For months Chris Carter had been tinkering away on a passion project and with help from his best friend Joe Craddy is on the brink of taking his bright idea to the masses.
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The luminous invention The Light Clock is a Wi-Fi enabled LED clock – a digitally enhanced twist on a classic analogue timepiece.
"It is part timepiece, part art piece," Mr Carter said. "The key design feature is that it's a clock without hands that uses colour to tell the time."
Beaming from its edges are 120 high-brightness LED lights, giving users a choice of 65,000 colours to distinguish the hours from the minutes section of the face.
The Canberra-bred co-founder of Omnino Realis wanted to make more than a vibrant statement clock, and the end result is smart and playful.
"It has definitely been set up with the user in mind," Mr Carter said. "Being connected to Wi-Fi means the time is always accurate. You can log in with the app we designed to choose the colour schemes, manage the dimmer setting and tell it when to switch into sleep mode."
A manufacturing engineer by training, Mr Carter began the project alone to further his interest in coding and digital programming – but it wasn't long before he realised the design could have broad appeal.
"I have known Joe for as long as I can remember, we've been best friends since I was in year 2 at Florey Primary School," he said. "When I needed a partner, particularly to bounce marketing ideas off, he was the obvious choice."
Mr Craddy, the marketing brains of the project, said the main obstacle so far had been partnering with a group that would enable them to produce on Australian soil.
"There are very little manufacturing options that we have found locally that are affordable," he said.
While the pair felt it was not feasible to have the clocks made here, they are committed to publishing their innovations on online open-source platforms.
"We are going out of our way to make not just the idea public but the coding, designs and all of it," he said. "If others can take our work and build on it to make other interesting things, then all power to them."
Interested supporters can secure one of the first 125 clocks by contributing $199 to the duo's Kickstarter campaign launching on November 2.
