Your phone,
without the screen.
Vyldor is a leather belt that measures your waist. A strain gauge sits in the buckle, two zones at your hips tap to tell you which way to turn, and one hidden button confirms the things that matter. Your phone never leaves your pocket.
The actual design model. Drag it around.
The design, moving
Twenty-five seconds, rendered from the parametric model. No prototype has been built, so nothing here is a photograph.
The problem
Checking a phone to be told to turn left
Walking somewhere new, you take the phone out roughly every ninety seconds to confirm you have not missed a turn. In a meeting you flip it face down and still glance at it. On a train you hold it up to your ear because that is the only way to hear.
None of that is a hardware problem. The phone is already excellent at maps, at voice, at knowing who is calling. The problem is that its only way of reaching you is a bright rectangle that demands your eyes.
So Vyldor does not try to be a better phone. It is a different way for the phone you own to reach you: through your hips, through a tug on the strap, and through a single button you press on purpose.
What it does
Three things, and that is the whole list
We would rather do three things properly than ship a menu. Each one is a physical movement, so there is nothing to learn and nothing to look at.
The short spec
Numbers, not adjectives
- Strap
- 37 mm wide, 3.6 mm thick, black full-grain leather, painted edges
- Adjustment
- A ratchet, not holes. 103 mm of range in 5 mm steps, so 20 positions where a punched belt gives you five. The teeth are on the inside face of the free end and invisible from outside; a 9 mm keeper holds the tail flat
- Buckle
- 66 × 41 mm, matte anodised aluminium, purely mechanical. The only electrical thing in it is a strain gauge under the leather collar, thinner than a third of a millimetre
- What it measures
- Waist circumference, continuously, from the tension in the strap. The same signal carries breathing, meals, sitting and coughing
- Haptics
- Two zones, 50 × 23 × 3.8 mm, one at each hip
- Electronics
- 96 × 24 × 4.8 mm along the back, under one continuous skin
Worn, not watched.
A belt is the one thing most people put on every morning without deciding to. That is the whole reason we picked it.
Read next
Hear about it first
One email when there is something real to report: the first haptic test, the first working prototype, the day you can actually buy one.
Thinking about backing it instead? Read the investor page