Cleanbox Technology kills coronavirus on your VR headset

Hello Amy, can you introduce yourself to my readers?

Hi, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Cleanbox Technology, a smart tech hygiene company offering UVC decontamination products for electronics and shared hardware. We are a primarily female-owned and operated company, which is something I’m very proud of!

What is Cleanbox Technology, what does your company do?

Cleanbox Technology is a premium hygienic and eco-friendly brand providing solutions for the decontamination of virtual, augmented and mixed reality headsets, headphones, and other mass-use hardware. Cleanbox patented products eliminate the need for heat, liquid or toxins in the decontamination process, protecting electronics and providing an eco-friendly, safe experience for the customer.

Cleanbox eradicates 99% of bacteria, virus and fungi in 1 minute and its modular designs can treat any number of hardware from 1 to 1,000 or more. Designed with commercial high-volume traffic in mind, Cleanbox products are streamlined for effectiveness, ease, and speed.

What has made you start a similar company? What’s your story? What is your dream vision?

We built the Cleanbox brand in anticipation of the adoption of immersive technology as a global game-changer for business and end consumers. We saw that broad acceptance of the use of any kind of shared hardware would require a safe and extremely effective and streamlined hygiene solution to allow for businesses to feel confident in their broad use, and consumers to feel safe. In fact, our first patents were filed more than five years ago!

What are your main products?

Our sweet spot is the chemical and heat-free decontamination of product and hardware worn on the face and head, with proximity to high-risk contagion transfer points of the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Our core technology was designed around hard-to-clean virtual and augmented reality headsets and we have expanded that fine-tuned engineering to other products including PPEs, masks, eye glasses, haptics, and personal electronics.

We have products on the market for HMDs, respirator masks and other personal objects.

Can you explain in detail how do they work?

Cleanbox uses UVC light to eradicate 99.99% of viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Our superhydrophobic nanotech coating for your HMDs provides long-term care and prevention of grime, germs, and smells – while built-in air jets dry your headsets.

Does Cleanbox clean all the areas of the headset, even the ones that aren’t accessible with a cloth?

UVC is a line of sight technology so we have engineered our products to target all areas of a headset that have contact with the face, skin, hair, eyes, nose and mouth. All Cleanbox products are engineered for maximum efficacy use of UVC, which means the plastics, lenses, foam and rubber exposed to potential contagion transfer, have been safely and completely decontaminated. Our CleanMask decontaminates all areas of a mask, and our AdHoc Cleanbox fully decontaminates any object that it holds.

Does it also remove the grease, the dust, and other forms of dirt from the device or does it just kill the bacteria? And if not, how to handle with the dirt caused by the usage of the headset?

We provide a nanocoating that is hydrophobic and oleophobic for use on the textiles of a headset. It’s a one-time spray on the textiles, that creates an invisible irregular surface on the fabrics, keeping sweat, dirt, and of course, contagions including bacteria at the surface. When the device is put into the Cleanbox, the air jets blow off dust, dirt and any other detritus. This coating also helps prevent makeup from sticking to the surface. It is safe for electronics, has no toxic chemicals, and last for months.

Is there any risk for the hardware? Can these rays damage the lenses, the displays, etc.. of the HMD?

UVC light is very different from UVA and UVB light, the latter which are known to be bad for plastics. UVC doesn’t have the same effect. Our high-powered, 60-second cycles can be run over and over again for years without any harm to your headsets.

Why is there always a 0.01% of bacteria that survive? Is it so they can tell the others how effective is your product? 😀

🙂 You can’t legally claim 100% decontamination. But 99.99+% after 60-seconds means that we are operating at a log 4 or 5 kill rate—which is acceptable to hospitals and healthcare workers.

(Log 4 kill rate means 99.99% reduction of bacteria, while Log 5 is 99.999%)

With which AR/VR hardware does Cleanbox work? Is it also effective for controllers?

Cleanbox accommodates all major VR/AR/XR headsets on the market, as well as controllers. 

Are Cleanbox products effective against COVID-19?

UVC light has been proven highly effective against the coronavirus family and is a technology that has been used in hospitals for decades. Killing a virus is generally easier than eradicating bacteria (which we do in 60-seconds at a 99.99+% rate), and is a matter of UVC dosage and the magical math of distance/power/nanometer/time.

What’s the order of magnitude of price of your solutions?

Why don’t you send us an email and find out! We offer a range of products for enterprise, healthcare, and LBE. One of our sales reps would be happy to share our product deck and pricing options with you!

How do you envision the future of LBVR arcades after this pandemic? Will they rise again? When? Can you help with this problem?

Absolutely. I do believe in the opportunity that LBEs bring to the general public and see them as a strong gateway to global consumer adoption of VR and AR.

In order for this to happen, their customers need to FEEL safe but more than that—they need to actually BE safe. I think a lot of previous mindset on hygiene was that if the customer didn’t complain, they were doing it right. But the fact is that to a lot of people, the *thought* of dirty, shared headsets already kept them away from an entertainment venue so operators were not always aware of the revenue they were missing. Now that everyone is thinking about hygiene and safety, not only will it be important to SHOW customers how attentive you are to hygiene, it will be critical to prove that your hygiene solution works.

The silver lining for the well-prepared operator is that kids and adults who have been in quarantine for weeks will be wanting to go out and let off some steam, so there’s a great opportunity for them to come back stronger than ever.

Is it possible in your opinion to create an automatic disinfection device for automatic LBVR machines?

We can but that generally isn’t necessary for LBEs so it’s not a standard product option. We can build it into fully automated entertainment towers, and we are as with Periscape.