Luna Oculus - Eyes on the road, we've got your back!

Ever concerned about how close cars get behind? As cyclists ourselves, this has always been a source of worry when trying to navigate our busy city. 

If you were to step into any modern car you would be immediately surrounded by smart camera technology alerting you to dangers...but the adoption of this kind of tech for bikes has been relatively slow. We want to change this and bring the benefits of smart camera technology to our most vulnerable road users - you! 

What is Luna Oculus & what does it do? Luna Oculus is a rear-facing camera with integrated bike light that, once connected to our smartphone app, gives you a heads-up when cars and other vehicles get too close for comfort. 

1. Rear warnings: Visual & audio

Once you connect the camera to the app, you can see a livestream view (see below) of what's happening behind.  When a car or other vehicle is detected, the app provides a visual and audio warning. This alert intensifies the close the approaching vehicle gets. 

Side note: We've packed a lot of customisation into this solution. Some cyclists prefer visual warnings, others audio - we have built both option in, but you can choose based on your preference. We also acknowledge that very cyclist and environment is different, so we have built in the option for you to set your own warning distance.

What you get:

​​The Luna Oculus camera:

• High resolution imaging (1080p), integrated lighting system (90 lumens), quarter-turn mounting, USB-C charging - 6 hours battery life.
• Smartphone app - Android & IoS - Free subscriptions for backers
• Check out our additional perks that you will receive as an early supporter of our mission. 

Safety in numbers - With Luna Oculus, we want to build a tribe!

What we are probably most proud of with this product is that every time you get up on your bike, (with your consent of course!), you can share your mapped events with other users. Similar well-known concepts already exist for cars but we feel there is a huge opportunity here for bikes!

So, the idea is that not only does this product aim to keep you safe, it also unlocks a an AI-powered cycling safety community - alerting other cyclists in your city about dangerous hotspots. We will also give you the option of sharing these mapped events with your city. And here is where the big changes can happen. Amplifying the cycling community's safety concerns with mapped irrefutable proof of dangerous hotspots will help cities to priortise infrastructure improvements.

Operating in the shared micromobility industry for the past four years, we have built an excellent network of city relationships and have a keen understanding of the kinds of insights needed to really make a difference in terms of infrastructure improvement

Who are we?

Greetings from Dublin City University's Innovation Campus! We are Luna Systems, an Irish computer vision solutions provider in the field of micromobility safety. The leadership team consists of Andrew Fleury, CEO, Maria Diviney, COO & Barry Cronin. CTO, but the real brains of our company are our incredible 12-strong engineering team.

In 2020 and backed by Enterprise Ireland and EIT Urban Mobility we pioneered the use of computer vision for the field of shared micromobility - leveraging our solutions to help provide a better understanding to shared scooter operators and cities on the kinds of infrastructure deficits that lead to dangerous behavior, such as sidewalk riding and collisions. Our work in this industry very much continues with Europe's shared micromobility operators and cities - supporting them with our cameras and software to communicate to riders and issue fines about specific cases of scooter sidewalk riding. Significant to our work on Oculus, we also provide cities with mapped data of scooter sidewalk riding and collision risk events to city planners to help them better understand the infrastructure issues that lead to this behavior in the first place (Read more in Forbes).

Coverage on Luna Oculus 

• Road.cc (May 2024): Tech of the Week: Will this “AI rear-view mirror” enhance road safety for cyclists? 
• Global Cycling Network (May 2024): New rear-view camera for bikes uses AI to keep cyclists safe
• Digital Camera World (May 2024): Rear-view camera for bikes with AI lets riders report unsafe places
• Smart Cities World (May 2024): Luna launches crowdfunding campaign for bike safety solution

Risks & Challenges

Where are we right now? Prior to this campaign, our rear detection capabilities already worked to a high level of readiness (TRL 9). We initially began development in June 2023 working directly with bike manufacturing (B2B) market to ensure a high level of accuracy for our detections. We felt this was a crucial step in order to learn from the biggest names in cycling how to build a truly world-class safety product. We continue to market to bike OEMs, but focus for this campaign is to get this kind of solution into the hands of consumers and build out the aforementioned features - event mapping, data sharing etc. We beliegve everyone should have access to these kinds of technologies.

Our creds:

• Established business, operating for the past five years and leading global partnerships with leading OEMs and global partners like Qualcomm Technologies (read more) and Segway-Ninebot (read more).
• Partnered in our initial product - shared micromobility ARAS with the world's leading shared operators with more than four years experience developing hardware solutions (more complex, plug and play AI cameras for the shared micromobility market).
• Extensive experience working with cities to provide anonymised data on the infrastructure causes that lead to safety risks for micromobility users.
• Luna as a company is hardware agnostic. What this means is that we can work with virtually any hardware and have been doing so since the start of our journey.

Risks:

• What we have minimised:
  • The main ingredients of this solution are already in place. The solution's basic capability - rear warnings already exists (more details above) - just as a more functional B2B product. The purpose of this project is converting this into a consumer facing product. Again, our current iteration is highly accurate and we have an extremely robust set of testing guidelines and a dedicated test team. One of our early backer perks will be an invitation to a behind the scenes meeting with our founders and engineering team where we bring you inside the tent and showcase our work in more detail. 
• Still required:
  • Camera prototype design: We have spent 12 months testing different camera solutions defining our requirements and have now finalised an exact set of hardware requirements. We are now ready to hit go on prototype design and will test and iterate extremely quickly in order to meet shipping deadline!
  • Patent protection - in train
  • Resourcing to deliver these outcomes...
  • ...and of course, the final production run!

Other Ways You Can Help

We appreciate that not everyone can contribute, but if you are in any way inspired by our work, we would genuinely appreciate your feedback. We would also appreciate if you could get the word out on our behalf on social, or offline. 

If you have any questions, please shoot us a mail: info@luna.systems, or connect on +353 83 8031003

With sincere thanks,

The Luna Systems team!