Viva Technology is one of Europe's biggest tech shows. It happens every year in Paris, France. This year, biped was invited by the organizers. It was an amazing opportunity for us to showcase the latest version of biped. We also took the chance to announce the opening of our pre-orders.‍

One year after joining Digital Health Hub in Epalinges and going through its Vanguard Accelerator Program, biped.ai becomes the 7th awardee of the Biopôle Startup Fund. The support from Biopôle Startup Fund has a lot of meaning for us and for our involvement in the HealthTech ecosystem of Lausanne. It will help us support operational costs and ship of device on the market before the end of 2022.

Mael Fabien, CEO of biped, was recently featured in the famous Mosen at Large podcast by Jonathan Mosen. If you are not familiar with this podcast, it covers the cutting edge of the rapidly changing technology world from a blindness perspective, and makes sense of it all. It also looks at everything through a blindness lens, including health, self-improvement, news, politics, history, leadership, music, and more.

Our team is happy to launch Switzerland’s first Applied Computer Vision (ACV). The meetup will explore several aspects of computer vision and feature team members of biped as well as experts, researchers professionals, or students in the field. These are the topics that we will approach in the ACV meetup:

biped started as a hackathon project while Mael, now CEO of biped, was doing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, in Switzerland. He met Bruno, now CTO of biped, during the hackathon and they started to work on a common vision: bringing autonomous driving technologies at the pedestrian level, to guide blind and visually impaired people in unknown environments. Since then, Mael and Bruno have been expanding the team and working on some of the most exciting technologies of the 21st century. In this article, Mael and Bruno highlight their backgrounds, as well as the team members who joined them.

Sounds are probably the most important information for blind users when they navigate. Numerous research papers have shown in the past that blind and visually impaired people become exceptionally good at identifying the location of the source of a sound around them. So why would someone in their right mind play sounds in a blind person’s ears?

As biped plays 3D sounds to warn you about the most important elements, the key question remains to know how to filter the most relevant information. And to be honest, this is not straightforward, for multiple reasons: every user is different and has different thresholds that they consider as an overload every user has different residual vision and wants different warnings, what matters usually depends on the situation, and every situation is different.

For decades, companies have used ultrasounds or laser sensors. These sensors have been mounted on a wristband, on a necklace, on glasses, on a white cane, on shoes…Innovation cannot come from the way one wears these sensors. Limits have been reached long ago. Whether you try to group a couple of sensors together, work on the feedback or else, there is simply nothing that will allow you to produce a good understanding of your surroundings.

biped introduced its smart harness for blind and visually impaired people, at VivaTech 2022, in Paris, in June. A world premiere for this commercial version. Pre-orders are now available!biped is a smart harness, worn on the shoulders, bringing autonomous driving features to humans. biped mirrors the way autonomous vehicles work. It allows end-users to avoid obstacles, anticipate collisions, understand the scene and get navigation instructions, through 3D sounds that are streamed in headphones.