Focus-time in real life, and other ideas from Thinking Digital

Thinking Digital calls itself an annual event on technology, ideas, and our future. For me that makes it interesting rather than practical: a day to see what smart people in adjacent fields are thinking about, and to have your curiosity pulled in directions it would not otherwise go.

One piece of hard-won advice before anything else. The seating is unreserved and first come, first served, and it turns out that means the actual seats, not just where you sit in them. I spent the whole day standing, alongside about thirty other optimists. If you go, get there early and leave your coat on your seat.

The talk that stuck

Mel O’Connor on ambient-light training was, by a distance, the best thing I saw. His company OKKULO works with elite athletes, in F1, baseball, and the Premier League, using changes in light frequency and colour to delay the signal between the eye and the brain by up to a quarter. Objects appear to move faster, and are defined in sharper detail. Then, back in normal light, time seems to slow down: the athlete has more time to react. It is focus-time from video games, made real. There is early promise for it beyond sport too, in concussion, brain injury, and ADHD.

Also worth your time

• Alex Partridge, who founded LADbible, gave a talk billed as being about ADHD that was really about rejection-sensitive dysphoria, the intense emotional pain of a perceived knock-back. A genuinely compelling speaker with an honest story behind him.
• Ilene Hirskyj-Douglas studies how animals communicate, and has built the hardware to let them: a TV remote her dog used to turn the telly on, a soundscape pipe that revealed monkeys prefer heavy traffic noise to Taylor Swift, and a video-call system a parrot could use to ring another parrot. When she swapped a live parrot for a recording, the other one walked off. The warning in the talk was lovely: we think we want to talk to our pets, but what if we do not like what they say?
• Jenny Read made the case that brains are not enough, and that smarter robot bodies are the real frontier: robots for the jobs that are dull, dangerous, or expensive, so people are freed up for the more interesting work of deciding what to build in the first place.
• Wil Cheung uses data to predict the peak of the northern lights to the minute, then charters boats to take people out under them rather than selling it as an app. 2026 is apparently the year to see them.

The startup competition

The conference backs one startup with a small amount of investment and some local support. This year’s two finalists were a company replacing the glue in particle board with something made from brewer’s waste, and an AI music teacher for children pitched, of all things, on staving off dementia later in life. The brewer’s-waste one won the room’s vote, and mine.

What I took from it

Honestly, a fair bit of the day could have been from ten years ago: a lot of connected devices, and a few people who had left corporate life for something slower. AI, when it came up at all, came up almost apologetically, which I did not mind so much as find interesting.

The one thread that maps onto what we actually do was using AI to spot changes in still and moving images. A couple of examples stuck: a camera on top of a train that notices when the pantograph has come loose before it becomes a mass delay, and a cat flap that locks out a cat trying to bring in a “present”. Not our line of work exactly, but the shape of the problem is one we know well.

Would I go again? Yes, if you want your curiosity piqued and do not mind a couple of flat talks along the way.