Access Insights

Case Study: Virtual Lex

Every organization has an origin story. Ours is a case study. The people who became Access Insights spent decades honing their craft at Intel. We left it at different times for different reasons, but kept in touch. Many of us knew Lex Frieden, chief architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In December 2024, Lex approached us and asked for help being present in rooms and events he could not travel to due to limitations of his disability. In the group that would eventually become Access Insights, he found a team with the right skills, with a shared passion for accessibility, and the time to collectively address his challenge. Becky Chierichetti led the initiative with a live-controlled digital twin of Lex. Pete Denman and Richard Beckwith constructed a robotic head to house the digital version, and Marco Beltman enabled immersive, high-fidelity presence with binaural audio. From the very first call, Lex was a codesigner in all aspects of the build.

On a conference stage, a seated interviewer turns toward the Virtual Lex robot head, a white head on a small draped table, which faces him back. Sponsor logos and a colorful transit mural fill the backdrop.
The bot in action. Lex, hundreds of miles away, in conversation on stage through the robot head. He hears the room in three dimensional binaural audio and turns the head to point its camera at whoever is speaking.

"Imagine and help me implement some creative telepresence demonstration."

Lex Frieden, to the team · December 2024, lightly edited

The challenge

The expertise could not stop. The travel had to.

Lex Frieden has spent five decades shaping disability policy, from architecting the Americans with Disabilities Act to advising governments and universities. The demand for that expertise keeps growing: lectures, conferences, testimony, classrooms. What stopped was his ability to be there in person.

In December 2024 he put the problem to people he knew and trusted: designers, researchers, and engineers who had spent their careers inside Intel building for accessibility. In a post-lockdown world, most people are very familiar with remote collaboration modalities such as video calls. Lex wanted something more impactful; he wanted a solution that would let a room experience him in a way that was more tangible and present than 2D video: his face, his timing, his presence, even when his body could not make the trip. A flat video call was the bar to clear, not the answer.

Approach and build

The approach

The user set the brief and the bar

This project began as a request from the person who would live with the result, put to a team that had just stepped out of long corporate careers and into the freedom to choose what mattered. Lex was an active codesigner the whole way. The team considered both physical embodiment and a digital twin. Three threads ran in parallel:

• A digital twin of Lex to use as an avatar in video calls
• A robot head to eventually house the avatar and act as a conversational target
• A holographic display to add an additional dimension of reality to the digital avatar.

Every decision came back to one test: does the room experience Lex as if he were physically present, and does Lex experience the room as if he were there in person?

The build

An avatar, a head, and open tools

Becky Chierichetti led the design and building of the avatar: a lip synced, animated likeness built with Character Creator 4, Blender, Unity, iFacialMocap, and VSeeFace. It is controlled by realtime video of Lex and functions as a realistic stand-in when Lex was unable to share video of himself. The pipeline was designed to be reproducible with minimal expertise and budget so it could be recreated by anyone. Pete Denman and Richard Beckwith built the physical structure to house the avatar: a robot head that can pivot on two axes and houses input for audio and video. Marco Beltman, our acoustics researcher, was heavily involved in the binaural audio: microphones seated in realistic ears allowed Lex to hear the room the way a person standing there would, while the head turns toward whoever is speaking.

Marco Beltman sits with a laptop on his knees in a sunlit kitchen, running audio calibration, while a foam stand-in head on a tripod, dressed in a jacket with taped-on microphone ears, faces the room.
Calibrating the ears. Marco Beltman runs the binaural calibration from his laptop, with a stand-in head wearing the microphone ears. Before the sound could be trusted, it had to be measured.
The Virtual Lex prototype in progress: a blue fiber shelled head and shoulders bust on a worktable, with a realistic silicone ear and a taped over eye socket where a camera mounts.
The physical prototype, in progress. The blue shell is the working head and torso; the realistic ears seat the binaural microphones, and the covered socket is a camera mount. Presence you can point at a podium.

The use case scenario

One lecture, given from his bed. A room, experienced from inside it.

The people below other than Lex are composites; the workflow is the real one. This is what a session looks like when the system does its job.

Presence runs both ways

From Lex

  • live face capture
  • his voice, in real time
  • expression and timing

The pipeline

  • Character Creator 4
  • Blender
  • Unity
  • iFacialMocap
  • VSeeFace
  • mostly free and open

In the room

  • lip synced avatar on screen
  • robot head that turns
  • camera view back to Lex
  • binaural sound back to Lex

Presence, not simulation

The system carries a live person into a room and carries the room back to him. Nothing speaks for Lex, predicts Lex, or stands in for Lex.

The person decides. Always.

  • his words, live, never generated
  • his schedule, his stamina, his call
  • his likeness, used only by him

Drawn from the team's build accounts. The avatar and the robot head are two embodiments of the same principle: the room should experience the person, and the person should experience the room.

The outcome

It worked well enough that people forgot.

In October 2025 the robotic interface made its public debut at a transit conference. It functioned as Lex's eyes and ears in front of the audience, and live control allowed him to gesture and look at the audience.

A hotel ballroom full of seated attendees looks up at a large screen showing Lex's animated avatar, a smiling man with gray hair in a light blue shirt, against a softly blurred room.
Lex on the big screen. While the robot head listens and looks on stage, the room sees Lex himself: his avatar, projected above the conversation.

More uses followed, in lecture halls and meetings, each one a room that treated the avatar as the man himself.

Then the favor for a friend became something nobody had planned: an organization. The careers that trained this team had ended at different times, for different reasons, but the work of building Virtual Lex proved that the team itself was the thing worth keeping. The group that gathered around Lex's December 2024 ask kept working together, and by January 2026 it had a name: Access Insights. Virtual Lex is not a project the company took on. It is where the company comes from, and it runs the same arc our ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit) and Connected Wheelchair case studies trace through our corporate years: begin with one person's lived reality, cocreate, build, validate in the real world.

  1. Lex's ask, December 2024
  2. Avatar and robot head, 2025
  3. Public debut, October 2025
  4. Access Insights, January 2026
  5. One click app, next
Side view of the Virtual Lex prototype bust on a worktable, showing the realistic silicone ear that houses a binaural microphone, with its wiring coiled behind the shoulder.
The ear is the point. Binaural microphones in realistic ears give the remote listener a human's sense of where sound comes from. Work in progress, photographed in the shop.

In June 2026 Lex presented the work with Pete Denman and Darryl Adams at the AADMD (American Academy of Developmental Medicine and Dentistry) One Voice session on inclusive technology, avatars, and the future of accessibility. His direction after: package the program so others can find it. The pipeline is already mostly free and open tools. What remains is making it effortless.

What this case proves

The end of one journey. The origin of this one.

Virtual Lex is the hinge between two chapters. The skills came from decades inside Intel, the same years our other case studies document. The mission came from a friend who needed to be in rooms his body could not reach. When the two met, the arc Access Insights now runs deliberately ran itself: begin with lived experience, a disabled expert defining his own requirements, cocreate, build, and validate in real rooms with real audiences.

It kept a founding voice of the disability rights movement teaching, testifying, and advising, and it founded this organization along the way. The next step, one click setup, is already specified by the user it serves. That is what disabled led development looks like, and it is how we intend to keep working.

Partner with us

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hello@accessinsights.net

Sources: the team's build accounts from Becky Chierichetti and Lex Frieden, the project email record, the site's Proto-Lab description, and the prototype photographs.