis and engineering. So I started to diversify a lot of my interests, but stuck to art as my core. And I think that that did train me to understand the eye and the perspective, not just for, let's say, financial maximum and for advancement of technology, you know, just something a little bit more unique where I cared about what was important to me. Why do I like this? Believing that something that I'm creating was had importance to me and value. I was enough for me to continue pursuing and creating it. And sometimes it's hard, you know, you hate that painting in a one second, you love it the second later.

And you just have to keep fighting yourself to believe that it's like worthwhile, you know, keep going. So I think that trained myself to have that base kind of core value on what I believed to be was, you know, valuable for me. And, you know, that was all that mattered. And then over time, I realized that impact and universal design and so on was not where it should have been, where it could have been. Because once you have a friend, let's say, you know, who is blind, you get to learn a lot, right?

KY: 23:59

And that's exactly what happened. And he identified literally all the little crevices of non-accessible ways the world has constructed itself. So the population of blind and vision care really, really went unseen for many, many, many generations as tech evolved. And so I invited him to my college. I was already doing prosthetics. had interest in furniture. Yes, I had a furniture company where I wanted to make sustainability the main forefront.

So main things I focused really on and sustainability and impact. Cause I wanted to do some good for the world. My father was a philanthropy man and he taught me early on that if I'm not doing this for people with blindness, when I started my innovation that I would be practically wasting my life. And I took that to heart and I told that to my co-founders and my employees at the time and said, Hey guys listen, this is the mission for a reason. If we don't do this for this, we're not going to be making really any impact. There's a nice to have, nice yacht design that makes people like ten percent happier. And there is impactful humanitarian design that would literally one hundred and eighty degrees change someone's life. And this is what we're doing. And yeah, that's how it came to be.

So furniture and all that art stuff, I think was in general, more or less a self-practice to believe in something and stick to it.

TS: 25:20

So you talked about your friend and how that sort of led you on this journey. And I remember hearing that you also did some research of your own, of literally putting yourself in the shoes of someone who's blind for a few days. Can you talk a bit about that experience and what you learned?

KY: 25:37

This was kind of a turning point, I think, in my design thinking, because I had a mentor throughout college. name is Henry Yu. People thought he was my dad because we the same last name, but he was like my college dad, I guess. And he was a phenomenal designer, incredible influencer in my life. And one of the things that he always mentioned is you must understand fully who you're designing for. And that's the major lesson I think that I wanted to get from industrial design and one of those things that Marcus brought into my attention, who's my friend that is blind, was you can't put a blindfold on and say that you know what it's like to be blind. Like how you can't just put a bra on and say, you know what it's like to be a woman and vice versa. So when I got into it, I just got into it. I was actually living in West Village at the time. I was in the center of the city.

Right after college, was fully getting into my company, into structure and kind of understanding what I was going to build. Then I started testing my own product on a daily basis. It was really janky, like pretty terrible. If I bought this, I would be leaving a terrible review, right? So I was the one using it and I needed to make it better. And I realized that I can't just close my eyes for the whole day. It was impossible. I would just open my eyes.

It's just natural human nature for me to just do that. So I had to at first wear a blindfold and put like sunglasses on and go outside. had a lot of canes because I used to prototype with a lot of white canes back in the day because I created proximity and vibration tools on it. And that was like my first prototype into navigation through haptics. So I had a lot of canes that I was prototyping with. I used them to get around safely. And I just first walked around my general vicinity to the park, Washington Square Park, around the circle, back around to the house, and even indoors, I would keep the blindfold on, do the cooking, going to the bathroom, everything. And of course, the first couple of days, again, just impossible, right? I would be, you know, cheating at every given couple of minutes. But after the days passed, I guess my adaption got better and I was able to withstand longer time without having to open my eyes.

And eventually, by the first week has passed, I was able to close my eyes fully, go outside, do majority of the things entirely without seeing, come back and so on. Even when I met with my friends, my co-founders and people in the city, I would keep my eyes closed and or have like, you know, sunglasses that were completely blocked off. And this way I was like living the full life of it. And obviously people thought it was weird.

KY: 28:27

The first days I realized the way people are looking at me is completely different, right? It's like immediately you're showcasing this giant cane and the connotation of your presence change. And that was also the main thing I wanted to mention is the reason why our device was adapted very heavily by the blind organizations was that it was discreet and it was universally used like a cell phone. People love to feel like they don't have an accessibility tool designed for their disability.

People want to feel like they're just using the same thing that everybody else is using. So that's the part of universal language or touch that I think really resonates with the community and also with everybody in the world. And those are the common grounds that I want to create. Like, hey, we can all use this technology exactly the same as every single person on the planet, a child, adult, blindsided, et cetera. And that's really important to us.

So with that said, yes, it was two weeks of immense learning, but the second week I was a different person really. And you click onto these new senses throughout your body every single day, you go by without sight. And that was really fascinating for me. That was when I knew haptic language could be generated if we just put a little bit of effort into it and information to touch you has so much room to grow. So that was my learning curve.

TS: 29:50

That must have been quite scary as well at times, especially at the beginning to do something like that.

KY: 29:57

So scary. Literally, it gave me anxiety and stress like I've never had before. I didn't even know I had anxiety until I started doing that. And here's the main thing that I used to talk about on panels and stuff. There was a moment, my friend, he drove me to the spot. He was gonna pick up his wife. He left me by the car. I held the car with my right hand and the cane in the other. this was like my, maybe my fifth day, sixth day, I collapsed at the cane, put it on the car and I decided how do I actually understand orientation? Like how good am I if I were to just let go of this car, just walk a few steps and can I come back to this car? So I kind of tested myself this moment and it was dark, it was nighttime, we were in a neighborhood, I didn't know where we were. I started walking and then I turned around and I started to reorient towards the car and then I started walking again.

And my friend literally found me in like the forest, going into the forest of the parking lot. And he's like, what the hell are you doing, man? And I was like, and I started to panic. I was going to start yelling his name and I felt lost. And immediately like that, in a couple of seconds, I felt from comfortable, stabilized to complete panic, where I was like, I'm going to start yelling to say, help, where am I? This is like the reality of it. understanding fear, I think was definitely the beginning of

truly getting it and then to feel empathy that was deeper than how others feel. You get to design for it better and be a part of their lives and be part of the community. So it's been ten years of this and that's why, you know, literally we've partnered with almost every single blind organization in the U.S. Also, I've started to go to other countries. I was just in Kenya and Ghana and we provide hundreds of smartphones to them through Google and, you know, we provide our technology and say, hey,

First time ever, haptic navigation, give it a try if you ever feel lost and it becomes a safety thing first, but then it becomes a confidence thing and then it becomes an independence thing and then it becomes a freedom thing. So it really covers the basis of a lot of that spectrum that I also felt going through the two weeks.

TS: 32:12

And I'm curious when you told your friend Marcus that you had done this for yourself, what was his reaction?

KY: 32:21

When I first told this, didn't say to Marcus, I told it to my co-founder. And he was like, dude, that's so rude. The reaction was like, that's so, I don't know, inconsiderate, X, Y, Z. The reaction was not what I expected, right? And we were all designers. So some designers have a different method, of course, and sometimes living it is just one way of doing it, but instead of research. So one person may say, I want to research it for years and years. Another person may say, just live it. You're just going through the process as humans, and we want to understand each other as humans, and we need to go through the process as raw and real as possible. And I think that's the best way that we can feel it.

TS: 33:04

And so when you thought about solving this problem and actually building a business around it, how convinced were you that the market was big enough? But I'm curious how you thought about the business side of things.

KY: 33:18

Yeah. And that is also the biggest challenge of today, right? I'm still a startup. Ten years ago, nobody cared about accessibility. And even now, to push policy, make, you know, regulations and mandates that really make things different in the world, it's still the challenge that we are going through. So, you know, the way that it has been 10 years ago, I was so optimistic to be like, I'm going to make the best map app in the world, which I still believe it is, and make it ready for everyone and dominate Google Maps. But they have your data. They have all this stuff. They have like years and years of evolution with information that I'm not going to be able to invest into.

So I'm adapting into the scene of saying, okay, I've created a tool. I can be easily plug and play into every single map app and ride sharing, indoor navigation, finding gates at airports, finding whatever you want, your friends and family and kids at Disneyland. It just provides that experience that's magic but at the same time, very inclusive. And I just want to be able to put that in the pipeline and have it be scalable.

TS: 33:04

And so just to talk about other potential use cases. So I know that you're targeting, first of all, people who are blind and visually impaired, but this could also benefit a much larger population. So is that the ambition that this becomes a sort of more of a mass market product and what are some of the other potential use cases?

KY: 34:41

That's a hundred percent correct. I'll give an example, specific one where, for example, Siri was invented for blind or visually impaired. And now literally all of us have it on our iPhones and Google has their own. so I know AI is improving it, XYZ, XYZ. So that's kind of definitely the direction that I'm taking Haptic and also Haptic navigation. I do wish to provide this service to every single company in the world.

To do that, we do need to keep control and to make sure that we can license to every single company in the world. So to do that also, we cannot sell to one company or the other. So yes, this is about scale. This is about normalizing and standardizing a new way of getting around and understanding information generally through vibrations and through other touch methods. So yeah, that's our mission.

TS: 35:32

As you look back over the last ten years or so, how has your definition of design evolved?

KY: 35:40

You know, we can do anything as humans. have technology now we have 3D printing. have methods of creation that have evolved so rapidly. So with this mentality, choosing and focusing and doing it for the right mission. And these kinds of things become harder. So I believe that, you know, in my life, the majority of my life now I have dedicated to innovating haptic technology, have done it for a reason and mission that has been very, I feel like it just makes sense as designers to design and iterate that progresses us forward, not towards more waste, not towards more pollution and everything else and addiction, right? A lot of designers are doing stuff based on data of addiction, social media, and just churning people in for the money and for the advertisement. But really there's another component to design that I really respect and that's the category I really want to stick to and educate people on.

TS: 36:41

Well, Kevin, it's been great having you. Thank you so much for your time. It's been such a fascinating conversation.

KY: 36:47

Really grateful that we got to finally connect and do this podcast together. So thank you so much for doing this. Just really grateful for you.

TS: 36:56

That was Kevin Yoo, CEO and founder of Haptic. I've included links in the show notes if you'd to learn more.

Coming up next week…

ME: 37:04

Kevin invited me back to New York to try out a product that he and some other designers had created. You could see the promise of this device that I was holding in my hands. And I was a little bit flabbergasted by the fact that maybe there's going to be a new device out there that's not GPS, that is not a white cane, and that is not a guide dog that could help blind people get around.

TS: 37:32

Be sure to tune in for the final episode of season two where Marcus Engel shares his story. I'm Tosin Sulaiman. Thanks for joining me on Made For Us.