New Products & Trends

Odisha-based Likhan manufactures use and throw pens with vegetable and fruit seeds in it, which later germinates into a tree.

Looking at the growing concern for our environment, the trend of adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle is fast catching up around the world. While switching to green products can be overwhelming, it is certainly not impossible. It can help reduce plastic waste and improve the quality of the environment we live in.
And while we talk about taking up green initiatives, going a step ahead and making a difference in its own way is Detour Odisha, a startup that takes tourists on guided heritage trails across the state’s capital Bhubaneswar.
After cyclone Fani affected the state recently, Detour Odisha organised the 124th Ekamra Walks Old Town Circuit, during which the organisers distributed eco-friendly pens for tourists as a souvenir, reports The New Indian Express.
What is interesting about these pens is it consists of vegetable, fruit, and flower seeds in it. These pens are manufactured by Likhan, a startup that was started by two college students Prem Shanker Pandey and Md Raza of Centurion University, Odisha.
In a conversation with NDTV, 21-year-old Prem Shanker said, “We have made an eco-friendly alternative to use-and-throw pens. Of course, these pens have a plastic refill, but the body of the pens has been created from waste newspaper. Therefore, in comparison to regular pens that are 100 percent plastic, our pens have only 10 percent plastic. Also, unlike regular use and throw pens, you can discard these upcycled pens in a pot or soil, nurture it, and within weeks it will germinate into a plant.”
The aim behind the startup was to tackle the paper waste generated on the university campus. Prem and Md Raza later landed up with an idea to produce paper pencil and took this concept to develop paper pens too.
 

The inspiring teenager also organises annual fundraisers in her society for the education of slum kids from Dharavi. Apart from raising Rs 4 lakhs each year, she also teaches them herself!

About five years ago, Aarushi Majumder, who was a 13-year-old at the time, decided to start teaching underprivileged children in Mumbai’s Dharavi locality.With absolute passion and dedication, the teenager would conduct classes, ensuring personal attention to each one of her young students.
But soon, she realised that some of her students were skipping class. While she was willing to overlook occasional absenteeism, it started to happen regularly enough for her to inquire about the reason.As it turns out, the kids were falling seriously ill.
“I learned that they spent most of their days collecting waste and working in landfills and the pollution there was affecting their health. Mumbai is amongst the most polluted cities in the world because of the unmitigated piles of garbage that arrive at the local landfills daily, and these children were subject to the consequences. It was heartbreaking,” Aarushi says in a conversation with The Better India.
Back in 2013, about 9,400 tonnes of garbage, most of it unsegregated and non-recyclable, would end up in Mumbai’s landfills every day, and the burden of it rested on the weak shoulders of the kids from Dharavi.
Troubled by these facts, she decided that she wanted to make a dent in the way the 21+ million people of Mumbai discarded their garbage.
“I took the first step to reduce the amount of waste my family produced by segregating the garbage produced at home. I recycled dry waste, reused what I could, and began composting biodegradable waste. Seven weeks later, not only did I have fertile soil for my plants but had also managed to reduce the garbage output by 80%,” she says.
“This boosted my confidence, so I drew up a standardised waste management plan to present to the Chairman of my apartment complex,” she adds.
Her approach had to ensure that the wet waste was being utilised sustainably and at the same time, reduce the dry garbage from going to the landfill.
As is usually the case with taking up a community initiative, Aarushi began with creating awareness about the consequences of letting unsegregated waste outside the society and presenting her plans, simple and easily applicable, to the adults of the society.
Colour-coded bins were introduced in the housing society and everyone, including the domestic staff, were trained to segregate waste.

A positive and negative reinforcement mini-programme was also introduced where the society members were added in a social media group, and their actions in terms of segregation or failure thereof were commented on my other members.
“We also taught all the domestic staff in our building how to recycle. I took the initiative of monitoring the compost closely, checking its temperature and pH twice a week. And soon, we successfully reduced the amount of waste that was sent to the dumps. In just four months, the 7 tonnes of monthly waste that we were sending out to landfills was reduced to 1.5 tonnes. We also introduced incentives for in-house staff who were involved in waste management using funds that we generated through selling excess compost outside,” the teen tells us.

Logitech revealed the VR Ink ‘Pilot Edition’, a stylus built for art and design in VR. Built with SteamVR Tracking tech, the stylus works similarly to a typical SteamVR controller, but affords the natural precision that comes with precise finger control. While it works well for drawing in the air, a pressure-sensitive tip also makes it great for drawing (and potentially evening writing) against a physical surface.

Aimed toward enterprises using VR for digital design workflows, Logitech says that it plans to bring the VR Ink stylus to market in the near future. For the company, today’s announcement of the ‘Pilot Edition’ is about getting the word out and soliciting interest from companies who want to use or integrate apps with the VR Ink stylus.I got a hands-on demo of the VR Ink Pilot Edition and came away suitably impressed with what Logitech has put together, both in performance and functionality.

Though it’s ‘just’ a stylus, the VR Ink has a surprising number of controls built right in. On the sides where you grip the stylus are two grip pads which can be squeezed as a form of input. On the top where your index finger rests is a pressure sensitive button at the front, an oval-shaped trackpad/button in the middle, and a smaller menu button in the back. There’s also on-board haptics, and the end of the stylus has a pressure-sensitive tip which allows for pressure-sensitive writing against physical surfaces.

It’s definitely bigger than a regular pen or pencil, but actually impressively compact when you consider all of the electronics that need to fit inside, and easy enough to grip just as you would a real writing implement.

The whole stylus uses SteamVR Tracking tech (supporting 1.0 and 2.0 base stations), and it can be easily used to draw lines in the air in art and design apps. For that purpose, it does feel more natural to use the pointy end of a stylus for tracing lines than using a big controller which restricts finer motions to wrist control, whereas a stylus benefits from fine finger control. Many readers on this site will be familiar with painting or drawing in 3D using VR, but the more exciting part of VR Ink is its ability to also draw precisely against a flat surface.

The stylus is a tool that’s been around for a millennia, and for good reason—the ‘free’ feedback of actually pushing a writing implement against a surface works perfectly in conjunction with the fine motor control that our fingers are capable of.

To make a stylus really work for surface drawing in VR, you need a lot of precision, and so far the VR Ink has impressed on that front. Largely driven by SteamVR Tracking, but undoubtedly assisted by the stylus’ pressure-sensitive tip, drawing against a table feels really natural. I’m by no means a digital artist who spends every day with a Wacom tablet, but I’ve used my fair share of tablet PCs with active digitizers (including the Surface Book as my primary laptop), and VR Ink’s drawing and pressure sensitivity felt very comparable.
 

Pelikan pen company is on target, introducing its Special Edition series 600 Vibrant Orange pen collection in perfect synchronicity with the season.

Orange is the color of fall, from pumpkins to turning leaves, from lengthening russet shadows to the glow of a Harvest Moon. And the Germany-based Pelikan pen company is on target, introducing its Special Edition series 600 Vibrant Orange pen collection in perfect synchronicity with the season.

Pelikan, of course, is not the only brand to offer an orange fountain pen. The Italy-based Delta pen company, as an example, created the Dolcevita collection a number of years ago, and it was one of the first contemporary luxury pen companies to do so. The vivid color was suggestive of the sunny disposition its name conjured (the translation of dolce vita is “sweet life”) and the bright orange and black pens always brought a smile to my face.

Other luxury brands, too, have offered—and continue to offer—orange writing instruments. Caran d’Ache’s Leman collection includes a lovely Saffron pen whose barrel is a spicy shade of orange paired with a silver cap. On the opposite end of the price spectrum is Retro 51’s super-affordable Tornado collection, with its Classic Lacquers series including an orange-colored rollerball or ballpoint. As a timely aside, Pantone, in its Fall 2018 Color Trend Report, named Russet Orange as the new bold hue, noting, “This forest floor orange speaks to earthen warmth.” Pumpkin spice latte, anyone?

This Souverän® 600 is crafted from a bright orange acrylic, and it apparently took several tries to achieve the perfect hue of bright fall leaves. Just like those leaves, the color is highly nuanced.