Sometimes it feels like we're sleepwalking through our lives.
We get all caught up in the demands of the day,
riveted to our phones and we forget to look up and look
around and see all of
the beautiful nuances happening around us all the time.
Innovation hinges on our ability to see things differently,
breaking boundaries and looking between the lines
in an effort to solve some of the world's greatest challenges.
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>> Our goal isn't to get more screens into people's hands,
our goal is to amplify
the experience that people have in real life.
We're constantly fusing together art, science,
and technology to take on some
of the greatest challenges in our lifetime.
We're discovering so many new ways to elevate
people's awareness through the experiences that we're building,
to make us more conscious of our environment,
more fully awake in this world.
So much of our work starts off with one simple question: what if?
What if we could augment our bodies to detect
and sense the invisible realms around us,
like for instance UV or carbon monoxide?
What might that look like?
What might that experience be like?
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>> So let's consider pollution.
Pollution is largely unseen
and while it's happening all around us, we
have no idea of the actual health impacts
it's causing us in our daily lives.
It's that what if question that actually led us to develop
colormetric makeup and hair color pigments that change
color based on the intensity of the UV index.
That's not magic, that's chemistry.
But what if we could actually hear them as well.
This past year we started
something called the Urban Innovation Initiative.
It's a cross-disciplinary effort that bridges together engineers,
designers, and researchers to tackle air quality.
We developed hyperlocal air quality sensors
to detect local air quality in real time.
Now what if we could take those signals and augment
something in our everyday life, for instance wind chimes.
If the air quality is good,
you might hear major chords and it sounds beautiful.
But if it isn't,
you might hear minor chords something discordant,
something that disturbs you.
This is project Eclipse.
We can detect four kinds of gases:
sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide,
ozone, and carbon monoxide.
In addition, we have a particle- sensing box that detects anything
from pollens to smoke, and it sends data right to the cloud.
And this enables people in
their own neighborhoods to know what's going
on with the air quality around them at a hyperlocal level.
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>> Let's talk about Project Florence.
What if we could talk to our plants?
How might that change our relationship with the natural world?
What would they say? How would they respond to us?
One of the artists that we actually worked with in
our residence program is Helene Steiner.
Helene had this idea of actually elevating
plant signals and translating
our language into plant language. Let me explain.
The way that Florence works is you
can type something to the plant.
So for instance, you could type something like,
"Good morning. How are you?"
and we use a natural language processing algorithm
to infer the sentiment of what you're texting to the plant.
We take that sentiment,
whether it's positive or negative,
we translate that into a red light or a blue light
which the plant will then have an electrochemical response to.
In addition to that, we augment the plant with sensors that infer
her state of moisture or dryness or if she's too hot or too cold,
and we combine all those things together to
have her actually print out a response.
Florence is just initially a whimsical piece
of art but this actually might have real world implications.
How might we grow our food in the future?
Perhaps we will need to augment
our crops to know in real time if they are healthy or not?
We're talking about very real solutions to global challenges.
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>> One of the examples of embedding sensing and
actuating capabilities into our fabrics
is something we call lightware.
So instead of sitting behind a lightbox,
you're actually immersed and wearing
a beautiful scarf of blue light.
So our question was:
How could we create
an easy plug and play platform for
people to build these experiences on top of?
So we used Microsoft MakeCode that enables anyone even like
fashion designers to plug and play
their own components into their garments.
So technical expertise is no longer a constraint.
Now we can provide these kind of creative tools that
enable them to go as far out as their imagination will take them.
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>> Our explorations with data-driven technologies have now
led us to one of our most ambitious creative collaborations.
We call her Ada.
Ada is our latest creative collaboration with Jenny Sabin Studios.
And Ada is incredibly disruptive.
Ada is comprised of
over 850 uniquely 3D-printed nylon parts that we call nodes,
and she's assembled with fiberglass rods and
digitally knitted cones to create one big ethereal piece,
almost like a collective mind or
heartbeat that lives in our atrium.
In order to get Ada to actually activate,
we've installed different camera stations around the building.
Camera stations that actually can detect
expressions and we translate those expressions into color.
So now Ada can swirl with color and pattern and
infer the different expressions and
activities going on inside the building.
Ada becomes almost our collective mind
because Ada infers a future in which
our architecture in the buildings and the environment that we live
in actually responds to us in real time.
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>> So think of it this way,
every one of us is like those uniquely printed 3D nodes,
we all have our quirky angles.
But when we come together and we fit just right,
we create something supernatural,
something beyond our mundane selves.
The way we see it,
art inspires us to come together,
bridges us back to our humanity.
And when we incorporate it into our technology,
we elevate this to the next level.
So most of the things that we create will never become
products and they're just not meant to,
our number one goal is to inspire.
So whether it's color- changing hair or
augmented wind chimes that enable us to hear air quality,
or even talking plants,
all of these things are coming
together to push a new narrative forward,
a narrative that actually brings art into
the conversation and expands our horizons,
and it pushes us into the next frontier.
And maybe someone who's watching this right now will be
inspired to go out and push
something meaningful and profound into the world.
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