Introducing Lemurbox Retro DIY Kit!

May 13, 2024

lemurbox retro diy kit

At HAL51.AI, we are purveyors of frugal avant-garde aspiring to turn thin air into a canvas for your imagination. Our vision is to invent a bold new vertical of AIccessories that turn smartphones and tablets into multi-utility AI-powered 3D consumer tech hardware. In doing so, we want to infuse AI into exciting modalities beyond the triad of text, voice & video: The worlds of optical illusions, frugal-fauxlograms, XR-dioramas, transparent-display-magic, and mirrors. The downstream applications are endless with the the most obvious verticals being EdTech, AdTech, and Entertainment.

TL;DR: Here’s our LemurBox hardware. Here’s our LemurScope App. Here’s our LinkTree.


❣Our MVP

The LemurBox is our first offering! It is a fun-laden modular multi-utility STE[A]M kit built using hidden-in-plain-sight commercial-grade optical materials that allow a user to load and interact with 3D digital models: Static, animated, and/or AI-powered! So, let’s get started in five simple steps:

  1. Build the LemurBox (Video, Slides)

  2. Download and install our LemurScope app onto your smartphone/tablet (iOS coming soon!)

  3. Connect your smartphone/tablet to a Bluetooth interactive device (like a mouse or a trackball)

  4. Place your smartphone/tablet into the projection chamber and turn on the lights

  5. Load and interact with the 3D digital models (.glb/.gltf for now)

That’s it! You have now been given the keys to the magical realm of the LemurBox ⚜

Complementary to the app-path, you can also:

  1. Fire up the YouTube app, head to our channel, smash that subscribe button, and enjoy the free and fun Lemur-compatible content we have created for you.

  2. Mirror your desktop screen to the phone/tablet/display device placed inside the LemurBox use one of our free web apps and interact. And yes, technically you don’t even need a smartphone. Any off-the-shelf 5-7 inch display will do the trick.


☯️ Our Philosophy

There is this Simplicity-Frugality quad that lives rent-free in our imagination. It’s more of an emergent ideal that develops through our lived experiences and guides us every step in our product-dev journey.

Figure 1: The Simplicity-Frugality quad

As seen in Figure 1 above, the quad’s nodes are The Least Squares-Pepper’s Ghost nexus, The Tao of Daiso, Retrofuturism, and The Binocular Curse and we cover these ideas in detail in our blog post here. Lurking somewhere close to the semantic barycenter of these four nodal ideas, we encountered this vision of the aiccessory that we now unveil.


💡 The AIccessory

In the face of the recent Cambrian explosion of the so-called AI-devices, ours is certainly a bit of a counter-cultural anti-trend take: We see no need for an AI device at all! The very idea of a dedicated slice of silicon adding to the environmental woes of our planet already drowning in silicon waste when we literally own a far more powerful silicon theater right in our pocket sounds plain weird to us. Also, there is this quaint little thing of paying attention to the macro trends. From where we sit, we are observing that the,

  • 🤖 LLMs are getting faster, smaller, cheaper to fine-tune, and easier to run on smartphones.

  • 📱The smartphones themselves are simultaneously getting mightier and faster and more AI-nativized by the way. (Psst … Notice how Google is now fusing its Android and hardware teams into one?)

  • 📲The smartphone screens (specifically the OLED variants) are getting cheaper brighter and more power-efficient as we type this and are on the cusp of a truly major disruption via the recent OLED burn-in breakthrough

  • ⚡Inference-focused startups with their bespoke chips have pretty much obliterated the latency woes thereby bringing the cloud ever closer to you

  • 📳Consumers are increasingly owning more than one smartphone or tablet (planned obsolescence = 👹 ) and typically have an unused device lying around catching dust. It is estimated that there is over $1.2 trillion worth of unused tech in UK, EU & US homes. More pertinently, an estimated 38% have at least two unused smartphones

  • 🚢Importing silicon trinkets through increasingly strenuous shipping lines exposes us to needless supply-chain shenanigans. We aspire to stay nimble, iterate, and ship fast. Silicon IMHO decelerates that! And also a little matter of additional packaging and shipping and unreliable hardware histrionics 😬

Hence, we want to focus on creating nimble, smart, and useful hardware with user-friendly apps that will embellish your pre-existent silicon and bring joy and value: The embrace of the AIccessory path. This is the way ✌️ 🖖


🛣️ The journey and the path ahead

ALTLemurBox alpha at the recent SF Bay Area Maker Faire

We had a weirdly memorable pre-debut at the local Maker Faire. On a rainy winter weekend, we drove all the way to Mare Island to showcase some of the pre-alpha devices and get some feedback. Instead, we unexpectedly sold out of our laser-cut inventory (XR dioramas tend to do that!) and we realized that most of our clients were not AI-bros or gadget fiends but teachers from the neighboring school districts, many of whom paid us with their school district issued debit cards!

A LemurBox boot camp at the Irvington High School, Fremont

This led to a slew of serendipitous invites into the classrooms, heaps and heaps of product-advice from educators and students alike, and some rapid iterations, and thus was born our MVP: The LemurBox Retro DIY STEAM kit. Currently, we are slogging towards filling the orders for these kits from the SF Bay Area summer STEM camps and have kept aside around 50 kits for the general consumer market here for $59.99.

Through the summer we will be releasing a slew of AI-powered pepper’s ghost avatar apps while testing them out in our bootcamps. Here’s a sneak peek 😉

On the hardware front, one of us has already begun experimenting with transparent LCD rigs as well 😇 and the results are pretty darn close to Woah!

Visualizing the AlphaFold3 assets in our experimental box


💌 Talk to us!

In the past few weeks, some of you who live in the SF Bay Area have seen us at some hackathons, maker spaces, and tech events. Every time, we’ve stepped out to show our wares, it is incredible how we get pitched with ideas we hadn’t even dreamt of! 3D menu boxes for fusion restaurants, substitute teachers in a box, gaming consoles, 3D design aid, virtual museums, 3D cameo, holographic chat-box, and ahem, a new form of adult entertainment.

Creatives, Influencers, EdTech peeps, 3D designers, Unity SDK wonks, Godot fans, VCs, Artists, Hardware designers, Kickstarter experts (we learned of this ilk last week), and social media experts: We are all ears! Here’s our LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/hal51.ai

“Wherever you go, go with all your heart” - Confucius