Hey,
This is Daniel. Together with Matt, we are building Inanimate - a consumer electronics company for the AI Era.
First time here? Welcome! This is Lab Notes, where we share our work and inspirations.
Previously…
Here’s what’s happening in The Lab.
Something in the Works
We are working towards something.
A release of physical devices that you can buy. This will be a fast to market, limited run. A way to get our ideas into customers' hands, and find out how people use agentic devices in the real world.
We are at the point of maximum expanse in this work. This week, finally, it feels like we are resolving more than opening up.
We will share a lot more about this in due time. But for now, this is our singular focus, and the context around everything we are doing.
And so we are…
Running through hundreds of product concepts, and whittling down to our five strongest to develop in greater detail
Sketching over breakfast with world leading designers to help feed more ideas into the process
Setting up a hardware-in-the-loop rig to improve the rate and reality that our code is being tested
Pushing forward with our Human-Machine Interaction loop - improving, fixing, iterating to make it robust enough for launch
Mapping out the high-level Inanimate user experience across all devices, ensuring it works for our core pre-loaded use case, as well as the cone of possibilities each device has.
Giving our agent more autonomy to test and explore using synthetic data, and speak to the devices, like a fake human tester. A bit wild.
All of this is now being captured for content by our lovely videographer Chris. We’ll be moving from text to visual storytelling in the coming weeks.
What else?
Thrilled to be doing this. It’s starting to feel like crunch time. Eyes down.
Yes, and…
Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.
Agent Extensions, Displays, and Joystick
Some great products caught our attention recently.
Granola for Apple Watch - the much loved AI note taker now works away from keyboard. “The best wearable is the one you’re already wearing.” Nicely put, Chris. More on the design process here.
Codex Micro - a new input device for agentic coding. Created by keyboard company Work Louder in collaboration with OpenAI, it has voice input, hot keys, and (as one wag put it) a dial that lets you increase the rate at which you give Open AI more money.
The Eden Project
In 1996, former music producer Tim Smit had an idea.
He wanted to create a place where people could learn about the plants that changed our world. Four years later, the Eden Project opened its doors. Last week, I visited and was totally blown away.
The buildings - examples of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome concept, and designed by Grimshaw Architects - house one of the largest indoor rainforests in the world. To walk inside is to be transported to a solar punk paradise.
There is a different story here though. While the Eden Project transformed a disused mine into one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, the people who built Eden also transformed a community, hobbled by industrial decline, through vision, determination, and shared experience.
A reminder that small groups of people can do incredible things.
The Eden Project
Star Axis
88 year old land artist Charles Ross is nearing completion of his 50 year project to build an eleven-story architectonic sculpture in the New Mexico desert.
It is called Star Axis - an archaeoastronomy monument designed to allow people to experience several earth-to-star alignments in human scale.
Another utterly profound project.
Read about it in this article from the New York Times (Gift Link). Find out more about Star Axis here.
Star Axis
There is No Sound of the 2020s
Last year, video essayist Adam Curtis suggested that we are stuck in a cultural moment. Too dependent on nostalgia fed back to us by algorithms trained on the past, we are unable to access the next phase in our collective cultural and civilisational future.
Perhaps, to paraphrase political scientist Francis Fukuyama, we have reached the end of cultural history?
This exceptional essay by Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor identifies a similar pattern in electronic music.
Watch a video summary (if the embed is broken). Check the long-read article here.
Thanks for reading. See you soon.