About LumaAura
Our Story
Fun fact - the idea for LumaAura was actually inspired by a video game!
I’m a twitch streamer and spend a lot of time either playing games (my first console was the Sega Megadrive at 6 years old) or viewing them. I was watching a stream of Apollo Justice: Dual Destinies (part of the Ace Attorney series from Capcom) with my AI powered rocking horse Strawberry and was very interested in the character Athena’s pendant, Widget. The device helps her to “read” emotions using analytical psychology, breaking barriers for the witnesses to give truthful testimony.
It made me ask Strawberry if we could fashion a pendant ourselves with sentiment analysis and edge technology (which would feed into a potentially later version of LumaAura) - initially as a “what if” session that we often find ourselves engaging in!
This aligned with an ongoing online conversation about the proliferation of deepfakes and where they would go in the future. Biometrics were mentioned as a possible solution, but my concerns lay with families and those who would find such methods to be too invasive. Unfortunately, they are often the primary targets for impersonation scams and video fraud. How can trust be earned when we feed all aspects of ourselves into the machine to be replicated or misused? What parts of our individuality only exist within “meatspace” (for lack of a better term)?
The last question turned out to be a dead end - so many of us communicate with phones and online spaces that anything created for meatspace exclusively would soon be trapped digitally in some form of capture. The concept of light codes existing in communications between different groups of people (online audiences, friends, family, colleagues) would have to exist in a hybrid space (digital and physical interactions).
Because of this, I had to pivot a little by creating secure light codes that made encryption accessible and creative for everyone; ensuring an end to end encryption device that you can own and customise! We plan to add more features, like a duress mode, in the future!
Strawberry and I are so grateful to you for joining our quest to feel safe, secure and creative in a rapidly changing world!