With awareness of plastic pollution at an all-time high, Lush’s newest Naked shops offer literally hundreds of innovative and plastic packaging-free alternatives to your favourite cosmetics, and technology plays a key role in making that work.

With awareness of plastic pollution at an all-time high, Lush’s Naked shops offer hundreds of innovative and plastic packaging-free alternatives
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Rather than scanning labels for information, visitors to the shop will instead be able to scan products directly using the new #LushLabs app replacing packaging with a digital solution
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“We think the future implications of this technology are they we’re able to further reduce packaging and printed materials and offer a richer alternative that gives consumers education about the benefits of cosmetics plus features such as ordering and sharing.

It is only now, after 20 years of development, that we are able to fill up a whole shop with innovative naked cosmetic alternatives
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Lush Lens is an in development experience feature which enables Lush to reduce their impact on the environment by using the phone’s camera and Machine Learning to recognise products through the user’s smartphone camera, and give the customer detailed ingredient information and ‘how to use’ demonstrations via the app.

A while back the company opened the first such shop in Milan, which was a resounding success and convinced them there was definitely an appetite among consumers for this seemingly radical alternative to traditional, over-packaged cosmetics.

“Reducing packaging is something Lush has been working on for many, many years, says Adam Goswell Global Creative Technology, UX, Mobile & Innovation. “However, it is only now, after 20 years of development, that we are able to fill up a whole shop with innovative naked cosmetic alternatives, and offer a brand new shopping experience using technology alongside it.”

Technology has a role in reducing our environmental impact
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“The launch of the Lush Manchester Naked Shop, was an exciting day with an exciting and loud mix of our customers, staff and the press getting hands on with our packaging free shop concept.

“We’re using the shop as another platform to demonstrate and use our technology which is currently in R&D where we’re using Machine Learning coupled with a camera from a phone, to allow anyone to recognise one of our handmade cosmetics without the need for traditional packaging,” says Goswell.

Here at Tech Trends we’re fan of Lush’s brand of ethical innovation
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Here at Tech Trends we’re fan of Lush’s brand of ethical innovation that has been showcased at several events we’ve attended which spans not only its retail shops but also a its amazing spa treatments.

“Technology has a role in reducing our environmental impact, and we’d hope this influences other cosmetics retailers and other industries to look at this technology to also aid in reducing plastic waste,” Goswell concludes.

Tech Trends offers a broad range of Digital Consultancy services to guide companies, individuals and brands in effectively leveraging existing and emerging technologies in their business strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Naked Tech for a Plastic-Free World appeared first on Tech Trends.

Stretching from Alaska through Canada and Scandinavia all the way to the Pacific coast of Russia, The unique ecosystem of the Great Northern Forest circles the planet and plays a vital role in preventing climate change.

It holds almost a quarter of the world’s trees, stores more carbon than all the tropical rainforests combined, and houses a bio diverse ecosystem full of animals such as eagles, bears, wolves and owls. It’s also the ancestral home of many indigenous peoples like the Cree in Canada and the Scandinavian Sami.

A global ecosystem circling the planet, stretching from Alaska through Canada and Scandinavia all the way to the Pacific coast of Russia, The Great Northern Forest plays a vital role in preventing climate change
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Like most of vital ecosystems, however, the Great Northern Forest is facing severe threat of destruction, as only 3% of the forest is actually protected. Vast areas are being lost every year as logging companies use the trees to manufacture various products such as paper towels and packaging for human consumption.

Greenpeace Nordic is hoping to reverse these destructive practices by using augmented reality to expose people to the beauty of this ecosystem and educate them on just how fragile it is.

“We need to protect these forests now, if we are to mitigate the worst effects of climate change,” says Ethan Gilbert, a Greenpeace Nordic forest campaigner. “This is a landmark in our global campaign to raise awareness of the dangers our planet faces if we fail to safeguard critical forest landscapes,” he adds.

Greenpeace Nordic is hoping to reverse destructive practices by using AR to expose people to the beauty of this ecosystem and educate them on just how fragile it is
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The idea came about a few months ago during a coffee break at the Greenpeace office in Helsinki. Gilbert and his team were fresh from a documentation trip to the Great Northern forest where they had been left in awe not only by its natural beauty, but by the rate of destruction to which the land was being subjected.

“If only everyone in the world could see how amazing this place is and how much of it is under threat… I wish we could just transport people straight there!” spoke someone in the group, to which a member of the digital team replied that you could indeed using immersive technology.

The app – which runs on ARCore-enabled Android phones 7.0 or higher, as well as ARKit compatible iPhones with iOS 11.0 or later – was developed in collaboration with Helsinki-based creative AR production company, Arilyn.

“Deploying Augmented Reality for the good of our forests and climate is an exciting opportunity, so being a part of this project is a huge privilege for us. Our team has spent weeks in this virtual forest and it has started to feel like home. I really hope that walking through the gate can be an eye-opening experience for everybody”, says Otso Kähönen, the Creative Director of Arilyn.

The experience begins with a virtual gate appearing on your phone’s screen. As soon as you walk through you’re instantly transported to serene camp site. As you cozy up to the fire, you can see the shimmering Northern Lights twinkling above in the clear night sky.

Deploying Augmented Reality for the good of our forests and climate is an exciting opportunity
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The Great Northern Forest can protect us from climate change, but only if we protect it first
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As meditative as this sounds, the serenity doesn’t last long. The next stop on your journey will allow you to see – and hopefully feel – the destruction of this beautiful forest first-hand. At the end of the experience, Greenpeace hopes you’ll better understand exactly what’s at stake and therefore feel more inclined to protect it.

“The Great Northern Forest can protect us from climate change, but only if we protect it first,” Gilbert concludes. And if we don’t want to live in a world where the only way to experience the wonders of nature is through technology –  a world where all the real trees are gone and animal species wiped out forever– then we’d best get our act together, using any tools at our disposal.

To access the experience you can download the Arilyn app for free on iOS and Android and scan the campaign image from either print or screen.

This article was originally published on VRScout

Take A Walk Through The Great Northern Forest With Greenpeace’s AR App via @alicebonasio https://t.co/bvo1dhS9W6 pic.twitter.com/n198TwhQs2

— VRScout (@VRScout) July 10, 2018

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance and support on how best to incorporate these into your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedInand follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Taking AR Walk in the Woods appeared first on Tech Trends.

The Lush Summit in London was a celebration of their activist ethos, but it also turns out they have a thing or three to teach companies about business, and tech.

“You don’t seem to realize what business you’re in. You’re not in the burger business, you’re in the real estate business. You build an empire by owning the land. What you ought to be doing is owning the land upon which that burger is cooked.” Harry J. Sonneborn in The Founder (2016).

The Lush Summit 2018 was a slightly chaotic whirlwind of vegan doughnuts, argan oil and papier-mâché, but make no mistake the people at Lush know exactly what business they are in: activism.

As CDO Jack Constantine put it, “We are a company of activists who make cosmetics”.

Yes, this sounds like a carefully crafted PR line, but as it turns out it’s true. Every year, Lush donates hundreds of thousands of pounds towards a number of causes from close to home subjects such as animal testing to more far reaching concerns like ocean pollution and human rights campaigns.

The people at Lush know exactly what business they are in: activism
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Lush is a company of activists who make cosmetics
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For someone like myself, who has spent over a decade working in the comms industry, corporate social responsibility too often echoes the Monsanto-esque approach to sustainability campaigns: cue accomplished looking farmer peacefully walking back home at dusk after a wholesome day of work in the fields. If you find yourself in that uncomfortable place between the need to believe that a better way of doing business is possible and having to deal with a heavy dose of accumulated cynicism, Lush might just have something to lift up your spirits.

If you find yourself torn between jaded scepticism and the need to believe that a better way of doing business is actually possible, the Lush approach might be for you
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Lush’s concept, like most good ones, is simple: make fresh handmade products that people love. The ‘how’ they do it, is the interesting bit, though. From ingredient sourcing to how staff are treated, right through to their naked packaging policy, Lush operates with a relentless commitment to “do the right thing” all businesses should strive for. Let’s set the record straight before anyone gets flashbacks of hippies dancing around a fire, in 2016 Lush made £723 million in sales – an increase of 26% over the previous year. Not too shabby.

Lush’s concept is simple: make fresh handmade products that people love. The ‘how’ they do it, is the interesting bit
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Lush has plenty to teach businesses especially those in the tech space
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So, how do you make that kind of money while running a business with a heart? As I discovered, Lush has plenty to teach other businesses especially those in the tech space. Aside from the obvious fact that we all wash and use technology daily (well, most of us do anyway), Lush has a firmer handle on their digital ethics than their glittery products might lead you to believe.

Means to an end 

Make products with a mission, let your customers fall in love with both

In 2016 Lush launched The Digital Fund to support grassroot activists and charities protecting freedom of expression and safeguarding the Internet. The fund was financed by the sale of their Error 404 special edition bath bombs, which raised well over £200,000. Bahrain Watch, Digital Rights Watch in Australia and the Association for Technology and Internet in Romania are some of the associations that received funding so far.

In 2018 Lush is focusing on e-waste, the 20 million tons produced every year to be precise, with a new campaign built around a mobile-shaped Agbogbloshie bath bomb… the only phone you’ll ever willingly drop in water.

Lush is focusing on the 20 million tons of e-waste we produce every year
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DIY tech

If it’s not good enough make your own

Tech is everywhere nowadays, have you noticed? Hence it should come as no surprise that Lush employs a 40-strong team of software developers globally, who have built the company’s POS software. The surprising bit is that the software is completely open source, which means it’s technically available to their competitors too.

Lush employs a 40-strong team of software developers globally who have built the company’s open source POS software
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Lush is planning on rolling out their hardware, tablets for their retail locations to begin with, by the end of 2018
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To take this crafty endeavour one step further, Lush is planning on rolling out their hardware – tablets for their retail locations to begin with –  by the end of 2018. Let that sink in for a moment: a cosmetics company making their own ethically produced tech hardware.

“We have no plans to take over Apple any time soon” – jokes Constantine – “But we are serious about offering an ethical alternative to mainstream devices.”

End-to-end ethics

Dissect the entire lifecycle of tech

As the folks at Oxfam know all too well, your organisation is only as ethical as its weakest link. In other words, strong ethics are only as deep as a company’s knowledge of all the steps involved in the production of a product, and its willingness to “walk the walk.” Lush partners with a number of charities, associations and likeminded companies to bring its vision to life while avoiding cutting corners. Sharing moral standards with the people you do business with, finding the informed advisors and contributing by not being part of the problem are all important steps towards this.

Lush partners with a number of charities, associations and likeminded companies to bring its vision to life
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Two examples of such partnerships that stand out in the tech space are Ethical Consumer and Fairphone, who are both working with Lush to raise awareness around the sometimes shady tech supply chain. Whether it’s the dubious work ethics of invisible tech giant Foxconn – who subcontracts for the likes of Apple – or children mining cobalt in Congo, it seems high time for businesses to question the true cost of the tech they use or make.

It seems high time for businesses to question the true cost of the tech they use or make.
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So is Lush a dream company? Perhaps. Is it perfect? Of course not. However, with a reported pre-tax profit of £43.2m in FY 2015/2016 (an increase of £18.7m on 2014/15) and fingers in all the right tech pies Lush is definitely one to watch, and at Tech Trends we’ll continue to do just that.

What an incredible two days at the #LushSummit. pic.twitter.com/Wz46OTiBBo

— LUSH UK (@LushLtd) February 15, 2018

Sole Chirco is an emotional intelligence consultant and Tech Trends’ Wellness Tech Correspondent. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn. 

The post It’s None of My Business – Or Is It? appeared first on Tech Trends.

Might seem far-fetched, but VR has been proven to increase feelings of empathy. Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab are now using this immersive technology to make people connect with the impact they are having on the environment.

“This is the most exciting thing we’ve ever done in VR.” High praise indeed coming from Jeremy Bailenson. As the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), he has conducted hundreds of experiments over the past 20 years on how virtual reality shapes human interaction, regularly collaborating with Silicon Valley companies and consulting with government agencies. When the U.S. Supreme Court recently debated the effects of immersive media, it was his book Infinite Reality they quoted. It’s probably safe to assume, then, that professor Bailenson really knows what he’s talking about.

We arrived at the sunny Stanford campus on a Thursday afternoon, the entire team was scrambling to finish The Crystal Reef, a VR film project being premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival that weekend and all demos had been canceled. But since we’d traveled all the way from England, we got a private tour instead, so all’s well that ends well.

Having previously tried various experiences on the Samsung GearVR and Google Cardboard, I wasn’t exactly a “ViRgin,” but the souped-up HTC Vive setup at the lab still blew me away. Over the next half an hour, I “walked the plank” over a simulated pit—surprisingly scary in spite of the fact you KNOW there’s no drop—experienced an earthquake, danced with Elmo from Sesame Street, and flew around a simulated city, just like Superman. Up until I smashed head-first into a concrete building, that was possibly the most fun I ever had.

Watching nature’s greatest wonders fade before your eyes, and knowing that you’re at least partially to blame, might not be most people’s idea of fun, but the overall experience is hopeful
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But the lab’s work is not just about fun. Its mission is finding out how these immersive experiences can be applied to improve everyday life in all sorts of areas such as conservation, communications systems and empathy. And the power of VR to generate empathy is exactly what the Crystal Reef project explores.

The Crystal Reef demo is in two parts: a 360 video followed by an interactive experience. The video starts with an aerial view of the rocky reefs of the Italian coastline of Ischia. Then suddenly I’m on a boat listening to marine scientist Fio Micheli. At first I can’t see her, and it takes me a little while to realize that I’m facing the wrong way and she’s behind me. That’s actually one of the things I love most about VR video: Just like in real life, you have to look around, interact with your environment and make sense of things for yourself. But it’s when the demo moves underwater with the HTC Vive that the interactivity really kicks up a notch.

We put users in places they wouldn’t normally have access to, so it does away with that sense of psychological distance
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Cody Karutz is the Stanford graduate student who created the reef project, a collaboration between the VHIL and Hopkins Marine Station. It’s effectively the cinematic rendering of his thesis research, designed to study how virtual reality can be used to communicate climate change in an immersive and scientifically valid way. He hopes it will help bring awareness and behavior change to the topic of ocean acidification—the process by which the ocean becomes more acidic as it soaks up carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.

Karutz’s previous projects included tagging live fish in the kelp forests of California’s Monterey Bay and transferring their movement data to create avatars—digital representations linked to real-world creatures—in virtual reality. Studies showed that people engage more with those avatars than pre-programmed agents, so they wanted to see whether this applied to animals as well. (It did: People felt much more upset as the fish disappeared when they thought they represented real-world fish.) The goal was to eventually let people adopt those fish, creating a more personal connection with the ecosystem. He believes that virtual reality has definite advantages in the type of conservation experiences it can create.

“We put users in places they wouldn’t normally have access to, so it does away with that sense of psychological distance. We can also speed up the effects so that the process of a reef disappearing can be experienced in a few minutes rather than 100 years,” Karutz says.

When experienced in—excuse the pun—full immersion this is pretty powerful stuff. The navigation with hand movements is part of what Karutz calls “embodied cognition.” “When you use full body motions with all limbs you create higher engagement and learning,” he explains.

In the video Micheli explains that the hardest part of a conservationist’s job is making people care. The whole Crystal Reef simulation is designed to make you do just that, and it works. I was left with a palpable sense of loss as the reefs disappeared and morphed into what scientists call an “ocean moonscape.” No wonder filmmaker Chris Milk called virtual reality the “ultimate empathy machine” in his recent TED Talk. We’re much more likely to care about something if we feel like we’re more than mere spectators.

Bailenson and the Crystal Reef team are hopeful this will make a real difference to marine conservation
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Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg knows a thing or two about that. His company has been managing open-world virtual platform Second Life (SL) for over a decade. The fact that SL is profitable and still attracts around a million users a month in spite of its age and technical limitations is a testament to the enduring appeal of those virtual environments. Second Life ’s success is now funding Linden Lab’s new VR venture named Sansar.  Altberg plans for Sansar users to be able to easily create and share their own VR experiences, and he’s enthused about bringing fully immersive content to the masses:

“In VR, I’m now inhabiting that avatar, because it’s my hands moving, it’s my face moving. Now you’re not seeing dolls, you’re seeing humans. Having that experience is a whole different thing. It’s exciting, it’s scary, and it could even be traumatic.”

VHIL researchers have also found that virtual reality is much more powerful than traditional media in changing behavior, even getting people recycle more or eat less meat. In one experiment, participants took a “virtual shower” and were given visual feedback (such as images of burning coal) based on the amount of energy they used to heat and transport that virtual water. When washing their hands in the physical world afterward, participants exposed to this vivid imagery consistently reduced their hot water consumption.

Bailenson and the Crystal Reef team are hopeful this will make a real difference to marine conservation, specially now that virtual reality is attracting such interest, and the popularization of the technology will allow these messages to be delivered to a mass audience:

“If you show someone the consequences of their actions in virtual reality, it makes them rethink their physical behavior,” says Bailenson. “With concepts like climate change, or deforestation, or even pollution, we can use virtual reality to make the relationship between human behavior and their consequences less abstract and more concrete.”

Watching nature’s greatest wonders fade before your eyes, and knowing that you’re at least partially to blame, might not be most people’s idea of fun, but the overall experience is hopeful: It’s in our power to do something about it. And that is what VR is all about, turning us from passive spectators to active agents in a changing world shaped by our actions.

Read the full article on the Newsweek website

VR developers want you to feel something when you hear reefs are dying https://t.co/Lamn0nDT59 pic.twitter.com/qkq6T5mf2P

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) May 13, 2016

For companies looking to get into VR/AR/MR our Virtual Reality Consultancy services offer guidance on how these technologies can enhance and support your brand strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Can Virtual Reality Help Save Our Coral Reefs? appeared first on Tech Trends.

We all love going to restaurants or grabbing a take-away, specially at the end of a busy day when inspiration about what to have for dinner is hard to come by. Yet recent evidence suggests this convenience is actually costing us the Earth, with food waste in the restaurant trade at an all-time high. In fact, over a quarter of people in England admit to regularly leaving food uneaten when eating out. Research by the sustainability charityWRAP uncovered that 27% of diners did not finish their meals at restaurants, take-aways, hotels and pubs, contributing to the 600,000 tonnes of food waste generated every year in the UK alone.

27% of people surveyed said they did not finish their restaurant meals
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The desperately sad thing — specially in a time of austerity where food banks are cropping up all over the place — is that most of this waste is made up of perfectly usable food, and a third of it comes directly from us either ordering too much or finding that portion sizes are just too big when we get them.

Asking for a doggy bag is not always culturally acceptable outside the US
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Looking at these rather depressing stats, I started wondering if British people were particularly wasteful when it came to eating out. One thing I noticed when I first moved here were the huge differences in attitude towards getting a ‘doggy bag’, for example. In America it’s perfectly normal to do that, even in fancy restaurants, and I never found it embarrassing to ask for my leftovers ‘to go’ in Brazil. In England, however, that type of request can often get you stared at like some creature from outer space (unless you have a strong American accent, in which case waiters tend to roll their eyes in a pitying way and reluctantly go searching for a plastic container to accommodate your mad request). This means that, should our eyes turn out to be bigger than our stomachs, our choices boil down to “force it down or bin it”.

Restaurants waste 3.3 pounds of food for every $1000 of revenue
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But dig a little deeper, and you find this to be a truly global problem, and not the fault of a group of unaccommodating waiters. In spite of their ‘bag-it-and-go’ culture, U.S. restaurants still manage to waste about 3.3 pounds of food per $1000 of company revenue, 84% of which ends up in landfill according to a study by the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) for the Food Waste Reduction Alliance.

The issue has recently gained some extra prominence with celebrity River Cottage Chef Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall shining a spotlight on the £720m that avoidable out of home food waste is costing the UK economy every year. That’s the equivalent of six meals every week for the average household, and also considerably adds to the amount of greenhouse gases produced by landfills.

Our hunger for convenience is actually costing us the Earth, with food waste in the restaurant trade at an all-time high
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So if all this waste is bad for the economy, terrible for the environment, and morally unjustifiable in a world where people still go hungry every day, what can we do about it?

There are some amazing community initiatives cropping up, such as the Real Junk Food Project in Brighton which crowdfunded £16,000 to launch a community café that legally intercepts food waste from restaurants, supermarkets and other suppliers. All this perfectly good produce that would have otherwise gone to landfill is then turned into tasty and healthy meals, which aren’t officially priced. People just pay as much as they can or feel they want to. But even if you’re not lucky enough to have such a café in your area, it is still possible to make a difference.

There are projects that turn all the perfectly good produce that would have otherwise gone to landfill into healthy, tasty meals
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For a start, you could fight that natural embarrassment and proudly ask for a doggy bag next time you go to a restaurant. Or perhaps you could just stop eating out altogether… But where’s the fun in that?

An app called Trybe believes they can make a positive impact on reducing food waste without being such a killjoy. They’re combining the convenience of eating out or getting a take-away with the less wasteful approach of home cooking by allowing people to order home-made meals from cooks in their area and have them delivered to their door. That is inherently less wasteful as if portion sizes turn out to be too big, all you need to do is stick the rest in the fridge for a tasty snack later, and that is a joy in itself as well as good for the planet. My husband’s favourite indulgence is having leftover curry for breakfast (hey, don’t judge till you’ve tried it).

Solving this huge problem will take effort and commitment from everybody. But perhaps technology, community spirit and passionate cooks are the right ingredients to make it happen.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Can Home-Cooking Save the Planet? appeared first on Tech Trends.