Our Story

08/25/22

Team Vechtr is formed

After knowing each other for over 3 years, and we came together to create a highly skilled team that was poised to help create technology that could aid the visually impaired folks in our community.

10/29/22

We meet our inspiration for our product

We meet folks from the Vista Center for Visually Impaired, one of the Leading Silicon Valley Centers Dedicated to Improving the Lives of the Visually Impaired, and strike up an interesting conversation with Neeraj Gupta, a volunteer there who has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease.

02/07/23

We make a proof of concept

We had our hardware and software teams work together strenuously to create our barebones product, the Vechtr Vision Hat v1.

03/26/23

We get user feedback from our inspiration

We invited Neeraj to our school, Santa Clara High School, where we had an amazing time getting to know him as a person, as well as gaining his personal feedback on all aspects of the prototype that could be improved.

04/19/23

We revitalized our product to adapt to the features most needed

After meeting up with Neeraj, we new that our prototype needed to lose weight, gain robustness, and move from loud speaker commands to more discreet bone conductor audio feedback. We employed all of this in our Vechtr Vision Hat v2.

05/13/23

Our group showed up and showed out at the Project Invent Demo Day, snagging coveted "Moonshot" Award for the Pacific Division, given to the team with the most novel and impactful product, and which came with $500 of VC funding.

We pitch our idea at Demo Day X for Project Invent

10/15/23

Finalizing the Hat Design

After over a year, we finally finish the hardware and the software portion of the hat to work as efficiently as possible, running a revised tensorflow lite model, and having custom CAD encasings for all of the components, making them removable, such that the device can be used as either a hat, or a lanyard, which are the two primary methods used in the industry. This is Vechtr Vision Hat v3.

01/09/24

Our group met with multiple visually impaired people at the Vista Center for Blind and Visually Impaired, who had a wide range of visual impairements, and this allowed us to get critically helpful feedback on how we could downsize and widespread our prototype, based on the concerns from the prototype testers.

We get feedback from the wider community

6/24/24-Present

Future Aspirations

After compiling the feedback from our meeting with the community we realized that the best plan of action was to downsize the hardware to be all comprised on a single custom PCB, and create a new software feature that allows the user to scan in new objects that they want to detect. We are currently working on this, and are planning to open-source our CAD and code once finished. Once finished, we are going to use our funding to mass produce over 100 of these PCB modules, to be donated to our visually impaired local community. Stay tuned!