• Shimmers, floating toolbars, and radical transparency: Here’s what iOS 26 could look like

    In less than two weeks, on June 9, Apple will kick off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, in which it will showcase the next versions of the operating systems that power its myriad devices. The centerpiece of that event will be iOS 26, the soon-to-be renumbered operating system that powers the company’s flagship product, the iPhone.

    Yet, despite artificial intelligence being all the rage in the tech industry right now, reports say that with iOS 26, Apple will promote something visual instead of artificial. While some new AI features may be baked into the newly renumbered OS, the key feature of iOS 26 will be its complete visual redesign. In other words, your iPhone’s software is about to look strikingly different. Here’s how.

    Welcome to the solarium—and iOS 26

    Two big changes are coming to the next iOS. The first is a naming rebrand. Historically, iOS versions were numbered sequentially, starting with “iPhone OS 1” for the original iPhone in 2007. With the iPhone’s 2010 operating system—its fourth version—Apple shortened the name to “iOS 4.”

    However, Bloomberg reports that starting with the new iOS Apple will debut on June 9, the company will drop the sequential numbering of the operating system, and go with the year it will spill over into, just like carmakers do with vehicles. So, despite being the 19th version, the upcoming iOS will no longer be called “iOS 19” and will instead be called “iOS 26.” This change will be carried over to the numbering system on all of Apple’s other operating systems, too, and is reportedly being done to provide a more uniform numbering scheme for its various software products, and make it easier for consumers to identify if they are running the latest device software.

    However, the rebranded iOS naming scheme is a relatively minor change compared to what else Apple has in store for iOS 19—sorry, iOS 26. That change is a radical visual redesign of the operating system.

    Most of what is currently known about iOS 26’s visual overhaul comes from two sources: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jon Prosser, host of the Front Page Tech YouTube channel. Both have reported on iOS 26’s major redesign, and their reports largely align, suggesting that they are, at least in part, accurate.

    So what will iOS 26 look like? Its internal codename—something Apple assigns to every software product in development—gives us a big clue. That name is “solarium,” Bloomberg reported. If you’re wondering what a solarium is, know that you’ve probably stood in one if you’ve ever been to an interior garden. It’s a room fitted with glass walls and ceilings, designed to let as much sunlight as possible filter in.

    Apple presumably chose the “solarium” codename for iOS 26 because the entire operating system will have a glass-like appearance. By “glass-like,” think of an operating system with elements like menus and toolbars that are partially transparent—you can see through them, and the colors and shapes of content behind them will show through, just like light shows through a solarium’s glass walls.

    If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because Apple has actually used similar transparency in one of its operating systems before—visionOS, the software that powers the Apple Vision Pro. Indeed, reports suggest that iOS 19’s design is inspired by visionOS. But visionOS powers a spatial computing device—one that melds the physical world with the digital. That 3D interface relies heavily on digital drop shadows and other visual tricks to re-create the feeling of physical depth. However, an iPhone’s operating system runs on a 2D screen, so don’t expect iOS 26 to feature heavy digital dropshadows. 

    If you want to see how Apple will handle transparent elements on a 2D device, you don’t have to wait until June 9. Instead, simply check out Apple’s new Invites app, which it launched in February. You can see a screenshot of it above. See how different the UI looks in the app from the UI of iOS 18 currently? Those glassy panes in the app give the best visual hint of what to expect system-wide in iOS 26.

    Another reported feature of the redesign is reflective buttons and other elements that shimmer when you move your phone. This shimmering isn’t caused by real light hitting your iPhone’s screen. Rather, the software can tell, thanks to your iPhone’s gyroscope, when the device is moving and tilting in your hand, and will thus generate a reflective light effect across buttons to give the translucent objects more depth and form.

    It will probably be very similar to how the home screen icons in tvOS, the operating system that powers the Apple TV, appear to shimmer when you gently swipe them with your thumb using the Siri Remote’s touchpad.

    iOS 26 is also expected to gain other major visual changes, including floating pill-shaped toolbars, thinner buttons, a glass-like keyboard, and potentially even rounder app icons.

    What’s behind the iOS 26 visual shakeup?

    Those who have reportedly seen builds of iOS 26 say the redesign that Apple is set to unveil in less than two weeks represents the most significant visual overhaul to the iPhone’s operating system since iOS 7 in 2013—a design that has largely persisted through and to the current iOS 18.

    Indeed, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has called the redesign transformative, stating that it is “one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history” while noting that it “will fundamentally change” the look of iOS.

    But here’s one thing about change: most people hate it—or are at least apprehensive about it. And Apple has a lot of people to contend with. It has more than two billion active devices around the world, used by hundreds of millions of users, and the switch isn’t coming to just the iPhone’s operating system, but to the operating systems of all of Apple’s devices this fall, including the iPad’s iPadOS, the Mac’s macOS, the Apple Watch’s watchOS, the Apple TV’s tvOS, and the Vision Pro’s visionOS.

    But Apple reportedly feels it needs to deliver something this year with iOS and its other operating systems that is, quite literally, eye-catching. It needs something special to help reinvigorate device sales, particularly after the flagship feature of iOS 18, Apple Intelligence, has largely been met with indifference by the average consumer and disappointment by AI aficionados.

    In January, respected TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated that there was no evidence to suggest that Apple Intelligence was driving hardware upgrade cycles among consumers. In Apple’s most recent financial report, from its second quarter, iPhone revenue rose about 2% from the same period a year earlier, to billion, but that growth may have been driven by U.S. consumers snapping up the device before Trump’s tariffs make iPhones more costly, notes Sherwood.

    Putting a new digital coat of paint on iOS 26 and the company’s other new operating systems is an easy way to make its devices feel fresh again—and, if done right, it can go a long way to actually making the ever-increasingly complicated operating systems more straightforward to use and easier to navigate.

    By incorporating the same design language used in iOS 26 into its other products, the redesigned interface may make users feel more familiar with Apple’s other devices, which could help spur sales of Macs or Apple TVs to people who currently only own iPhones.

    The iOS 26 redesign may also help distract from the fact that Apple isn’t expected to make any significant announcements regarding its AI platform, Apple Intelligence, at WWDC.

    Despite the early reports about iOS 26’s visual changes, we won’t know anything for sure until Apple unveils a preview of the upcoming operating system at WWDC on June 9.

    Speaking of that event: Apple’s logo for WWDC25 may be teasing the iOS 26 redesign in plain sight. If you check out the animated logo here, you’ll notice that the ends of the transparent, glass-like rainbow seem to show colored light reflecting through its surface—just like you’d see at a solarium.
    #shimmers #floating #toolbars #radical #transparency
    Shimmers, floating toolbars, and radical transparency: Here’s what iOS 26 could look like
    In less than two weeks, on June 9, Apple will kick off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, in which it will showcase the next versions of the operating systems that power its myriad devices. The centerpiece of that event will be iOS 26, the soon-to-be renumbered operating system that powers the company’s flagship product, the iPhone. Yet, despite artificial intelligence being all the rage in the tech industry right now, reports say that with iOS 26, Apple will promote something visual instead of artificial. While some new AI features may be baked into the newly renumbered OS, the key feature of iOS 26 will be its complete visual redesign. In other words, your iPhone’s software is about to look strikingly different. Here’s how. Welcome to the solarium—and iOS 26 Two big changes are coming to the next iOS. The first is a naming rebrand. Historically, iOS versions were numbered sequentially, starting with “iPhone OS 1” for the original iPhone in 2007. With the iPhone’s 2010 operating system—its fourth version—Apple shortened the name to “iOS 4.” However, Bloomberg reports that starting with the new iOS Apple will debut on June 9, the company will drop the sequential numbering of the operating system, and go with the year it will spill over into, just like carmakers do with vehicles. So, despite being the 19th version, the upcoming iOS will no longer be called “iOS 19” and will instead be called “iOS 26.” This change will be carried over to the numbering system on all of Apple’s other operating systems, too, and is reportedly being done to provide a more uniform numbering scheme for its various software products, and make it easier for consumers to identify if they are running the latest device software. However, the rebranded iOS naming scheme is a relatively minor change compared to what else Apple has in store for iOS 19—sorry, iOS 26. That change is a radical visual redesign of the operating system. Most of what is currently known about iOS 26’s visual overhaul comes from two sources: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jon Prosser, host of the Front Page Tech YouTube channel. Both have reported on iOS 26’s major redesign, and their reports largely align, suggesting that they are, at least in part, accurate. So what will iOS 26 look like? Its internal codename—something Apple assigns to every software product in development—gives us a big clue. That name is “solarium,” Bloomberg reported. If you’re wondering what a solarium is, know that you’ve probably stood in one if you’ve ever been to an interior garden. It’s a room fitted with glass walls and ceilings, designed to let as much sunlight as possible filter in. Apple presumably chose the “solarium” codename for iOS 26 because the entire operating system will have a glass-like appearance. By “glass-like,” think of an operating system with elements like menus and toolbars that are partially transparent—you can see through them, and the colors and shapes of content behind them will show through, just like light shows through a solarium’s glass walls. If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because Apple has actually used similar transparency in one of its operating systems before—visionOS, the software that powers the Apple Vision Pro. Indeed, reports suggest that iOS 19’s design is inspired by visionOS. But visionOS powers a spatial computing device—one that melds the physical world with the digital. That 3D interface relies heavily on digital drop shadows and other visual tricks to re-create the feeling of physical depth. However, an iPhone’s operating system runs on a 2D screen, so don’t expect iOS 26 to feature heavy digital dropshadows.  If you want to see how Apple will handle transparent elements on a 2D device, you don’t have to wait until June 9. Instead, simply check out Apple’s new Invites app, which it launched in February. You can see a screenshot of it above. See how different the UI looks in the app from the UI of iOS 18 currently? Those glassy panes in the app give the best visual hint of what to expect system-wide in iOS 26. Another reported feature of the redesign is reflective buttons and other elements that shimmer when you move your phone. This shimmering isn’t caused by real light hitting your iPhone’s screen. Rather, the software can tell, thanks to your iPhone’s gyroscope, when the device is moving and tilting in your hand, and will thus generate a reflective light effect across buttons to give the translucent objects more depth and form. It will probably be very similar to how the home screen icons in tvOS, the operating system that powers the Apple TV, appear to shimmer when you gently swipe them with your thumb using the Siri Remote’s touchpad. iOS 26 is also expected to gain other major visual changes, including floating pill-shaped toolbars, thinner buttons, a glass-like keyboard, and potentially even rounder app icons. What’s behind the iOS 26 visual shakeup? Those who have reportedly seen builds of iOS 26 say the redesign that Apple is set to unveil in less than two weeks represents the most significant visual overhaul to the iPhone’s operating system since iOS 7 in 2013—a design that has largely persisted through and to the current iOS 18. Indeed, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has called the redesign transformative, stating that it is “one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history” while noting that it “will fundamentally change” the look of iOS. But here’s one thing about change: most people hate it—or are at least apprehensive about it. And Apple has a lot of people to contend with. It has more than two billion active devices around the world, used by hundreds of millions of users, and the switch isn’t coming to just the iPhone’s operating system, but to the operating systems of all of Apple’s devices this fall, including the iPad’s iPadOS, the Mac’s macOS, the Apple Watch’s watchOS, the Apple TV’s tvOS, and the Vision Pro’s visionOS. But Apple reportedly feels it needs to deliver something this year with iOS and its other operating systems that is, quite literally, eye-catching. It needs something special to help reinvigorate device sales, particularly after the flagship feature of iOS 18, Apple Intelligence, has largely been met with indifference by the average consumer and disappointment by AI aficionados. In January, respected TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated that there was no evidence to suggest that Apple Intelligence was driving hardware upgrade cycles among consumers. In Apple’s most recent financial report, from its second quarter, iPhone revenue rose about 2% from the same period a year earlier, to billion, but that growth may have been driven by U.S. consumers snapping up the device before Trump’s tariffs make iPhones more costly, notes Sherwood. Putting a new digital coat of paint on iOS 26 and the company’s other new operating systems is an easy way to make its devices feel fresh again—and, if done right, it can go a long way to actually making the ever-increasingly complicated operating systems more straightforward to use and easier to navigate. By incorporating the same design language used in iOS 26 into its other products, the redesigned interface may make users feel more familiar with Apple’s other devices, which could help spur sales of Macs or Apple TVs to people who currently only own iPhones. The iOS 26 redesign may also help distract from the fact that Apple isn’t expected to make any significant announcements regarding its AI platform, Apple Intelligence, at WWDC. Despite the early reports about iOS 26’s visual changes, we won’t know anything for sure until Apple unveils a preview of the upcoming operating system at WWDC on June 9. Speaking of that event: Apple’s logo for WWDC25 may be teasing the iOS 26 redesign in plain sight. If you check out the animated logo here, you’ll notice that the ends of the transparent, glass-like rainbow seem to show colored light reflecting through its surface—just like you’d see at a solarium. #shimmers #floating #toolbars #radical #transparency
    WWW.FASTCOMPANY.COM
    Shimmers, floating toolbars, and radical transparency: Here’s what iOS 26 could look like
    In less than two weeks, on June 9, Apple will kick off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), in which it will showcase the next versions of the operating systems that power its myriad devices. The centerpiece of that event will be iOS 26, the soon-to-be renumbered operating system that powers the company’s flagship product, the iPhone. Yet, despite artificial intelligence being all the rage in the tech industry right now, reports say that with iOS 26 (formerly referred to as iOS 19—see below), Apple will promote something visual instead of artificial. While some new AI features may be baked into the newly renumbered OS, the key feature of iOS 26 will be its complete visual redesign. In other words, your iPhone’s software is about to look strikingly different. Here’s how. Welcome to the solarium—and iOS 26 Two big changes are coming to the next iOS. The first is a naming rebrand. Historically, iOS versions were numbered sequentially, starting with “iPhone OS 1” for the original iPhone in 2007. With the iPhone’s 2010 operating system—its fourth version—Apple shortened the name to “iOS 4.” However, Bloomberg reports that starting with the new iOS Apple will debut on June 9, the company will drop the sequential numbering of the operating system, and go with the year it will spill over into, just like carmakers do with vehicles. So, despite being the 19th version, the upcoming iOS will no longer be called “iOS 19” and will instead be called “iOS 26.” This change will be carried over to the numbering system on all of Apple’s other operating systems, too, and is reportedly being done to provide a more uniform numbering scheme for its various software products (currently numbered macOS 16, iPadOS 18, and visionOS 2, etc), and make it easier for consumers to identify if they are running the latest device software. However, the rebranded iOS naming scheme is a relatively minor change compared to what else Apple has in store for iOS 19—sorry, iOS 26. That change is a radical visual redesign of the operating system. Most of what is currently known about iOS 26’s visual overhaul comes from two sources: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jon Prosser, host of the Front Page Tech YouTube channel. Both have reported on iOS 26’s major redesign, and their reports largely align, suggesting that they are, at least in part, accurate. So what will iOS 26 look like? Its internal codename—something Apple assigns to every software product in development—gives us a big clue. That name is “solarium,” Bloomberg reported. If you’re wondering what a solarium is, know that you’ve probably stood in one if you’ve ever been to an interior garden. It’s a room fitted with glass walls and ceilings, designed to let as much sunlight as possible filter in. Apple presumably chose the “solarium” codename for iOS 26 because the entire operating system will have a glass-like appearance. By “glass-like,” think of an operating system with elements like menus and toolbars that are partially transparent—you can see through them, and the colors and shapes of content behind them will show through, just like light shows through a solarium’s glass walls. If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because Apple has actually used similar transparency in one of its operating systems before—visionOS, the software that powers the Apple Vision Pro. Indeed, reports suggest that iOS 19’s design is inspired by visionOS. But visionOS powers a spatial computing device—one that melds the physical world with the digital. That 3D interface relies heavily on digital drop shadows and other visual tricks to re-create the feeling of physical depth. However, an iPhone’s operating system runs on a 2D screen, so don’t expect iOS 26 to feature heavy digital dropshadows.  If you want to see how Apple will handle transparent elements on a 2D device, you don’t have to wait until June 9. Instead, simply check out Apple’s new Invites app, which it launched in February. You can see a screenshot of it above. See how different the UI looks in the app from the UI of iOS 18 currently? Those glassy panes in the app give the best visual hint of what to expect system-wide in iOS 26. Another reported feature of the redesign is reflective buttons and other elements that shimmer when you move your phone. This shimmering isn’t caused by real light hitting your iPhone’s screen. Rather, the software can tell, thanks to your iPhone’s gyroscope, when the device is moving and tilting in your hand, and will thus generate a reflective light effect across buttons to give the translucent objects more depth and form. It will probably be very similar to how the home screen icons in tvOS, the operating system that powers the Apple TV, appear to shimmer when you gently swipe them with your thumb using the Siri Remote’s touchpad. iOS 26 is also expected to gain other major visual changes, including floating pill-shaped toolbars (replacing the fixed toolbars used at the bottom of iPhone apps now), thinner buttons, a glass-like keyboard, and potentially even rounder app icons. What’s behind the iOS 26 visual shakeup? Those who have reportedly seen builds of iOS 26 say the redesign that Apple is set to unveil in less than two weeks represents the most significant visual overhaul to the iPhone’s operating system since iOS 7 in 2013—a design that has largely persisted through and to the current iOS 18. Indeed, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has called the redesign transformative, stating that it is “one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history” while noting that it “will fundamentally change” the look of iOS. But here’s one thing about change: most people hate it—or are at least apprehensive about it. And Apple has a lot of people to contend with. It has more than two billion active devices around the world, used by hundreds of millions of users, and the switch isn’t coming to just the iPhone’s operating system, but to the operating systems of all of Apple’s devices this fall, including the iPad’s iPadOS, the Mac’s macOS, the Apple Watch’s watchOS, the Apple TV’s tvOS, and the Vision Pro’s visionOS (all renumbered to “26,” too). But Apple reportedly feels it needs to deliver something this year with iOS and its other operating systems that is, quite literally, eye-catching. It needs something special to help reinvigorate device sales, particularly after the flagship feature of iOS 18, Apple Intelligence, has largely been met with indifference by the average consumer and disappointment by AI aficionados. In January, respected TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated that there was no evidence to suggest that Apple Intelligence was driving hardware upgrade cycles among consumers. In Apple’s most recent financial report, from its second quarter, iPhone revenue rose about 2% from the same period a year earlier, to $46.8 billion, but that growth may have been driven by U.S. consumers snapping up the device before Trump’s tariffs make iPhones more costly, notes Sherwood. Putting a new digital coat of paint on iOS 26 and the company’s other new operating systems is an easy way to make its devices feel fresh again—and, if done right, it can go a long way to actually making the ever-increasingly complicated operating systems more straightforward to use and easier to navigate. By incorporating the same design language used in iOS 26 into its other products, the redesigned interface may make users feel more familiar with Apple’s other devices, which could help spur sales of Macs or Apple TVs to people who currently only own iPhones. The iOS 26 redesign may also help distract from the fact that Apple isn’t expected to make any significant announcements regarding its AI platform, Apple Intelligence, at WWDC. Despite the early reports about iOS 26’s visual changes, we won’t know anything for sure until Apple unveils a preview of the upcoming operating system at WWDC on June 9. Speaking of that event: Apple’s logo for WWDC25 may be teasing the iOS 26 redesign in plain sight. If you check out the animated logo here, you’ll notice that the ends of the transparent, glass-like rainbow seem to show colored light reflecting through its surface—just like you’d see at a solarium.
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  • Pentagram’s galloping horse logo steers TwelveLabs rebrand

    Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs.
    Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.”
    Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable.
    Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram.
    “In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says.
    Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice.
    In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools.
    “Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.”
    “On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs.
    His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down.
    “We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this?
    “We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.”
    “Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says.
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
    The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding.
    “You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains.
    The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology.
    The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen.
    “We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.”


    The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour.
    “You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.”
    There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed.
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs
    Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers.
    “It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.”
    Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly.
    “It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.”
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
    Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
    #pentagrams #galloping #horse #logo #steers
    Pentagram’s galloping horse logo steers TwelveLabs rebrand
    Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs. Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.” Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable. Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram. “In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says. Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice. In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools. “Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.” “On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs. His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down. “We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this? “We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.” “Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding. “You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains. The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology. The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen. “We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.” The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour. “You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.” There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers. “It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.” Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly. “It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.” Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs #pentagrams #galloping #horse #logo #steers
    WWW.DESIGNWEEK.CO.UK
    Pentagram’s galloping horse logo steers TwelveLabs rebrand
    Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs. Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.” Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable. Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram. “In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says. Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice. In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools. “Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.” “On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs. His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down. “We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this? “We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.” “Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding. “You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains. The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology. The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen. “We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/01_TL_Logo_Gradient_16x9_60fps_10s_LOW.mp4 The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour. “You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.” There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed. Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers. “It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.” Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly. “It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.” Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri
  • Nintendo Switch 2 Community |OT| A New Generation of the Nintendo Switch Is Almost Here!

    IDontBeatGames
    ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice
    Member

    Oct 29, 2017

    21,074

    New York

    Welcome to the brand new Nintendo Switch 2 Community |OT|!

    Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development Division, commonly abbreviated as Nintendo EPD, is the largest division within the Japanese video game company Nintendo. The division focuses on developing and producing video games, mobile apps, and other related entertainment software for the company. EPD was created after merging their Entertainment Analysis & Developmentand Software Planning & Developmentdivisions in September 2015.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom​96​Everybody 1-2-Switch!​56​Pikmin 4​87​Super Mario Bros. Wonder​93​Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition​73​Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club​74​The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom​85​

    The Pokémon Companyis a Japanese company responsible for brand management, production, publishing, marketing, and licensing of the Pokémon franchise, which consists of video game software, a trading card game, anime television series, films, manga, home entertainment products, merchandise, and other ventures.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet​72​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero: Part I​66​Detective Pikachu Returns​66​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero: Part II​70​

    Upcoming Projects:​

    Game Title​Source​Pokemon Legends: Z-A​

    Monolith Software Inc., trading as Monolith Soft, is a Japanese video game development studio originally owned by Namcountil being bought out by Nintendo in 2007, best known for the Xenoblade Chronicles series of games.

    Click to expand...
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    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Xenoblade Chronicles 2​83​Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition​89​Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden County​80​Xenoblade Chronicles 3​89​Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Expansion Pass Wave 4 - Future Redeemed​92​

    Upcoming Projects:​

    Game Title​Source​Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition​

    HAL Laboratory, Inc., formerly shortened as HALKEN, is a Japanese video game developer founded on 21 February 1980. While independent, it has been closely tied with Nintendo throughout its history, and is often referred to as a second-party developer for the company. The company is most famous for their work on the Kirby and Mother series, as well as the first two Super Smash Bros. games.

    Click to expand...
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    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Kirby Star Allies​73​Kirby and the Forgotten Land​85​Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe​79​

    Upcoming Projects:​

    Game Title​Source​Kirby: Planet Robobot​

    Retro Studios, Inc. is an American video game developer and subsidiary of Nintendo based in Austin, Texas. The studio is best known for its work on the Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country series, and has contributed to several other Nintendo-developed projects, such as Mario Kart 7.

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    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze​83​Metroid Prime Remastered​94​

    Upcoming Projects:​

    Game Title​Source​Metroid Prime 4​Official Youtube Video​Rumors: Metroid Prime 2 & 3 Ports​Jeff Grubb​

    NDcube Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer and a subsidiary of Nintendo based in Japan with offices in Tokyo and Sapporo. The majority of the company is made up of former employees of Hudson Soft. They have also been the developers of the Mario Party series since Mario Party 9 onwards.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Super Mario Party​76​Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics​82​Mario Party Superstars​80​Everybody 1,2 Switch​56​Super Mario Party Jamboree​82​

    Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer best known for developing games published by Nintendo with the Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, WarioWare, and Wars video game series.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Current Project:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Fire Emblem: Three Houses​89​Paper Mario: The Origami King​80​WarioWare: Get It Together!​76​Fire Emblem: Engage​80​WarioWare: Movie It!​73​Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Remake​88​

    1-Up Studio Inc., formerly Brownie Brown Inc., is a Japanese video game developer founded on June 30, 2000, in Tokyo, Japan by Shinichi Kameoka and Kouji Tsuda who worked on the Mana series. The studio developed games for both Nintendo and Square Enix, including Magical Vacation and Sword of Mana.

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    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Ring Fit Adventure​83​Animal Crossing: New Horizons​90​Super Mario 3D All Stars​82​Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury​89​

    Next Level Games, Inc. is a Canadian video game developer owned by Nintendo based in Vancouver. The company is best known for its work with Nintendo, the Mario Strikers games and Punch-Out!! for the Wii, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon and Metroid Prime: Federation Force for the Nintendo 3DS, and Luigi's Mansion 3 for the Nintendo Switch.

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    Current Projects:​

    Game Title​Metacritic Score​Luigi's Mansion 3​86​Mario Strikers: Battle League​73​

    About the Nintendo Switch Online and the Expansion Pack:

    Play online with friends, family, and other players around the world.

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    Play old-school favorites like the Super Mario Bros.™ 3, Donkey Kong Country™, and The Legend of Zelda™: Link's Awakening games. These games include added online functionality so you can competeonline with friends depending on the game.

    Nintendo Switch Online members can buy a pair of Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers* and redeem each one for a digital game in the voucher catalog to score savings. For example, get The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and one other game for up to in savings with Game Vouchers!
    Click to expand...
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    Get all the benefits of Nintendo Switch Online, plus access to classic Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, and Sega Genesis games, along with select DLC.

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    Party like it's 1996 with classic Nintendo 64™ games like Mario Kart™ 64, GoldenEye 007, The Legend of Zelda™: Ocarina of Time™, and more!

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    Includes classics like The Legend of Zelda™: The Minish Cap and Super Mario™ Advance 4: Super Mario Bros.™ 3.

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    Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members also get access a collection of SEGA Genesis™ games—like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Golden Axe—that are great to play anytime, anywhere!

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    Uncover top-quality experiences from independent developers with Indie World! Covering a wide range of genres, Indie World represent some of the best titles available for the Nintendo Switch from independent developers.

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    The Nintendo Switch 2 has officially been announced!​

    Per Bloomberg:

    Robin Zhu, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said ahead of the announcement that Nintendo has prepared a supply chain network that will allow the company to sell more than 20 million units in its first year. That compares with the current Switch's sale of around 15 million units in its first four quarters.

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    Go hands-on with Nintendo Switch 2 at Nintendo Switch 2 Experience events in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas! A free Nintendo Account is required to register. You can sign up here starting January 17. A free Nintendo account is required for signups.

    Dates and Locations:

    New York, April 4-6, 2025
    Los Angeles, April 11-13, 2025
    Dallas, April 25-27, 2025
    Toronto, April 25-27, 2025
    Europe:

    Paris, April 4-6, 2025
    London, April 11-13, 2025
    Milan, April 25-27, 2025
    Berlin, April 25-27, 2025
    Madrid, May 9-11, 2025
    Amsterdam, May 9-11, 2025
    Oceania:

    Melbourne, May 10-11, 2025
    Asia:

    Tokyo, April 26-27, 2025
    Seoul, May 31-June 1, 2025
    Hong Kong, To be announced
    Taipei, To be announced

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    A Nintendo Direct focusing on the Nintendo Switch 2 has been confirmed! It will release in...
    Apr 2, 2025 at 10:00 AM


     

    Last edited: Jan 16, 2025

    Shaman
    Member

    Jan 18, 2024

    3,556

    Oh baby here we go. Exciting times ahead!
     

    OP

    OP

    IDontBeatGames
    ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice
    Member

    Oct 29, 2017

    21,074

    New York

    Shaman said:

    Oh baby here we go. Exciting times ahead!

    Click to expand...
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    Let the good times finally begin!

     

    PAFenix
    Unshakable Resolve
    Member

    Nov 21, 2019

    20,123

    A disappointing lack of Donkey Kong in the OT.
     

    Bishop89
    What Are Ya' Selling?
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    42,767

    Melbourne, Australia

    All aboard!

     

    lednerg
    Member

    Dec 18, 2017

    248

    We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video?
     

    Geg
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    6,606

    What the hell is a Switch
     

    Neoxon
    Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    93,516

    Houston, TX

    Joining in on a new era of Nintendo.
     

    OP

    OP

    IDontBeatGames
    ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice
    Member

    Oct 29, 2017

    21,074

    New York

    PAFenix said:

    A disappointing lack of Donkey Kong in the OT.

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    We will make it up for it by posting about Donkey Kong its ok we're about to get bananas

     

    ClickyCal'
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    65,518

    The year of Metroid Prime 4.
     

    Lukar
    Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    28,250

    Slick OT!

    ClickyCal' said:

    The year of Metroid Prime 4.

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    I reeeaaally hope it has Mouse-Con support on Switch 2. Playing the previous Prime games via PrimeHack feels so good.
     

    jman0625
    One Winged Uncle Works at Nintendo
    Member

    Dec 18, 2017

    845

    The year of a New Mario Kart after 11 years
     

    Zekes
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    7,955

    Can't wait for the western release of Mother 3 on the Switch 2 baby
     

    PAFenix
    Unshakable Resolve
    Member

    Nov 21, 2019

    20,123

    IDontBeatGames said:

    We will make it up for it by posting about Donkey Kong its ok we're about to get bananas

    Hell yeah, welcome to the super Mario Party!
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    Feel like we're going to have one hell of a Jamboree 

    OP

    OP

    IDontBeatGames
    ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice
    Member

    Oct 29, 2017

    21,074

    New York

    lednerg said:

    We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video?

    Click to expand...
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    This is what I'm waiting on! I want to add more Nintendo Switch 2 related content into the OP, I had to make due with various news outlets websites lol

    Geg said:

    What the hell is a Switch

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    That's a good question right there

    Neoxon said:

    Joining in on a new era of Nintendo.

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    ClickyCal' said:

    The year of Metroid Prime 4.

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    You've waited so long, your time is almost here, how does it feel?!

    Lukar said:

    Slick OT!

    Click to expand...
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    Thank you!
     

    jort
    Member

    Sep 18, 2024

    305

    In on first page
     

    Amnixia
    ▲ Legend ▲
    The Fallen

    Jan 25, 2018

    11,942

    Can't wait for the direct in April
     

    BannerThief
    Member

    Apr 10, 2019

    279

    Seattle

    Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.
     

    fox
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    197

    Should be fun!
     

    SofNascimento
    cursed
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    24,911

    São Paulo - Brazil

    I don't own a Switch but I must confess the Switch 2 is an alluring prospect. Waiting for more info.
     

    Spooky_Lantern
    Member

    Nov 21, 2017

    2,156

    So is it confirmed the joycon can be used as a mouse?
     

    MrSaturn99
    One Winged Slayer
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    13,066

    I live in a giant bucket.

    We're sorry we doubted ya, Nate!

    Fantastic work. Here's to a new era of Nintendo. 

    Aniki
    "This guy are sick"
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    7,253

    I hope I can get one day one. Looking forward to Monolith's new game.
     

    Televoid
    Uncle Works at Nintendo
    Member

    Nov 28, 2024

    1,458

    Alright so now that Mous-con is real, over/under on if we're finally getting DS NSO on the new system.
     

    Rndom Grenadez
    Prophet of Truth
    Member

    Dec 7, 2017

    6,095

    We in here!
     

    OP

    OP

    IDontBeatGames
    ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice
    Member

    Oct 29, 2017

    21,074

    New York

    BannerThief said:

    Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.

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    Hell yeah!! We're happy you're here!
     

    Shaman
    Member

    Jan 18, 2024

    3,556

    IDontBeatGames said:

    Let the good times finally begin!

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    Hell yeah! The gif is mental and I LOVE IT!

    Also the Direct will be on my birthday 

    Undeniablybiased
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    4,163

    Can't wait for everybody 1 Switch 2

    Genuinely though, very excited to see a new Mario kart and whatever weird games the mouse-con bring us. Full version of that caveman online playtest maybe?? 

    mavericktopgun
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    5,447

    Will the Switch 2 be bigger or as big as the ROG Ally? It's almost too big tbh.
     

    EPaul
    Member

    Oct 30, 2017

    650

    Let's Goooo!
     

    RebelStrike
    Member

    Apr 28, 2020

    925

    Hell yes and wow, very elaborate OT! Can't wait for the April Direct and more than ready to pick this up day one lol.
     

    Xwing
    This guy are sick of the unshakeable slayer
    Member

    Nov 11, 2017

    11,611

    This is an excellent OT; awesome work!

    Looking forward to the Halo MCC announcement. 

    Jakenbakin
    "This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance
    Member

    Jun 17, 2018

    14,385

    Please god give me a new Monolith trailer in April
     

    Lutv
    Member

    Nov 17, 2017

    178

    Jakarta

    Can't wait!
     

    Vex
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    25,625

    GODDAMN NEW THREAD SMELL?
     

    Punished Dan
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    4,534

    We will be there.
     

    KanjoBazooie
    ▲ Legend ▲
    Avenger

    Oct 26, 2017

    32,726

    Chicago

    BannerThief said:

    Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.

    Click to expand...
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    welcome back to having a Nintendo console, this one should be dope
     

    Maxime
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    3,590

    Highly doubt I'll be there day one, not even a big Nintendo client. But ngl, a new Nintendo console is always something special.
     

    Ramsiege
    Avenger

    Oct 27, 2017

    1,599

    Excited for this one! Can't wait!
     

    PaultheNerd
    Member

    Dec 25, 2018

    978

    Exciting times, looking forward to more news in April! Until then, Switch 1 direct and Pokemon Legends ZA trailer in February should hold me over.
     

    poptire
    Avatar Wrecking Crew
    The Fallen

    Oct 25, 2017

    15,517

    Hello Switch 2 family
     

    Punch_Rockgroin
    Member

    Feb 7, 2022

    849

    My poor wife has committed to getting this for me as a Father's Day gift. I wish her luck. 🫡

    Are we actually getting joycon mice?! 

    Lukar
    Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    28,250

    lednerg said:

    We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video?

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    IDontBeatGames said:

    This is what I'm waiting on! I want to add more Nintendo Switch 2 related content into the OP, I had to make due with various news outlets websites lol

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    There are a couple of pics on their press site, one sec

    EDIT: Here you go 

    Televoid
    Uncle Works at Nintendo
    Member

    Nov 28, 2024

    1,458

    BannerThief said:

    Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.

    Click to expand...
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    Honestly a good choice with the BC of the new system. You'll have two generations of games to easily play on.
     

    Kouriozan
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    24,836

    Posting in a new legendary thread.

    Switch 2 took it sweatass time but is finally showing itself ! 

    Mattmo831
    Featuring Mattmo831 from the Apple v Epic case
    Member

    Oct 26, 2020

    6,541

    Hello my family. cant wait for a new 3d mario 

    Bizarre
    Member

    Dec 7, 2024

    970

    Here goes

    The season of F Zero must be coming this time around 

    rewkol
    One Winged Slayer
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    420

    BannerThief said:

    Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.

    Click to expand...
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    Don't know if I envy you for having so many great games to go back to, or if I feel sorry for you because there are so many games to go back to andso many more great games to come! 

    Genesius
    Member

    Nov 2, 2018

    20,586

    Gonna wait for Animal Crossing before I pick up a Switch 2

    Mario Kart is evergreen 

    thecowboypoet
    Avenger

    Oct 25, 2017

    2,533

    Bishop89 said:

    Ultimate tier gif. 
    #nintendo #switch #community #new #generation
    Nintendo Switch 2 Community |OT| A New Generation of the Nintendo Switch Is Almost Here!
    IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York Welcome to the brand new Nintendo Switch 2 Community |OT|! Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development Division, commonly abbreviated as Nintendo EPD, is the largest division within the Japanese video game company Nintendo. The division focuses on developing and producing video games, mobile apps, and other related entertainment software for the company. EPD was created after merging their Entertainment Analysis & Developmentand Software Planning & Developmentdivisions in September 2015. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom​96​Everybody 1-2-Switch!​56​Pikmin 4​87​Super Mario Bros. Wonder​93​Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition​73​Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club​74​The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom​85​ The Pokémon Companyis a Japanese company responsible for brand management, production, publishing, marketing, and licensing of the Pokémon franchise, which consists of video game software, a trading card game, anime television series, films, manga, home entertainment products, merchandise, and other ventures. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet​72​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero: Part I​66​Detective Pikachu Returns​66​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero: Part II​70​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Pokemon Legends: Z-A​ Monolith Software Inc., trading as Monolith Soft, is a Japanese video game development studio originally owned by Namcountil being bought out by Nintendo in 2007, best known for the Xenoblade Chronicles series of games. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Xenoblade Chronicles 2​83​Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition​89​Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden County​80​Xenoblade Chronicles 3​89​Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Expansion Pass Wave 4 - Future Redeemed​92​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition​ HAL Laboratory, Inc., formerly shortened as HALKEN, is a Japanese video game developer founded on 21 February 1980. While independent, it has been closely tied with Nintendo throughout its history, and is often referred to as a second-party developer for the company. The company is most famous for their work on the Kirby and Mother series, as well as the first two Super Smash Bros. games. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Kirby Star Allies​73​Kirby and the Forgotten Land​85​Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe​79​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Kirby: Planet Robobot​ Retro Studios, Inc. is an American video game developer and subsidiary of Nintendo based in Austin, Texas. The studio is best known for its work on the Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country series, and has contributed to several other Nintendo-developed projects, such as Mario Kart 7. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze​83​Metroid Prime Remastered​94​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Metroid Prime 4​Official Youtube Video​Rumors: Metroid Prime 2 & 3 Ports​Jeff Grubb​ NDcube Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer and a subsidiary of Nintendo based in Japan with offices in Tokyo and Sapporo. The majority of the company is made up of former employees of Hudson Soft. They have also been the developers of the Mario Party series since Mario Party 9 onwards. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Super Mario Party​76​Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics​82​Mario Party Superstars​80​Everybody 1,2 Switch​56​Super Mario Party Jamboree​82​ Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer best known for developing games published by Nintendo with the Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, WarioWare, and Wars video game series. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Project:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Fire Emblem: Three Houses​89​Paper Mario: The Origami King​80​WarioWare: Get It Together!​76​Fire Emblem: Engage​80​WarioWare: Movie It!​73​Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Remake​88​ 1-Up Studio Inc., formerly Brownie Brown Inc., is a Japanese video game developer founded on June 30, 2000, in Tokyo, Japan by Shinichi Kameoka and Kouji Tsuda who worked on the Mana series. The studio developed games for both Nintendo and Square Enix, including Magical Vacation and Sword of Mana. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Ring Fit Adventure​83​Animal Crossing: New Horizons​90​Super Mario 3D All Stars​82​Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury​89​ Next Level Games, Inc. is a Canadian video game developer owned by Nintendo based in Vancouver. The company is best known for its work with Nintendo, the Mario Strikers games and Punch-Out!! for the Wii, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon and Metroid Prime: Federation Force for the Nintendo 3DS, and Luigi's Mansion 3 for the Nintendo Switch. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Luigi's Mansion 3​86​Mario Strikers: Battle League​73​ About the Nintendo Switch Online and the Expansion Pack: Play online with friends, family, and other players around the world. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Play old-school favorites like the Super Mario Bros.™ 3, Donkey Kong Country™, and The Legend of Zelda™: Link's Awakening games. These games include added online functionality so you can competeonline with friends depending on the game. Nintendo Switch Online members can buy a pair of Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers* and redeem each one for a digital game in the voucher catalog to score savings. For example, get The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and one other game for up to in savings with Game Vouchers! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Get all the benefits of Nintendo Switch Online, plus access to classic Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, and Sega Genesis games, along with select DLC. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Party like it's 1996 with classic Nintendo 64™ games like Mario Kart™ 64, GoldenEye 007, The Legend of Zelda™: Ocarina of Time™, and more! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Includes classics like The Legend of Zelda™: The Minish Cap and Super Mario™ Advance 4: Super Mario Bros.™ 3. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members also get access a collection of SEGA Genesis™ games—like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Golden Axe—that are great to play anytime, anywhere! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Uncover top-quality experiences from independent developers with Indie World! Covering a wide range of genres, Indie World represent some of the best titles available for the Nintendo Switch from independent developers. Click to expand... Click to shrink... The Nintendo Switch 2 has officially been announced!​ Per Bloomberg: Robin Zhu, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said ahead of the announcement that Nintendo has prepared a supply chain network that will allow the company to sell more than 20 million units in its first year. That compares with the current Switch's sale of around 15 million units in its first four quarters. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Go hands-on with Nintendo Switch 2 at Nintendo Switch 2 Experience events in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas! A free Nintendo Account is required to register. You can sign up here starting January 17. A free Nintendo account is required for signups. Dates and Locations: New York, April 4-6, 2025 Los Angeles, April 11-13, 2025 Dallas, April 25-27, 2025 Toronto, April 25-27, 2025 Europe: Paris, April 4-6, 2025 London, April 11-13, 2025 Milan, April 25-27, 2025 Berlin, April 25-27, 2025 Madrid, May 9-11, 2025 Amsterdam, May 9-11, 2025 Oceania: Melbourne, May 10-11, 2025 Asia: Tokyo, April 26-27, 2025 Seoul, May 31-June 1, 2025 Hong Kong, To be announced Taipei, To be announced Click to expand... Click to shrink... A Nintendo Direct focusing on the Nintendo Switch 2 has been confirmed! It will release in... Apr 2, 2025 at 10:00 AM ​   Last edited: Jan 16, 2025 Shaman Member Jan 18, 2024 3,556 Oh baby here we go. Exciting times ahead!   OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York Shaman said: Oh baby here we go. Exciting times ahead! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Let the good times finally begin!   PAFenix Unshakable Resolve Member Nov 21, 2019 20,123 A disappointing lack of Donkey Kong in the OT.   Bishop89 What Are Ya' Selling? Member Oct 25, 2017 42,767 Melbourne, Australia All aboard!   lednerg Member Dec 18, 2017 248 We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video?   Geg Member Oct 25, 2017 6,606 What the hell is a Switch   Neoxon Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst Member Oct 25, 2017 93,516 Houston, TX Joining in on a new era of Nintendo.   OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York PAFenix said: A disappointing lack of Donkey Kong in the OT. Click to expand... Click to shrink... We will make it up for it by posting about Donkey Kong its ok we're about to get bananas   ClickyCal' Member Oct 25, 2017 65,518 The year of Metroid Prime 4.   Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,250 Slick OT! ClickyCal' said: The year of Metroid Prime 4. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I reeeaaally hope it has Mouse-Con support on Switch 2. Playing the previous Prime games via PrimeHack feels so good.   jman0625 One Winged Uncle Works at Nintendo Member Dec 18, 2017 845 The year of a New Mario Kart after 11 years   Zekes Member Oct 25, 2017 7,955 Can't wait for the western release of Mother 3 on the Switch 2 baby   PAFenix Unshakable Resolve Member Nov 21, 2019 20,123 IDontBeatGames said: We will make it up for it by posting about Donkey Kong its ok we're about to get bananas Hell yeah, welcome to the super Mario Party! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Feel like we're going to have one hell of a Jamboree  OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York lednerg said: We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video? Click to expand... Click to shrink... This is what I'm waiting on! I want to add more Nintendo Switch 2 related content into the OP, I had to make due with various news outlets websites lol Geg said: What the hell is a Switch Click to expand... Click to shrink... That's a good question right there Neoxon said: Joining in on a new era of Nintendo. Click to expand... Click to shrink... ClickyCal' said: The year of Metroid Prime 4. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You've waited so long, your time is almost here, how does it feel?! Lukar said: Slick OT! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Thank you!   jort Member Sep 18, 2024 305 In on first page   Amnixia ▲ Legend ▲ The Fallen Jan 25, 2018 11,942 Can't wait for the direct in April   BannerThief Member Apr 10, 2019 279 Seattle Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.   fox Member Oct 25, 2017 197 Should be fun!   SofNascimento cursed Member Oct 28, 2017 24,911 São Paulo - Brazil I don't own a Switch but I must confess the Switch 2 is an alluring prospect. Waiting for more info.   Spooky_Lantern Member Nov 21, 2017 2,156 So is it confirmed the joycon can be used as a mouse?   MrSaturn99 One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 13,066 I live in a giant bucket. We're sorry we doubted ya, Nate! Fantastic work. Here's to a new era of Nintendo.  Aniki "This guy are sick" Member Oct 25, 2017 7,253 I hope I can get one day one. Looking forward to Monolith's new game.   Televoid Uncle Works at Nintendo Member Nov 28, 2024 1,458 Alright so now that Mous-con is real, over/under on if we're finally getting DS NSO on the new system.   Rndom Grenadez Prophet of Truth Member Dec 7, 2017 6,095 We in here!   OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Hell yeah!! We're happy you're here!   Shaman Member Jan 18, 2024 3,556 IDontBeatGames said: Let the good times finally begin! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Hell yeah! The gif is mental and I LOVE IT! Also the Direct will be on my birthday  Undeniablybiased Member Oct 25, 2017 4,163 Can't wait for everybody 1 Switch 2 Genuinely though, very excited to see a new Mario kart and whatever weird games the mouse-con bring us. Full version of that caveman online playtest maybe??  mavericktopgun Member Oct 27, 2017 5,447 Will the Switch 2 be bigger or as big as the ROG Ally? It's almost too big tbh.   EPaul Member Oct 30, 2017 650 Let's Goooo!   RebelStrike Member Apr 28, 2020 925 Hell yes and wow, very elaborate OT! Can't wait for the April Direct and more than ready to pick this up day one lol.   Xwing This guy are sick of the unshakeable slayer Member Nov 11, 2017 11,611 This is an excellent OT; awesome work! Looking forward to the Halo MCC announcement.  Jakenbakin "This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance Member Jun 17, 2018 14,385 Please god give me a new Monolith trailer in April   Lutv Member Nov 17, 2017 178 Jakarta Can't wait!   Vex Member Oct 25, 2017 25,625 GODDAMN NEW THREAD SMELL?   Punished Dan Member Oct 27, 2017 4,534 We will be there.   KanjoBazooie ▲ Legend ▲ Avenger Oct 26, 2017 32,726 Chicago BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... welcome back to having a Nintendo console, this one should be dope   Maxime Member Oct 27, 2017 3,590 Highly doubt I'll be there day one, not even a big Nintendo client. But ngl, a new Nintendo console is always something special.   Ramsiege Avenger Oct 27, 2017 1,599 Excited for this one! Can't wait!   PaultheNerd Member Dec 25, 2018 978 Exciting times, looking forward to more news in April! Until then, Switch 1 direct and Pokemon Legends ZA trailer in February should hold me over.   poptire Avatar Wrecking Crew The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 15,517 Hello Switch 2 family   Punch_Rockgroin Member Feb 7, 2022 849 My poor wife has committed to getting this for me as a Father's Day gift. I wish her luck. 🫡 Are we actually getting joycon mice?!  Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,250 lednerg said: We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video? Click to expand... Click to shrink... IDontBeatGames said: This is what I'm waiting on! I want to add more Nintendo Switch 2 related content into the OP, I had to make due with various news outlets websites lol Click to expand... Click to shrink... There are a couple of pics on their press site, one sec EDIT: Here you go  Televoid Uncle Works at Nintendo Member Nov 28, 2024 1,458 BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Honestly a good choice with the BC of the new system. You'll have two generations of games to easily play on.   Kouriozan Member Oct 25, 2017 24,836 Posting in a new legendary thread. Switch 2 took it sweatass time but is finally showing itself !  Mattmo831 Featuring Mattmo831 from the Apple v Epic case Member Oct 26, 2020 6,541 Hello my family. cant wait for a new 3d mario  Bizarre Member Dec 7, 2024 970 Here goes The season of F Zero must be coming this time around  rewkol One Winged Slayer Member Oct 27, 2017 420 BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Don't know if I envy you for having so many great games to go back to, or if I feel sorry for you because there are so many games to go back to andso many more great games to come!  Genesius Member Nov 2, 2018 20,586 Gonna wait for Animal Crossing before I pick up a Switch 2 Mario Kart is evergreen  thecowboypoet Avenger Oct 25, 2017 2,533 Bishop89 said: Ultimate tier gif.  #nintendo #switch #community #new #generation
    WWW.RESETERA.COM
    Nintendo Switch 2 Community |OT| A New Generation of the Nintendo Switch Is Almost Here!
    IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York Welcome to the brand new Nintendo Switch 2 Community |OT|! Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development Division, commonly abbreviated as Nintendo EPD, is the largest division within the Japanese video game company Nintendo. The division focuses on developing and producing video games, mobile apps, and other related entertainment software for the company. EPD was created after merging their Entertainment Analysis & Development (EAD) and Software Planning & Development (SPD) divisions in September 2015. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom​96​Everybody 1-2-Switch!​56​Pikmin 4​87​Super Mario Bros. Wonder​93​Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition​73​Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club​74​The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom​85​ The Pokémon Company (株式会社ポケモン, Kabushiki Gaisha Pokemon) (TPC) is a Japanese company responsible for brand management, production, publishing, marketing, and licensing of the Pokémon franchise, which consists of video game software, a trading card game, anime television series, films, manga, home entertainment products, merchandise, and other ventures. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet​72​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero: Part I​66​Detective Pikachu Returns​66​Pokemon Scarlet/Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero: Part II​70​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Pokemon Legends: Z-A​ Monolith Software Inc., trading as Monolith Soft, is a Japanese video game development studio originally owned by Namco (later Bandai Namco) until being bought out by Nintendo in 2007, best known for the Xenoblade Chronicles series of games. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Xenoblade Chronicles 2​83​Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition​89​Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden County​80​Xenoblade Chronicles 3​89​Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Expansion Pass Wave 4 - Future Redeemed​92​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition​ HAL Laboratory, Inc., formerly shortened as HALKEN (derived from its native name), is a Japanese video game developer founded on 21 February 1980. While independent, it has been closely tied with Nintendo throughout its history, and is often referred to as a second-party developer for the company. The company is most famous for their work on the Kirby and Mother series, as well as the first two Super Smash Bros. games. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Kirby Star Allies​73​Kirby and the Forgotten Land​85​Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe​79​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Kirby: Planet Robobot​ Retro Studios, Inc. is an American video game developer and subsidiary of Nintendo based in Austin, Texas. The studio is best known for its work on the Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country series, and has contributed to several other Nintendo-developed projects, such as Mario Kart 7. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze​83​Metroid Prime Remastered​94​ Upcoming Projects:​ Game Title​Source​Metroid Prime 4​Official Youtube Video​Rumors: Metroid Prime 2 & 3 Ports​Jeff Grubb​ NDcube Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer and a subsidiary of Nintendo based in Japan with offices in Tokyo and Sapporo. The majority of the company is made up of former employees of Hudson Soft. They have also been the developers of the Mario Party series since Mario Party 9 onwards. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Super Mario Party​76​Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics​82​Mario Party Superstars​80​Everybody 1,2 Switch​56​Super Mario Party Jamboree​82​ Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd. is a Japanese video game developer best known for developing games published by Nintendo with the Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, WarioWare, and Wars video game series. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Project:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Fire Emblem: Three Houses​89​Paper Mario: The Origami King​80​WarioWare: Get It Together!​76​Fire Emblem: Engage​80​WarioWare: Movie It!​73​Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Remake​88​ 1-Up Studio Inc. (stylized as "1-UP Studio Inc."), formerly Brownie Brown Inc., is a Japanese video game developer founded on June 30, 2000, in Tokyo, Japan by Shinichi Kameoka and Kouji Tsuda who worked on the Mana series. The studio developed games for both Nintendo and Square Enix, including Magical Vacation and Sword of Mana. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Ring Fit Adventure​83​Animal Crossing: New Horizons​90​Super Mario 3D All Stars​82​Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury​89​ Next Level Games, Inc. is a Canadian video game developer owned by Nintendo based in Vancouver. The company is best known for its work with Nintendo, the Mario Strikers games and Punch-Out!! for the Wii, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon and Metroid Prime: Federation Force for the Nintendo 3DS, and Luigi's Mansion 3 for the Nintendo Switch. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Current Projects:​ Game Title​Metacritic Score​Luigi's Mansion 3​86​Mario Strikers: Battle League​73​ About the Nintendo Switch Online and the Expansion Pack: Play online with friends, family, and other players around the world. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Play old-school favorites like the Super Mario Bros.™ 3, Donkey Kong Country™, and The Legend of Zelda™: Link's Awakening games. These games include added online functionality so you can compete (or cooperate) online with friends depending on the game. Nintendo Switch Online members can buy a pair of Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers* and redeem each one for a digital game in the voucher catalog to score savings. For example, get The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and one other game for up to $30 in savings with Game Vouchers! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Get all the benefits of Nintendo Switch Online, plus access to classic Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, and Sega Genesis games, along with select DLC. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Party like it's 1996 with classic Nintendo 64™ games like Mario Kart™ 64, GoldenEye 007, The Legend of Zelda™: Ocarina of Time™, and more! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Includes classics like The Legend of Zelda™: The Minish Cap and Super Mario™ Advance 4: Super Mario Bros.™ 3. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members also get access a collection of SEGA Genesis™ games—like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Golden Axe—that are great to play anytime, anywhere! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Uncover top-quality experiences from independent developers with Indie World! Covering a wide range of genres, Indie World represent some of the best titles available for the Nintendo Switch from independent developers. Click to expand... Click to shrink... The Nintendo Switch 2 has officially been announced!​ Per Bloomberg: Robin Zhu, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said ahead of the announcement that Nintendo has prepared a supply chain network that will allow the company to sell more than 20 million units in its first year. That compares with the current Switch's sale of around 15 million units in its first four quarters. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Go hands-on with Nintendo Switch 2 at Nintendo Switch 2 Experience events in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas! A free Nintendo Account is required to register. You can sign up here starting January 17. A free Nintendo account is required for signups. Dates and Locations: New York, April 4-6, 2025 Los Angeles, April 11-13, 2025 Dallas, April 25-27, 2025 Toronto, April 25-27, 2025 Europe: Paris, April 4-6, 2025 London, April 11-13, 2025 Milan, April 25-27, 2025 Berlin, April 25-27, 2025 Madrid, May 9-11, 2025 Amsterdam, May 9-11, 2025 Oceania: Melbourne, May 10-11, 2025 Asia: Tokyo (Makuhari), April 26-27, 2025 Seoul, May 31-June 1, 2025 Hong Kong, To be announced Taipei, To be announced Click to expand... Click to shrink... A Nintendo Direct focusing on the Nintendo Switch 2 has been confirmed! It will release in... Apr 2, 2025 at 10:00 AM ​   Last edited: Jan 16, 2025 Shaman Member Jan 18, 2024 3,556 Oh baby here we go. Exciting times ahead!   OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York Shaman said: Oh baby here we go. Exciting times ahead! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Let the good times finally begin!   PAFenix Unshakable Resolve Member Nov 21, 2019 20,123 A disappointing lack of Donkey Kong in the OT.   Bishop89 What Are Ya' Selling? Member Oct 25, 2017 42,767 Melbourne, Australia All aboard!   lednerg Member Dec 18, 2017 248 We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video?   Geg Member Oct 25, 2017 6,606 What the hell is a Switch   Neoxon Spotlighting Black Excellence - Diversity Analyst Member Oct 25, 2017 93,516 Houston, TX Joining in on a new era of Nintendo.   OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York PAFenix said: A disappointing lack of Donkey Kong in the OT. Click to expand... Click to shrink... We will make it up for it by posting about Donkey Kong its ok we're about to get bananas   ClickyCal' Member Oct 25, 2017 65,518 The year of Metroid Prime 4.   Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,250 Slick OT! ClickyCal' said: The year of Metroid Prime 4. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I reeeaaally hope it has Mouse-Con support on Switch 2. Playing the previous Prime games via PrimeHack feels so good.   jman0625 One Winged Uncle Works at Nintendo Member Dec 18, 2017 845 The year of a New Mario Kart after 11 years   Zekes Member Oct 25, 2017 7,955 Can't wait for the western release of Mother 3 on the Switch 2 baby   PAFenix Unshakable Resolve Member Nov 21, 2019 20,123 IDontBeatGames said: We will make it up for it by posting about Donkey Kong its ok we're about to get bananas Hell yeah, welcome to the super Mario Party! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Feel like we're going to have one hell of a Jamboree  OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York lednerg said: We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video? Click to expand... Click to shrink... This is what I'm waiting on! I want to add more Nintendo Switch 2 related content into the OP, I had to make due with various news outlets websites lol Geg said: What the hell is a Switch Click to expand... Click to shrink... That's a good question right there Neoxon said: Joining in on a new era of Nintendo. Click to expand... Click to shrink... ClickyCal' said: The year of Metroid Prime 4. Click to expand... Click to shrink... You've waited so long, your time is almost here, how does it feel?! Lukar said: Slick OT! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Thank you!   jort Member Sep 18, 2024 305 In on first page   Amnixia ▲ Legend ▲ The Fallen Jan 25, 2018 11,942 Can't wait for the direct in April   BannerThief Member Apr 10, 2019 279 Seattle Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg.   fox Member Oct 25, 2017 197 Should be fun!   SofNascimento cursed Member Oct 28, 2017 24,911 São Paulo - Brazil I don't own a Switch but I must confess the Switch 2 is an alluring prospect. Waiting for more info.   Spooky_Lantern Member Nov 21, 2017 2,156 So is it confirmed the joycon can be used as a mouse?   MrSaturn99 One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 13,066 I live in a giant bucket. We're sorry we doubted ya, Nate! Fantastic work. Here's to a new era of Nintendo.  Aniki "This guy are sick" Member Oct 25, 2017 7,253 I hope I can get one day one. Looking forward to Monolith's new game.   Televoid Uncle Works at Nintendo Member Nov 28, 2024 1,458 Alright so now that Mous-con is real, over/under on if we're finally getting DS NSO on the new system.   Rndom Grenadez Prophet of Truth Member Dec 7, 2017 6,095 We in here!   OP OP IDontBeatGames ThreadMarksman - Saved Transistor's sanity twice Member Oct 29, 2017 21,074 New York BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Hell yeah!! We're happy you're here!   Shaman Member Jan 18, 2024 3,556 IDontBeatGames said: Let the good times finally begin! Click to expand... Click to shrink... Hell yeah! The gif is mental and I LOVE IT! Also the Direct will be on my birthday  Undeniablybiased Member Oct 25, 2017 4,163 Can't wait for everybody 1 Switch 2 Genuinely though, very excited to see a new Mario kart and whatever weird games the mouse-con bring us. Full version of that caveman online playtest maybe??  mavericktopgun Member Oct 27, 2017 5,447 Will the Switch 2 be bigger or as big as the ROG Ally? It's almost too big tbh.   EPaul Member Oct 30, 2017 650 Let's Goooo!   RebelStrike Member Apr 28, 2020 925 Hell yes and wow, very elaborate OT! Can't wait for the April Direct and more than ready to pick this up day one lol.   Xwing This guy are sick of the unshakeable slayer Member Nov 11, 2017 11,611 This is an excellent OT; awesome work! Looking forward to the Halo MCC announcement.  Jakenbakin "This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance Member Jun 17, 2018 14,385 Please god give me a new Monolith trailer in April   Lutv Member Nov 17, 2017 178 Jakarta Can't wait!   Vex Member Oct 25, 2017 25,625 GODDAMN NEW THREAD SMELL?   Punished Dan Member Oct 27, 2017 4,534 We will be there.   KanjoBazooie ▲ Legend ▲ Avenger Oct 26, 2017 32,726 Chicago BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... welcome back to having a Nintendo console, this one should be dope   Maxime Member Oct 27, 2017 3,590 Highly doubt I'll be there day one, not even a big Nintendo client. But ngl, a new Nintendo console is always something special.   Ramsiege Avenger Oct 27, 2017 1,599 Excited for this one! Can't wait!   PaultheNerd Member Dec 25, 2018 978 Exciting times, looking forward to more news in April! Until then, Switch 1 direct and Pokemon Legends ZA trailer in February should hold me over.   poptire Avatar Wrecking Crew The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 15,517 Hello Switch 2 family   Punch_Rockgroin Member Feb 7, 2022 849 My poor wife has committed to getting this for me as a Father's Day gift. I wish her luck. 🫡 Are we actually getting joycon mice?!  Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,250 lednerg said: We've made it! Does anybody have access to a press kit with higher quality images/video? Click to expand... Click to shrink... IDontBeatGames said: This is what I'm waiting on! I want to add more Nintendo Switch 2 related content into the OP, I had to make due with various news outlets websites lol Click to expand... Click to shrink... There are a couple of pics on their press site, one sec EDIT: Here you go  Televoid Uncle Works at Nintendo Member Nov 28, 2024 1,458 BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Honestly a good choice with the BC of the new system. You'll have two generations of games to easily play on.   Kouriozan Member Oct 25, 2017 24,836 Posting in a new legendary thread. Switch 2 took it sweatass time but is finally showing itself !  Mattmo831 Featuring Mattmo831 from the Apple v Epic case Member Oct 26, 2020 6,541 Hello my family. cant wait for a new 3d mario (plz)   Bizarre Member Dec 7, 2024 970 Here goes The season of F Zero must be coming this time around  rewkol One Winged Slayer Member Oct 27, 2017 420 BannerThief said: Gonna be my first Nintendo console since the GameCube, lfg. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Don't know if I envy you for having so many great games to go back to, or if I feel sorry for you because there are so many games to go back to and (hopefully) so many more great games to come!  Genesius Member Nov 2, 2018 20,586 Gonna wait for Animal Crossing before I pick up a Switch 2 Mario Kart is evergreen  thecowboypoet Avenger Oct 25, 2017 2,533 Bishop89 said: Ultimate tier gif. 
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  • The Ordinary and Uncommon lift the lid on beauty endorsements

    On the surface, the towering pile of fake banknotes stacked in the window of a glistening skincare store could be interpreted as a marketing stunt, but behind the glass, the message is serious. The Cost of Influence – a new physical installation created by Uncommon for The Ordinary – was designed to highlight the hidden fees consumers pay for celebrity endorsements in the beauty industry, not tucked away in the ingredients list but embedded in the price.
    The campaign, live during the brand's flagship relaunch, makes The Ordinary's positioning crystal clear: no inflated costs, no gimmicks, just science-backed skincare. "What the industry is trying to keep under wraps is the complete opposite of transparency," says Joe Sare, art director at Uncommon. "Brands are paying significant sums of money for celebrities to endorse their products and passing those costs onto the consumer. So, we decided to reveal this 'secret ingredient' to the world, to reinforce the brand's commitment to being truly open."
    Far from a traditional ad campaign, the team leaned into something more visceral that people could touch, feel, and share. At the heart of the installation is a cold, almost sterile stack of imitation cash, deliberately stripped of the polish we might associate with retail window dressing.
    "A huge pile of money feels quite cold, and at first glance, it could almost look like a pile of rubbish," Joe explains. "Then, your eyes are drawn to the words on the window that explain what you're seeing, and the penny drops – no pun intended."

    The display's impact lies in its tension: blending stark visual simplicity with an idea that demands a second thought. Uncommon consciously leaned into that duality.
    "While the installation was physical, we went into the process with social virality in mind," says Joe. "We did play around with other, more intricate ways of showing the money – it flying around in a box, shapes other than the pile, making it interactive – but we landed on this execution as the most honest and impactful way of telling the story."
    On the glass, bold copy spells out that one of the most expensive ingredients in many beauty products is influence. Alongside the pile are tongue-in-cheek "price tags" assigning monetary values to fictional endorsements—the going rate, perhaps, for a 'celebrity serum' or moisturiser marketed by your favourite A-lister.
    Rather than preaching or pointing fingers, the tone is playful and inclusive. "We're ultimately on the audiences' side," says Marco Del Valle, Planning Director at Uncommon. "This isn't about judging them for buying other brands, but revealing something to them that they likely were not aware of."

    For a brand like The Ordinary – whose identity is rooted in radical transparency – the message isn't an opportunistic call-out but a reflection of its founding values. "The Ordinary is not anti-celebrity," Marco continues, "but it is against using unnecessary, bolt-on ingredients that ultimately cost customers more… and often the most expensive ingredient is a celebrity endorsement."
    That clarity of perspective helped shape the creative direction. According to the Uncommon team, the collaboration was genuinely collaborative—not just signed off but co-authored. "They're a dream to work alongside," says Joe. The entire team has such a strong sense of what the brand stands for and a deep passion for bringing that to life. We were on the journey together at every stage… from the creative to the messaging. It's a true partnership."
    The work also taps into a broader shift in what audiences want and expect from brands, especially in beauty and wellness, where the mood is turning from aspiration to honesty.
    "We've always set out to build the brands people wish existed," says Marco. "And for us, a big part of this is doing work that uncovers and/or addresses real cultural tensions. Every single category has multiple tensions and untold stories within it – the world of beauty is no exception."

    What's striking is how the piece walks the line between creative expression and brand activism without slipping into moralising. Instead of issuing a lecture, it sparks a conversation, both on the high street and online, where its simplicity proved especially shareable. According to Joe, most passers-by stopped to take pictures, with social sentiment "overwhelmingly positive."
    For Uncommon, it marks another step in its evolution as a studio that blends brand storytelling with cultural critique. As Marco puts it: "We are living in an increasingly fragmented, hyper-visual reality. Social media has shortened our attention spans and increased the need for brands to create thumb-stopping content.
    "On top of this, in the current socio-economic climate, consumers are becoming more discerning about the companies they choose to engage with. They're looking for brands with depth, brands that stand for something."
    In that sense, The Cost of Influence is a provocation, holding a mirror up to an industry and nudging us to question what we're buying into.
    #ordinary #uncommon #lift #lid #beauty
    The Ordinary and Uncommon lift the lid on beauty endorsements
    On the surface, the towering pile of fake banknotes stacked in the window of a glistening skincare store could be interpreted as a marketing stunt, but behind the glass, the message is serious. The Cost of Influence – a new physical installation created by Uncommon for The Ordinary – was designed to highlight the hidden fees consumers pay for celebrity endorsements in the beauty industry, not tucked away in the ingredients list but embedded in the price. The campaign, live during the brand's flagship relaunch, makes The Ordinary's positioning crystal clear: no inflated costs, no gimmicks, just science-backed skincare. "What the industry is trying to keep under wraps is the complete opposite of transparency," says Joe Sare, art director at Uncommon. "Brands are paying significant sums of money for celebrities to endorse their products and passing those costs onto the consumer. So, we decided to reveal this 'secret ingredient' to the world, to reinforce the brand's commitment to being truly open." Far from a traditional ad campaign, the team leaned into something more visceral that people could touch, feel, and share. At the heart of the installation is a cold, almost sterile stack of imitation cash, deliberately stripped of the polish we might associate with retail window dressing. "A huge pile of money feels quite cold, and at first glance, it could almost look like a pile of rubbish," Joe explains. "Then, your eyes are drawn to the words on the window that explain what you're seeing, and the penny drops – no pun intended." The display's impact lies in its tension: blending stark visual simplicity with an idea that demands a second thought. Uncommon consciously leaned into that duality. "While the installation was physical, we went into the process with social virality in mind," says Joe. "We did play around with other, more intricate ways of showing the money – it flying around in a box, shapes other than the pile, making it interactive – but we landed on this execution as the most honest and impactful way of telling the story." On the glass, bold copy spells out that one of the most expensive ingredients in many beauty products is influence. Alongside the pile are tongue-in-cheek "price tags" assigning monetary values to fictional endorsements—the going rate, perhaps, for a 'celebrity serum' or moisturiser marketed by your favourite A-lister. Rather than preaching or pointing fingers, the tone is playful and inclusive. "We're ultimately on the audiences' side," says Marco Del Valle, Planning Director at Uncommon. "This isn't about judging them for buying other brands, but revealing something to them that they likely were not aware of." For a brand like The Ordinary – whose identity is rooted in radical transparency – the message isn't an opportunistic call-out but a reflection of its founding values. "The Ordinary is not anti-celebrity," Marco continues, "but it is against using unnecessary, bolt-on ingredients that ultimately cost customers more… and often the most expensive ingredient is a celebrity endorsement." That clarity of perspective helped shape the creative direction. According to the Uncommon team, the collaboration was genuinely collaborative—not just signed off but co-authored. "They're a dream to work alongside," says Joe. The entire team has such a strong sense of what the brand stands for and a deep passion for bringing that to life. We were on the journey together at every stage… from the creative to the messaging. It's a true partnership." The work also taps into a broader shift in what audiences want and expect from brands, especially in beauty and wellness, where the mood is turning from aspiration to honesty. "We've always set out to build the brands people wish existed," says Marco. "And for us, a big part of this is doing work that uncovers and/or addresses real cultural tensions. Every single category has multiple tensions and untold stories within it – the world of beauty is no exception." What's striking is how the piece walks the line between creative expression and brand activism without slipping into moralising. Instead of issuing a lecture, it sparks a conversation, both on the high street and online, where its simplicity proved especially shareable. According to Joe, most passers-by stopped to take pictures, with social sentiment "overwhelmingly positive." For Uncommon, it marks another step in its evolution as a studio that blends brand storytelling with cultural critique. As Marco puts it: "We are living in an increasingly fragmented, hyper-visual reality. Social media has shortened our attention spans and increased the need for brands to create thumb-stopping content. "On top of this, in the current socio-economic climate, consumers are becoming more discerning about the companies they choose to engage with. They're looking for brands with depth, brands that stand for something." In that sense, The Cost of Influence is a provocation, holding a mirror up to an industry and nudging us to question what we're buying into. #ordinary #uncommon #lift #lid #beauty
    WWW.CREATIVEBOOM.COM
    The Ordinary and Uncommon lift the lid on beauty endorsements
    On the surface, the towering pile of fake banknotes stacked in the window of a glistening skincare store could be interpreted as a marketing stunt, but behind the glass, the message is serious. The Cost of Influence – a new physical installation created by Uncommon for The Ordinary – was designed to highlight the hidden fees consumers pay for celebrity endorsements in the beauty industry, not tucked away in the ingredients list but embedded in the price. The campaign, live during the brand's flagship relaunch, makes The Ordinary's positioning crystal clear: no inflated costs, no gimmicks, just science-backed skincare. "What the industry is trying to keep under wraps is the complete opposite of transparency," says Joe Sare, art director at Uncommon. "Brands are paying significant sums of money for celebrities to endorse their products and passing those costs onto the consumer. So, we decided to reveal this 'secret ingredient' to the world, to reinforce the brand's commitment to being truly open." Far from a traditional ad campaign, the team leaned into something more visceral that people could touch, feel, and share. At the heart of the installation is a cold, almost sterile stack of imitation cash, deliberately stripped of the polish we might associate with retail window dressing. "A huge pile of money feels quite cold, and at first glance, it could almost look like a pile of rubbish," Joe explains. "Then, your eyes are drawn to the words on the window that explain what you're seeing, and the penny drops – no pun intended." The display's impact lies in its tension: blending stark visual simplicity with an idea that demands a second thought. Uncommon consciously leaned into that duality. "While the installation was physical, we went into the process with social virality in mind," says Joe. "We did play around with other, more intricate ways of showing the money – it flying around in a box, shapes other than the pile, making it interactive – but we landed on this execution as the most honest and impactful way of telling the story." On the glass, bold copy spells out that one of the most expensive ingredients in many beauty products is influence. Alongside the pile are tongue-in-cheek "price tags" assigning monetary values to fictional endorsements—the going rate, perhaps, for a 'celebrity serum' or moisturiser marketed by your favourite A-lister. Rather than preaching or pointing fingers, the tone is playful and inclusive. "We're ultimately on the audiences' side," says Marco Del Valle, Planning Director at Uncommon. "This isn't about judging them for buying other brands, but revealing something to them that they likely were not aware of." For a brand like The Ordinary – whose identity is rooted in radical transparency – the message isn't an opportunistic call-out but a reflection of its founding values. "The Ordinary is not anti-celebrity," Marco continues, "but it is against using unnecessary, bolt-on ingredients that ultimately cost customers more… and often the most expensive ingredient is a celebrity endorsement." That clarity of perspective helped shape the creative direction. According to the Uncommon team, the collaboration was genuinely collaborative—not just signed off but co-authored. "They're a dream to work alongside," says Joe. The entire team has such a strong sense of what the brand stands for and a deep passion for bringing that to life. We were on the journey together at every stage… from the creative to the messaging. It's a true partnership." The work also taps into a broader shift in what audiences want and expect from brands, especially in beauty and wellness, where the mood is turning from aspiration to honesty. "We've always set out to build the brands people wish existed," says Marco. "And for us, a big part of this is doing work that uncovers and/or addresses real cultural tensions. Every single category has multiple tensions and untold stories within it – the world of beauty is no exception." What's striking is how the piece walks the line between creative expression and brand activism without slipping into moralising. Instead of issuing a lecture, it sparks a conversation, both on the high street and online, where its simplicity proved especially shareable. According to Joe, most passers-by stopped to take pictures, with social sentiment "overwhelmingly positive." For Uncommon, it marks another step in its evolution as a studio that blends brand storytelling with cultural critique. As Marco puts it: "We are living in an increasingly fragmented, hyper-visual reality. Social media has shortened our attention spans and increased the need for brands to create thumb-stopping content. "On top of this, in the current socio-economic climate, consumers are becoming more discerning about the companies they choose to engage with. They're looking for brands with depth, brands that stand for something." In that sense, The Cost of Influence is a provocation, holding a mirror up to an industry and nudging us to question what we're buying into.
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  • Collaborators: Healthcare Innovation to Impact

    JONATHAN CARLSON: From the beginning, healthcare stood out to us as an important opportunity for general reasoners to improve the lives and experiences of patients and providers. Indeed, in the past two years, there’s been an explosion of scientific papers looking at the application first of text reasoners and medicine, then multi-modal reasoners that can interpret medical images, and now, most recently, healthcare agents that can reason with each other. But even more impressive than the pace of research has been the surprisingly rapid diffusion of this technology into real world clinical workflows. 
    LUNGREN: So today, we’ll talk about how our cross-company collaboration has shortened that gap and delivered advanced AI capabilities and solutions into the hands of developers and clinicians around the world, empowering everyone in health and life sciences to achieve more. I’m Doctor Matt Lungren, chief scientific officer for Microsoft Health and Life Sciences. 
    CARLSON: And I’m Jonathan Carlson, vice president and managing director of Microsoft Health Futures. 
    LUNGREN: And together we brought some key players leading in the space of AI and health
    CARLSON: We’ve asked these brilliant folks to join us because each of them represents a mission critical group of cutting-edge stakeholders, scaling breakthroughs into purpose-built solutions and capabilities for health
    LUNGREN: We’ll hear today how generative AI capabilities can unlock reasoning across every data type in medicine: text, images, waveforms, genomics. And further, how multi-agent frameworks in healthcare can accelerate complex workflows, in some cases acting as a specialist team member, safely secured inside the Microsoft 365 tools used by hundreds of millions of healthcare enterprise users across the world. The opportunity to save time today and lives tomorrow with AI has never been larger.  MATTHEW LUNGREN: Jonathan. You know, it’s been really interesting kind of observing Microsoft Research over the decades. I’ve, you know, been watching you guys in my prior academic career. You are always on the front of innovation, particularly in health
     JONATHAN CARLSON: I mean, it’s some of what’s in our DNA, I mean, we’ve been publishing in health and life sciences for two decades here. But when we launched Health Futures as a mission-focused lab about 7 or 8 years ago, we really started with the premise that the way to have impact was to really close the loop between, not just good ideas that get published, but good ideas that can actually be grounded in real problems that clinicians and scientists care about, that then allow us to actually go from that first proof of concept into an incubation, into getting real world feedback that allows us to close that loop. And now with, you know, the HLS organization here as a product group, we have the opportunity to work really closely with you all to not just prove what’s possible in the clinic or in the lab, but actually start scaling that into the broader community. 
    CAMERON RUNDE: And one thing I’ll add here is that the problems that we’re trying to tackle in health
    CARLSON: So, Matt, back to you. What are you guys doing in the product group? How do you guys see these models getting into the clinic?
    LUNGREN: You know, I think a lot of people, you know, think about AI is just, you know, maybe just even a few years old because of GPT and how that really captured the public’s consciousness. Right?
    And so, you think about the speech-to-text technology of being able to dictate something, for a clinic note or for a visit, that was typically based on Nuance technology. And so there’s a lot of product understanding of the market, how to deliver something that clinicians will use, understanding the pain points and workflows and really that Health IT space, which is sometimes the third rail, I feel like with a lot of innovation in healthcare. 
    But beyond that, I mean, I think now that we have this really powerful engine of Microsoft and the platform capabilities, we’re seeing, innovations on the healthcare side for data storage, data interoperability, with different types of medical data. You have new applications coming online, the ability, of course, to see generative AI now infused into the speech-to-text and, becoming Dragon Copilot, which is something that has been, you know, tremendously, received by the community. 
    Physicians are able to now just have a conversation with a patient. They turn to their computer and the note is ready for them. There’s no more this, we call it keyboard liberation. I don’t know if you heard that before. And that’s just been tremendous. And there’s so much more coming from that side. And then there’s other parts of the workflow that we also get engaged in — the diagnostic workflow.
    So medical imaging, sharing images across different hospital systems, the list goes on. And so now when you move into AI, we feel like there’s a huge opportunity to deliver capabilities into the clinical workflow via the products and solutions we already have. But, I mean, we’ll now that we’ve kind of expanded our team to involve Azure and platform, we’re really able to now focus on the developers.
    WILL GUYMAN: Yeah. And you’re always telling me as a doctor how frustrating it is to be spending time at the computer instead of with your patients. I think you told me, you know, 4,000 clicks a day for the typical doctor, which is tremendous. And something like Dragon Copilot can save that five minutes per patient. But it can also now take actions after the patient encounter so it can draft the after-visit summary. 
    It can order labs and medications for the referral. And that’s incredible. And we want to keep building on that. There’s so many other use cases across the ecosystem. And so that’s why in Azure AI Foundry, we have translated a lot of the research from Microsoft Research and made that available to developers to build and customize for their own applications. 
    SMITHA SALIGRAMA: Yeah. And as you were saying, in our transformation of moving from solutions to platforms and as, scaling solutions to other, multiple scenarios, as we put our models in AI Foundry, we provide these developer capabilities like bring your own data and fine
    LUNGREN: Well, I want to do a reality check because, you know, I think to us that are now really focused on technology, it seems like, I’ve heard this story before, right. I, I remember even in, my academic clinical days where it felt like technology was always the quick answer and it felt like technology was, there was maybe a disconnect between what my problems were or what I think needed to be done versus kind of the solutions that were kind of, created or offered to us. And I guess at some level, how Jonathan, do you think about this? Because to do things well in the science space is one thing, to do things well in science, but then also have it be something that actually drives health
    CARLSON: Yeah. I mean, as you said, I think one of the core pathologies of Big Tech is we assume every problem is a technology problem. And that’s all it will take to solve the problem. And I think, look, I was trained as a computational biologist, and that sits in the awkward middle between biology and computation. And the thing that we always have to remember, the thing that we were very acutely aware of when we set out, was that we are not the experts. We do have, you know, you as an M.D., we have everybody on the team, we have biologists on the team. 
    But this is a big space. And the only way we’re going to have real impact, the only way we’re even going to pick the right problems to work on is if we really partner deeply, with providers, with EHRvendors, with scientists, and really understand what’s important and again, get that feedback loop. 
    RUNDE: Yeah, I think we really need to ground the work that we do in the science itself. You need to understand the broader ecosystem and the broader landscape, across healthwe think are important. Because, as Jonathan said, we’re not the experts in health
    CARLSON: When we really launched this, this mission, 7 or 8 years ago, we really came in with the premise of, if we decide to stop, we want to be sure the world cares. And the only way that’s going to be true is if we’re really deeply embedded with the people that matter–the patients, the providers and the scientists.
    LUNGREN: And now it really feels like this collaborative effort, you know, really can help start to extend that mission. Right. I think, you know, Will and Smitha, that we definitely feel the passion and the innovation. And we certainly benefit from those collaborations, too. But then we have these other partners and even customers, right, that we can start to tap into and have that flywheel keep spinning. 
    GUYMAN: Yeah. And the whole industry is an ecosystem. So, we have our own data sets at Microsoft Research that you’ve trained amazing AI models with. And those are in the catalog. But then you’ve also partnered with institutions like Providence or Page AI . And those models are in the catalog with their data. And then there are third parties like Nvidia that have their own specialized proprietary data sets, and their models are there too. So, we have this ecosystem of open source models. And maybe Smitha, you want to talk about how developers can actually customize these. 
    SALIGRAMA: Yeah. So we use the Azure AI Foundry ecosystem. Developers can feel at home if they’re using the AI Foundry. So they can look at our model cards that we publish as part of the models we publish, understand the use cases of these models, how to, quickly, bring up these APIs and, look at different use cases of how to apply these and even fine
    LUNGREN: Yeah it has been interesting to see we have these health
    GUYMAN: Well, the general-purpose large language models are amazing for medical general reasoning. So Microsoft Research has shown that that they can perform super well on, for example, like the United States medical licensing exam, they can exceed doctor performance if they’re just picking between different multiple-choice questions. But real medicine we know is messier. It doesn’t always start with the whole patient context provided as text in the prompt. You have to get the source data and that raw data is often non-text. The majority of it is non-text. It’s things like medical imaging, radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology. It goes on and on. And there’s endless signal data, lab data. And so all of this diverse data type needs to be processed through specialized models because much of that data is not available on the public internet. 
    And that’s why we’re taking this partner approach, first party and third party models that can interpret all this kind of data and then connect them ultimately back to these general reasoners to reason over that. 
    LUNGREN: So, you know, I’ve been at this company for a while and, you know, familiar with kind of how long it takes, generally to get, you know, a really good research paper, do all the studies, do all the data analysis, and then go through the process of publishing, right, which takes, as, you know, a long time and it’s, you know, very rigorous. 
    And one of the things that struck me, last year, I think we, we started this big collaboration and, within a quarter, you had a Nature paper coming out from Microsoft Research, and that model that the Nature paper was describing was ready to be used by anyone on the Azure AI Foundry within that same quarter. It kind of blew my mind when I thought about it, you know, even though we were all, you know, working very hard to get that done. Any thoughts on that? I mean, has this ever happened in your career? And, you know, what’s the secret sauce to that? 
    CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, the time scale from research to product has been massively compressed. And I’d push that even further, which is to say, the reason why it took a quarter was because we were laying the railroad tracks as we’re driving the train. We have examples right after that when we are launching on Foundry the same day we were publishing the paper. 
    And frankly, the review times are becoming longer than it takes to actually productize the models. I think there’s two things that are going on with that are really converging. One is that the overall ecosystem is converging on a relatively small number of patterns, and that gives us, as a tech company, a reason to go off and really make those patterns hardened in a way that allows not just us, but third parties as well, to really have a nice workflow to publish these models. 
    But the other is actually, I think, a change in how we work, you know, and for most of our history as an industrial research lab, we would do research and then we’d go pitch it to somebody and try and throw it over the fence. We’ve really built a much more integrated team. In fact, if you look at that Nature paper or any of the other papers, there’s folks from product teams. Many of you are on the papers along with our clinical collaborators.
    RUNDE: Yeah. I think one thing that’s really important to note is that there’s a ton of different ways that you can have impact, right? So I like to think about phasing. In Health Futures at least, I like to think about phasing the work that we do. So first we have research, which is really early innovation. And the impact there is getting our technology and our tools out there and really sharing the learnings that we’ve had. 
    So that can be through publications like you mentioned. It can be through open-sourcing our models. And then you go to incubation. So, this is, I think, one of the more new spaces that we’re getting into, which is maybe that blurred line between research and product. Right. Which is, how do we take the tools and technologies that we’ve built and get them into the hands of users, typically through our partnerships? 
    Right. So, we partner very deeply and collaborate very deeply across the industry. And incubation is really important because we get that early feedback. We get an ability to pivot if we need to. And we also get the ability to see what types of impact our technology is having in the real world. And then lastly, when you think about scale, there’s tons of different ways that you can scale. We can scale third-party through our collaborators and really empower them to go to market to commercialize the things that we’ve built together. 
    You can also think about scaling internally, which is why I’m so thankful that we’ve created this flywheel between research and product, and a lot of the models that we’ve built that have gone through research, have gone through incubation, have been able to scale on the Azure AI Foundry. But that’s not really our expertise. Right? The scale piece in research, that’s research and incubation. Smitha, how do you think about scaling? 
    SALIGRAMA: So, there are several angles to scaling the models, the state-of-the-art models we see from the research team. The first angle is, the open sourcing, to get developer trust, and very generous commercial licenses so that they can use it and for their own, use cases. The second is, we also allow them to customize these models, fine
    GUYMAN: And as one example, you know, University of Wisconsin Health, you know, which Matt knows well. They took one of our models, which is highly versatile. They customized it in Foundry and they optimized it to reliably identify abnormal chest X-rays, the most common imaging procedure, so they could improve their turnaround time triage quickly. And that’s just one example. But we have other partners like Sectra who are doing more of operations use cases automatically routing imaging to the radiologists, setting them up to be efficient. And then Page AI is doing, you know, biomarker identification for actually diagnostics and new drug discovery. So, there’s so many use cases that we have partners already who are building and customizing.
    LUNGREN: The part that’s striking to me is just that, you know, we could all sit in a room and think about all the different ways someone might use these models on the catalog. And I’m still shocked at the stuff that people use them for and how effective they are. And I think part of that is, you know, again, we talk a lot about generative AI and healthcare and all the things you can do. Again, you know, in text, you refer to that earlier and certainly off the shelf, there’s really powerful applications. But there is, you know, kind of this tip of the iceberg effect where under the water, most of the data that we use to take care of our patients is not text. Right. It’s all the different other modalities. And I think that this has been an unlock right, sort of taking these innovations, innovations from the community, putting them in this ecosystem kind of catalog, essentially. Right. And then allowing folks to kind of, you know, build and develop applications with all these different types of data. Again, I’ve been surprised at what I’m seeing. 
    CARLSON: This has been just one of the most profound shifts that’s happened in the last 12 months, really. I mean, two years ago we had general models in text that really shifted how we think about, I mean, natural language processing got totally upended by that. Turns out the same technology works for images as well. It doesn’t only allow you to automatically extract concepts from images, but allows you to align those image concepts with text concepts, which means that you can have a conversation with that image. And once you’re in that world now, you are a place where you can start stitching together these multimodal models that really change how you can interact with the data, and how you can start getting more information out of the raw primary data that is part of the patient journey.
    LUNGREN: Well, and we’re going to get to that because I think you just touched on something. And I want to re-emphasize stitching these things together. There’s a lot of different ways to potentially do that. Right? There’s ways that you can literally train the model end to end with adapters and all kinds of other early fusion fusions. All kinds of ways. But one of the things that the word of the I guess the year is going to be agents and an agent is a very interesting term to think about how you might abstract away some of the components or the tasks that you want the model to, to accomplish in the midst of sort of a real human to maybe model interaction. Can you talk a little bit more about, how we’re thinking about agents in this, in this platform approach?  GUYMAN: Well, this is our newest addition to the Azure AI Foundry. So there’s an agent catalog now where we have a set of pre-configured agents for health care. And then we also have a multi-agent orchestrator that can jump
    LUNGREN: And, and I really like that concept because, you know, as, as a, as a from the user personas, I think about myself as a user. How am I going to interact with these agents? Where does it naturally fit? And I and I sort of, you know, I’ve seen some of the demonstrations and some of the work that’s going on with Stanford in particular, showing that, you know, and literally in a Teams chat, I can have my clinician colleagues and I can have specialized health
    It is a completely mind-blowing thing for me. And it’s a light bulb moment for me to I wonder, what have we, what have we heard from folks that have, you know, tried out this health care agent orchestrator in this kind of deployment environment via Teams?
    GUYMAN: Well, someone joked, you know, are you sure you’re not using Teams because you work at Microsoft?But, then we actually were meeting with one of the, radiologists at one of our partners, and they said that that morning they had just done a Teams meeting, or they had met with other specialists to talk about a patient’s cancer case, or they were coming up with a treatment plan. 
    And that was the light bulb moment for us. We realized, actually, Teams is already being used by physicians as an internal communication tool, as a tool to get work done. And especially since the pandemic, a lot of the meetings moved to virtual and telemedicine. And so it’s a great distribution channel for AI, which is often been a struggle for AI to actually get in the hands of clinicians. And so now we’re allowing developers to build and then deploy very easily and extend it into their own workflows. 
    CARLSON: I think that’s such an important point. I mean, if you think about one of the really important concepts in computer science is an application programing interface, like some set of rules that allow two applications to talk to each other. One of the big pushes, really important pushes, in medicine has been standards that allow us to actually have data standards and APIs that allow these to talk to each other, and yet still we end up with these silos. There’s silos of data. There’s silos of applications.
    And just like when you and I work on our phone, we have to go back and forth between applications. One of the things that I think agents do is that it takes the idea that now you can use language to understand intent and effectively program an interface, and it creates a whole new abstraction layer that allows us to simplify the interaction between not just humans and the endpoint, but also for developers. 
    It allows us to have this abstraction layer that lets different developers focus on different types of models, and yet stitch them all together in a very, very natural, way, not just for the users, but for the ability to actually deploy those models. 
    SALIGRAMA: Just to add to what Jonathan was mentioning, the other cool thing about the Microsoft Teams user interface is it’s also enterprise ready.
    RUNDE: And one important thing that we’re thinking about, is exactly this from the very early research through incubation and then to scale, obviously. Right. And so early on in research, we are actively working with our partners and our collaborators to make sure that we have the right data privacy and consent in place. We’re doing this in incubation as well. And then obviously in scale. Yep. 
    LUNGREN: So, I think AI has always been thought of as a savior kind of technology. We talked a little bit about how there’s been some ups and downs in terms of the ability for technology to be effective in health care. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of new innovations that are really making a difference. But then we kind of get, you know, we talked about agents a little bit. It feels like we’re maybe abstracting too far. Maybe it’s things are going too fast, almost. What makes this different? I mean, in your mind is this truly a logical next step or is it going to take some time? 
    CARLSON: I think there’s a couple things that have happened. I think first, on just a pure technology. What led to ChatGPT? And I like to think of really three major breakthroughs.
    The first was new mathematical concepts of attention, which really means that we now have a way that a machine can figure out which parts of the context it should actually focus on, just the way our brains do. Right? I mean, if you’re a clinician and somebody is talking to you, the majority of that conversation is not relevant for the diagnosis. But, you know how to zoom in on the parts that matter. That’s a super powerful mathematical concept. The second one is this idea of self-supervision. So, I think one of the fundamental problems of machine learning has been that you have to train on labeled training data and labels are expensive, which means data sets are small, which means the final models are very narrow and brittle. And the idea of self-supervision is that you can just get a model to automatically learn concepts, and the language is just predict the next word. And what’s important about that is that leads to models that can actually manipulate and understand really messy text and pull out what’s important about that, and then and then stitch that back together in interesting ways.
    And the third concept, that came out of those first two, was just the observational scale. And that’s that more is better, more data, more compute, bigger models. And that really leads to a reason to keep investing. And for these models to keep getting better. So that as a as a groundwork, that’s what led to ChatGPT. That’s what led to our ability now to not just have rule-based systems or simple machine learning based systems to take a messy EHR record, say, and pull out a couple concepts.
    But to really feed the whole thing in and say, okay, I need you to figure out which concepts are in here. And is this particular attribute there, for example. That’s now led to the next breakthrough, which is all those core ideas apply to images as well. They apply to proteins, to DNA. And so we’re starting to see models that understand images and the concepts of images, and can actually map those back to text as well. 
    So, you can look at a pathology image and say, not just at the cell, but it appears that there’s some certain sort of cancer in this particular, tissue there. And then you take those two things together and you layer on the fact that now you have a model, or a set of models, that can understand intent, can understand human concepts and biomedical concepts, and you can start stitching them together into specialized agents that can actually reason with each other, which at some level gives you an API as a developer to say, okay, I need to focus on a pathology model and get this really, really, sound while somebody else is focusing on a radiology model, but now allows us to stitch these all together with a user interface that we can now talk to through natural language. 
    RUNDE: I’d like to double click a little bit on that medical abstraction piece that you mentioned. Just the amount of data, clinical data that there is for each individual patient. Let’s think about cancer patients for a second to make this real. Right. For every cancer patient, it could take a couple of hours to structure their information. And why is that important? Because, you have to get that information in a structured way and abstract relevant information to be able to unlock precision health applications right, for each patient. So, to be able to match them to a trial, right, someone has to sit there and go through all of the clinical notes from their entire patient care journey, from the beginning to the end. And that’s not scalable. And so one thing that we’ve been doing in an active project that we’ve been working on with a handful of our partners, but Providence specifically, I’ll call out, is using AI to actually abstract and curate that information. So that gives time back to the health care provider to spend with patients, instead of spending all their time curating this information. 
    And this is super important because it sets the scene and the backbone for all those precision health applications. Like I mentioned, clinical trial matching, tumor boards is another really important example here. Maybe Matt, you can talk to that a little bit.
    LUNGREN: It’s a great example. And you know it’s so funny. We’ve talked about this use case and the you know the health
    And a tumor board is a critical meeting that happens at many cancer centers where specialists all get together, come with their perspective, and make a comment on what would be the best next step in treatment. But the background in preparing for that is you know, again, organizing the data. But to your point, also, what are the clinical trials that are active? There are thousands of clinical trials. There’s hundreds every day added. How can anyone keep up with that? And these are the kinds of use cases that start to bubble up. And you realize that a technology that understands concepts, context and can reason over vast amounts of data with a language interface-that is a powerful tool. Even before we get to some of the, you know, unlocking new insights and even precision medicine, this is that idea of saving time before lives to me. And there’s an enormous amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting that happens in health
    GUYMAN: And we’ve packaged these agents, the manual abstraction work that, you know, manually takes hours. Now we have an agent. It’s in Foundry along with the clinical trial matching agent, which I think at Providence you showed could double the match rate over the baseline that they were using by using the AI for multiple data sources. So, we have that and then we have this orchestration that is using this really neat technology from Microsoft Research. Semantic Kernel, Magentic
    There’s turn taking, there’s negotiation between the agents. So, there’s this really interesting system that’s emerging. And again, this is all possible to be used through Teams. And there’s some great extensibility as well. We’ve been talking about that and working on some cool tools. 
    SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think if I have to geek out a little bit on how all this agent tech orchestrations are coming up, like I’ve been in software engineering for decades, it’s kind of a next version of distributed systems where you have these services that talk to each other. It’s a more natural way because LLMs are giving these natural ways instead of a structured API ways of conversing. We have these agents which can naturally understand how to talk to each other. Right. So this is like the next evolution of our systems now. And the way we’re packaging all of this is multiple ways based on all the standards and innovation that’s happening in this space. So, first of all, we are building these agents that are very good at specific tasks, like, Will was saying like, a trial matching agent or patient timeline agents. 
    So, we take all of these, and then we package it in a workflow and an orchestration. We use the standard, some of these coming from research. The Semantic Kernel, the Magentic-One. And then, all of these also allow us to extend these agents with custom agents that can be plugged in. So, we are open sourcing the entire agent orchestration in AI Foundry templates, so that developers can extend their own agents, and make their own workflows out of it. So, a lot of cool innovation happening to apply this technology to specific scenarios and workflows. 
    LUNGREN: Well, I was going to ask you, like, so as part of that extension. So, like, you know, folks can say, hey, I have maybe a really specific part of my workflow that I want to use some agents for, maybe one of the agents that can do PubMed literature search, for example. But then there’s also agents that, come in from the outside, you know, sort of like I could, I can imagine a software company or AI company that has a built-in agent that plugs in as well. 
    SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you can bring your own agent. And then we have these, standard ways of communicating with agents and integrating with the orchestration language so you can bring your own agent and extend this health care agent, agent orchestrator to your own needs. 
    LUNGREN: I can just think of, like, in a group chat, like a bunch of different specialist agents. And I really would want an orchestrator to help find the right tool, to your point earlier, because I’m guessing this ecosystem is going to expand quickly. Yeah. And I may not know which tool is best for which question. I just want to ask the question. Right. 
    SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah. 
    CARLSON: Well, I think to that point to I mean, you said an important point here, which is tools, and these are not necessarily just AI tools. Right? I mean, we’ve known this for a while, right? LLMS are not very good at math, but you can have it use a calculator and then it works very well. And you know you guys both brought up the universal medical abstraction a couple times. 
    And one of the things that I find so powerful about that is we’ve long had this vision within the precision health community that we should be able to have a learning hospital system. We should be able to actually learn from the actual real clinical experiences that are happening every day, so that we can stop practicing medicine based off averages. 
    There’s a lot of work that’s gone on for the last 20 years about how to actually do causal inference. That’s not an AI question. That’s a statistical question. The bottleneck, the reason why we haven’t been able to do that is because most of that information is locked up in unstructured text. And these other tools need essentially a table. 
    And so now you can decompose this problem, say, well, what if I can use AI not to get to the causal answer, but to just structure the information. So now I can put it into the causal inference tool. And these sorts of patterns I think again become very, not just powerful for a programmer, but they start pulling together different specialties. And I think we’ll really see an acceleration, really, of collaboration across disciplines because of this. 
    CARLSON: So, when I joined Microsoft Research 18 years ago, I was doing work in computational biology. And I would always have to answer the question: why is Microsoft in biomedicine? And I would always kind of joke saying, well, it is. We sell Office and Windows to every health
    SALIGRAMA: A lot of healthcare organizations already use Microsoft productivity tools, as you mentioned. So, they asked the developers, build these agents, and use our healthcare orchestrations, to plug in these agents and expose these in these productivity tools. They will get access to all these healthcare workers. So the healthcare agent orchestrator we have today integrates with Microsoft Teams, and it showcases an example of how you can atmention these agents and talk to them like you were talking to another person in a Teams chat. And then it also provides examples of these agents and how they can use these productivity tools. One of the examples we have there is how they can summarize the assessments of this whole chat into a Word Doc, or even convert that into a PowerPoint presentation, for later on.
    CARLSON: One of the things that has struck me is how easy it is to do. I mean, Will, I don’t know if you’ve worked with folks that have gone from 0 to 60, like, how fast? What does that look like? 
    GUYMAN: Yeah, it’s funny for us, the technology to transfer all this context into a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation for a doctor to take to a meeting is relatively straightforward compared to the complicated clinical trial matching multimodal processing. The feedback has been tremendous in terms of, wow, that saves so much time to have this organized report that then I can show up to meeting with and the agents can come with me to that meeting because they’re literally having a Teams meeting, often with other human specialists. And the agents can be there and ask and answer questions and fact check and source all the right information on the fly. So, there’s a nice integration into these existing tools. 
    LUNGREN: We worked with several different centers just to kind of understand, you know, where this might be useful. And, like, as I think we talked about before, the ideas that we’ve come up with again, this is a great one because it’s complex. It’s kind of hairy. There’s a lot of things happening under the hood that don’t necessarily require a medical license to do, right, to prepare for a tumor board and to organize data. But, it’s fascinating, actually. So, you know, folks have come up with ideas of, could I have an agent that can operate an MRI machine, and I can ask the agent to change some parameters or redo a protocol. We thought that was a pretty powerful use case. We’ve had others that have just said, you know, I really want to have a specific agent that’s able to kind of act like deep research does for the consumer side, but based on the context of my patient, so that it can search all the literature and pull the data in the papers that are relevant to this case. And the list goes on and on from operations all the way to clinical, you know, sort of decision making at some level. And I think that the research community that’s going to sprout around this will help us, guide us, I guess, to see what is the most high-impact use cases. Where is this effective? And maybe where it’s not effective.
    But to me, the part that makes me so, I guess excited about this is just that I don’t have to think about, okay, well, then we have to figure out Health IT. Because it’s always, you know, we always have great ideas and research, and it always feels like there’s such a huge chasm to get it in front of the health care workers that might want to test this out. And it feels like, again, this productivity tool use case again with the enterprise security, the possibility for bringing in third parties to contribute really does feel like it’s a new surface area for innovation.
    CARLSON: Yeah, I love that. Look. Let me end by putting you all on the spot. So, in three years, multimodal agents will do what? Matt, I’ll start with you. 
    LUNGREN: I am convinced that it’s going to save massive amount of time before it saves many lives. 
    RUNDE: I’ll focus on the patient care journey and diagnostic journey. I think it will kind of transform that process for the patient itself and shorten that process. 
    GUYMAN: Yeah, I think we’ve seen already papers recently showing that different modalities surfaced complementary information. And so we’ll see kind of this AI and these agents becoming an essential companion to the physician, surfacing insights that would have been overlooked otherwise. 
    SALIGRAMA: And similar to what you guys were saying, agents will become important assistants to healthcare workers, reducing a lot of documentation and workflow, excess work they have to do. 
    CARLSON: I love that. And I guess for my part, I think really what we’re going to see is a massive unleash of creativity. We’ve had a lot of folks that have been innovating in this space, but they haven’t had a way to actually get it into the hands of early adopters. And I think we’re going to see that really lead to an explosion of creativity across the ecosystem. 
    LUNGREN: So, where do we get started? Like where are the developers who are listening to this? The folks that are at, you know, labs, research labs and developing health care solutions. Where do they go to get started with the Foundry, the models we’ve talked about, the healthcare agent orchestrator. Where do they go?
    GUYMAN: So AI.azure.com is the AI Foundry. It’s a website you can go as a developer. You can sign in with your Azure subscription, get your Azure account, your own VM, all that stuff. And you have an agent catalog, the model catalog. You can start from there. There is documentation and templates that you can then deploy to Teams or other applications. 
    LUNGREN: And tutorials are coming. Right. We have recordings of tutorials. We’ll have Hackathons, some sessions and then more to come. Yeah, we’re really excited.  
    LUNGREN: Thank you so much, guys for joining us. 
    CARLSON: Yes. Yeah. Thanks. 
    SALIGRAMA: Thanks for having us.  
    #collaborators #healthcare #innovation #impact
    Collaborators: Healthcare Innovation to Impact
    JONATHAN CARLSON: From the beginning, healthcare stood out to us as an important opportunity for general reasoners to improve the lives and experiences of patients and providers. Indeed, in the past two years, there’s been an explosion of scientific papers looking at the application first of text reasoners and medicine, then multi-modal reasoners that can interpret medical images, and now, most recently, healthcare agents that can reason with each other. But even more impressive than the pace of research has been the surprisingly rapid diffusion of this technology into real world clinical workflows.  LUNGREN: So today, we’ll talk about how our cross-company collaboration has shortened that gap and delivered advanced AI capabilities and solutions into the hands of developers and clinicians around the world, empowering everyone in health and life sciences to achieve more. I’m Doctor Matt Lungren, chief scientific officer for Microsoft Health and Life Sciences.  CARLSON: And I’m Jonathan Carlson, vice president and managing director of Microsoft Health Futures.  LUNGREN: And together we brought some key players leading in the space of AI and health CARLSON: We’ve asked these brilliant folks to join us because each of them represents a mission critical group of cutting-edge stakeholders, scaling breakthroughs into purpose-built solutions and capabilities for health LUNGREN: We’ll hear today how generative AI capabilities can unlock reasoning across every data type in medicine: text, images, waveforms, genomics. And further, how multi-agent frameworks in healthcare can accelerate complex workflows, in some cases acting as a specialist team member, safely secured inside the Microsoft 365 tools used by hundreds of millions of healthcare enterprise users across the world. The opportunity to save time today and lives tomorrow with AI has never been larger.  MATTHEW LUNGREN: Jonathan. You know, it’s been really interesting kind of observing Microsoft Research over the decades. I’ve, you know, been watching you guys in my prior academic career. You are always on the front of innovation, particularly in health  JONATHAN CARLSON: I mean, it’s some of what’s in our DNA, I mean, we’ve been publishing in health and life sciences for two decades here. But when we launched Health Futures as a mission-focused lab about 7 or 8 years ago, we really started with the premise that the way to have impact was to really close the loop between, not just good ideas that get published, but good ideas that can actually be grounded in real problems that clinicians and scientists care about, that then allow us to actually go from that first proof of concept into an incubation, into getting real world feedback that allows us to close that loop. And now with, you know, the HLS organization here as a product group, we have the opportunity to work really closely with you all to not just prove what’s possible in the clinic or in the lab, but actually start scaling that into the broader community.  CAMERON RUNDE: And one thing I’ll add here is that the problems that we’re trying to tackle in health CARLSON: So, Matt, back to you. What are you guys doing in the product group? How do you guys see these models getting into the clinic? LUNGREN: You know, I think a lot of people, you know, think about AI is just, you know, maybe just even a few years old because of GPT and how that really captured the public’s consciousness. Right? And so, you think about the speech-to-text technology of being able to dictate something, for a clinic note or for a visit, that was typically based on Nuance technology. And so there’s a lot of product understanding of the market, how to deliver something that clinicians will use, understanding the pain points and workflows and really that Health IT space, which is sometimes the third rail, I feel like with a lot of innovation in healthcare.  But beyond that, I mean, I think now that we have this really powerful engine of Microsoft and the platform capabilities, we’re seeing, innovations on the healthcare side for data storage, data interoperability, with different types of medical data. You have new applications coming online, the ability, of course, to see generative AI now infused into the speech-to-text and, becoming Dragon Copilot, which is something that has been, you know, tremendously, received by the community.  Physicians are able to now just have a conversation with a patient. They turn to their computer and the note is ready for them. There’s no more this, we call it keyboard liberation. I don’t know if you heard that before. And that’s just been tremendous. And there’s so much more coming from that side. And then there’s other parts of the workflow that we also get engaged in — the diagnostic workflow. So medical imaging, sharing images across different hospital systems, the list goes on. And so now when you move into AI, we feel like there’s a huge opportunity to deliver capabilities into the clinical workflow via the products and solutions we already have. But, I mean, we’ll now that we’ve kind of expanded our team to involve Azure and platform, we’re really able to now focus on the developers. WILL GUYMAN: Yeah. And you’re always telling me as a doctor how frustrating it is to be spending time at the computer instead of with your patients. I think you told me, you know, 4,000 clicks a day for the typical doctor, which is tremendous. And something like Dragon Copilot can save that five minutes per patient. But it can also now take actions after the patient encounter so it can draft the after-visit summary.  It can order labs and medications for the referral. And that’s incredible. And we want to keep building on that. There’s so many other use cases across the ecosystem. And so that’s why in Azure AI Foundry, we have translated a lot of the research from Microsoft Research and made that available to developers to build and customize for their own applications.  SMITHA SALIGRAMA: Yeah. And as you were saying, in our transformation of moving from solutions to platforms and as, scaling solutions to other, multiple scenarios, as we put our models in AI Foundry, we provide these developer capabilities like bring your own data and fine LUNGREN: Well, I want to do a reality check because, you know, I think to us that are now really focused on technology, it seems like, I’ve heard this story before, right. I, I remember even in, my academic clinical days where it felt like technology was always the quick answer and it felt like technology was, there was maybe a disconnect between what my problems were or what I think needed to be done versus kind of the solutions that were kind of, created or offered to us. And I guess at some level, how Jonathan, do you think about this? Because to do things well in the science space is one thing, to do things well in science, but then also have it be something that actually drives health CARLSON: Yeah. I mean, as you said, I think one of the core pathologies of Big Tech is we assume every problem is a technology problem. And that’s all it will take to solve the problem. And I think, look, I was trained as a computational biologist, and that sits in the awkward middle between biology and computation. And the thing that we always have to remember, the thing that we were very acutely aware of when we set out, was that we are not the experts. We do have, you know, you as an M.D., we have everybody on the team, we have biologists on the team.  But this is a big space. And the only way we’re going to have real impact, the only way we’re even going to pick the right problems to work on is if we really partner deeply, with providers, with EHRvendors, with scientists, and really understand what’s important and again, get that feedback loop.  RUNDE: Yeah, I think we really need to ground the work that we do in the science itself. You need to understand the broader ecosystem and the broader landscape, across healthwe think are important. Because, as Jonathan said, we’re not the experts in health CARLSON: When we really launched this, this mission, 7 or 8 years ago, we really came in with the premise of, if we decide to stop, we want to be sure the world cares. And the only way that’s going to be true is if we’re really deeply embedded with the people that matter–the patients, the providers and the scientists. LUNGREN: And now it really feels like this collaborative effort, you know, really can help start to extend that mission. Right. I think, you know, Will and Smitha, that we definitely feel the passion and the innovation. And we certainly benefit from those collaborations, too. But then we have these other partners and even customers, right, that we can start to tap into and have that flywheel keep spinning.  GUYMAN: Yeah. And the whole industry is an ecosystem. So, we have our own data sets at Microsoft Research that you’ve trained amazing AI models with. And those are in the catalog. But then you’ve also partnered with institutions like Providence or Page AI . And those models are in the catalog with their data. And then there are third parties like Nvidia that have their own specialized proprietary data sets, and their models are there too. So, we have this ecosystem of open source models. And maybe Smitha, you want to talk about how developers can actually customize these.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. So we use the Azure AI Foundry ecosystem. Developers can feel at home if they’re using the AI Foundry. So they can look at our model cards that we publish as part of the models we publish, understand the use cases of these models, how to, quickly, bring up these APIs and, look at different use cases of how to apply these and even fine LUNGREN: Yeah it has been interesting to see we have these health GUYMAN: Well, the general-purpose large language models are amazing for medical general reasoning. So Microsoft Research has shown that that they can perform super well on, for example, like the United States medical licensing exam, they can exceed doctor performance if they’re just picking between different multiple-choice questions. But real medicine we know is messier. It doesn’t always start with the whole patient context provided as text in the prompt. You have to get the source data and that raw data is often non-text. The majority of it is non-text. It’s things like medical imaging, radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology. It goes on and on. And there’s endless signal data, lab data. And so all of this diverse data type needs to be processed through specialized models because much of that data is not available on the public internet.  And that’s why we’re taking this partner approach, first party and third party models that can interpret all this kind of data and then connect them ultimately back to these general reasoners to reason over that.  LUNGREN: So, you know, I’ve been at this company for a while and, you know, familiar with kind of how long it takes, generally to get, you know, a really good research paper, do all the studies, do all the data analysis, and then go through the process of publishing, right, which takes, as, you know, a long time and it’s, you know, very rigorous.  And one of the things that struck me, last year, I think we, we started this big collaboration and, within a quarter, you had a Nature paper coming out from Microsoft Research, and that model that the Nature paper was describing was ready to be used by anyone on the Azure AI Foundry within that same quarter. It kind of blew my mind when I thought about it, you know, even though we were all, you know, working very hard to get that done. Any thoughts on that? I mean, has this ever happened in your career? And, you know, what’s the secret sauce to that?  CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, the time scale from research to product has been massively compressed. And I’d push that even further, which is to say, the reason why it took a quarter was because we were laying the railroad tracks as we’re driving the train. We have examples right after that when we are launching on Foundry the same day we were publishing the paper.  And frankly, the review times are becoming longer than it takes to actually productize the models. I think there’s two things that are going on with that are really converging. One is that the overall ecosystem is converging on a relatively small number of patterns, and that gives us, as a tech company, a reason to go off and really make those patterns hardened in a way that allows not just us, but third parties as well, to really have a nice workflow to publish these models.  But the other is actually, I think, a change in how we work, you know, and for most of our history as an industrial research lab, we would do research and then we’d go pitch it to somebody and try and throw it over the fence. We’ve really built a much more integrated team. In fact, if you look at that Nature paper or any of the other papers, there’s folks from product teams. Many of you are on the papers along with our clinical collaborators. RUNDE: Yeah. I think one thing that’s really important to note is that there’s a ton of different ways that you can have impact, right? So I like to think about phasing. In Health Futures at least, I like to think about phasing the work that we do. So first we have research, which is really early innovation. And the impact there is getting our technology and our tools out there and really sharing the learnings that we’ve had.  So that can be through publications like you mentioned. It can be through open-sourcing our models. And then you go to incubation. So, this is, I think, one of the more new spaces that we’re getting into, which is maybe that blurred line between research and product. Right. Which is, how do we take the tools and technologies that we’ve built and get them into the hands of users, typically through our partnerships?  Right. So, we partner very deeply and collaborate very deeply across the industry. And incubation is really important because we get that early feedback. We get an ability to pivot if we need to. And we also get the ability to see what types of impact our technology is having in the real world. And then lastly, when you think about scale, there’s tons of different ways that you can scale. We can scale third-party through our collaborators and really empower them to go to market to commercialize the things that we’ve built together.  You can also think about scaling internally, which is why I’m so thankful that we’ve created this flywheel between research and product, and a lot of the models that we’ve built that have gone through research, have gone through incubation, have been able to scale on the Azure AI Foundry. But that’s not really our expertise. Right? The scale piece in research, that’s research and incubation. Smitha, how do you think about scaling?  SALIGRAMA: So, there are several angles to scaling the models, the state-of-the-art models we see from the research team. The first angle is, the open sourcing, to get developer trust, and very generous commercial licenses so that they can use it and for their own, use cases. The second is, we also allow them to customize these models, fine GUYMAN: And as one example, you know, University of Wisconsin Health, you know, which Matt knows well. They took one of our models, which is highly versatile. They customized it in Foundry and they optimized it to reliably identify abnormal chest X-rays, the most common imaging procedure, so they could improve their turnaround time triage quickly. And that’s just one example. But we have other partners like Sectra who are doing more of operations use cases automatically routing imaging to the radiologists, setting them up to be efficient. And then Page AI is doing, you know, biomarker identification for actually diagnostics and new drug discovery. So, there’s so many use cases that we have partners already who are building and customizing. LUNGREN: The part that’s striking to me is just that, you know, we could all sit in a room and think about all the different ways someone might use these models on the catalog. And I’m still shocked at the stuff that people use them for and how effective they are. And I think part of that is, you know, again, we talk a lot about generative AI and healthcare and all the things you can do. Again, you know, in text, you refer to that earlier and certainly off the shelf, there’s really powerful applications. But there is, you know, kind of this tip of the iceberg effect where under the water, most of the data that we use to take care of our patients is not text. Right. It’s all the different other modalities. And I think that this has been an unlock right, sort of taking these innovations, innovations from the community, putting them in this ecosystem kind of catalog, essentially. Right. And then allowing folks to kind of, you know, build and develop applications with all these different types of data. Again, I’ve been surprised at what I’m seeing.  CARLSON: This has been just one of the most profound shifts that’s happened in the last 12 months, really. I mean, two years ago we had general models in text that really shifted how we think about, I mean, natural language processing got totally upended by that. Turns out the same technology works for images as well. It doesn’t only allow you to automatically extract concepts from images, but allows you to align those image concepts with text concepts, which means that you can have a conversation with that image. And once you’re in that world now, you are a place where you can start stitching together these multimodal models that really change how you can interact with the data, and how you can start getting more information out of the raw primary data that is part of the patient journey. LUNGREN: Well, and we’re going to get to that because I think you just touched on something. And I want to re-emphasize stitching these things together. There’s a lot of different ways to potentially do that. Right? There’s ways that you can literally train the model end to end with adapters and all kinds of other early fusion fusions. All kinds of ways. But one of the things that the word of the I guess the year is going to be agents and an agent is a very interesting term to think about how you might abstract away some of the components or the tasks that you want the model to, to accomplish in the midst of sort of a real human to maybe model interaction. Can you talk a little bit more about, how we’re thinking about agents in this, in this platform approach?  GUYMAN: Well, this is our newest addition to the Azure AI Foundry. So there’s an agent catalog now where we have a set of pre-configured agents for health care. And then we also have a multi-agent orchestrator that can jump LUNGREN: And, and I really like that concept because, you know, as, as a, as a from the user personas, I think about myself as a user. How am I going to interact with these agents? Where does it naturally fit? And I and I sort of, you know, I’ve seen some of the demonstrations and some of the work that’s going on with Stanford in particular, showing that, you know, and literally in a Teams chat, I can have my clinician colleagues and I can have specialized health It is a completely mind-blowing thing for me. And it’s a light bulb moment for me to I wonder, what have we, what have we heard from folks that have, you know, tried out this health care agent orchestrator in this kind of deployment environment via Teams? GUYMAN: Well, someone joked, you know, are you sure you’re not using Teams because you work at Microsoft?But, then we actually were meeting with one of the, radiologists at one of our partners, and they said that that morning they had just done a Teams meeting, or they had met with other specialists to talk about a patient’s cancer case, or they were coming up with a treatment plan.  And that was the light bulb moment for us. We realized, actually, Teams is already being used by physicians as an internal communication tool, as a tool to get work done. And especially since the pandemic, a lot of the meetings moved to virtual and telemedicine. And so it’s a great distribution channel for AI, which is often been a struggle for AI to actually get in the hands of clinicians. And so now we’re allowing developers to build and then deploy very easily and extend it into their own workflows.  CARLSON: I think that’s such an important point. I mean, if you think about one of the really important concepts in computer science is an application programing interface, like some set of rules that allow two applications to talk to each other. One of the big pushes, really important pushes, in medicine has been standards that allow us to actually have data standards and APIs that allow these to talk to each other, and yet still we end up with these silos. There’s silos of data. There’s silos of applications. And just like when you and I work on our phone, we have to go back and forth between applications. One of the things that I think agents do is that it takes the idea that now you can use language to understand intent and effectively program an interface, and it creates a whole new abstraction layer that allows us to simplify the interaction between not just humans and the endpoint, but also for developers.  It allows us to have this abstraction layer that lets different developers focus on different types of models, and yet stitch them all together in a very, very natural, way, not just for the users, but for the ability to actually deploy those models.  SALIGRAMA: Just to add to what Jonathan was mentioning, the other cool thing about the Microsoft Teams user interface is it’s also enterprise ready. RUNDE: And one important thing that we’re thinking about, is exactly this from the very early research through incubation and then to scale, obviously. Right. And so early on in research, we are actively working with our partners and our collaborators to make sure that we have the right data privacy and consent in place. We’re doing this in incubation as well. And then obviously in scale. Yep.  LUNGREN: So, I think AI has always been thought of as a savior kind of technology. We talked a little bit about how there’s been some ups and downs in terms of the ability for technology to be effective in health care. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of new innovations that are really making a difference. But then we kind of get, you know, we talked about agents a little bit. It feels like we’re maybe abstracting too far. Maybe it’s things are going too fast, almost. What makes this different? I mean, in your mind is this truly a logical next step or is it going to take some time?  CARLSON: I think there’s a couple things that have happened. I think first, on just a pure technology. What led to ChatGPT? And I like to think of really three major breakthroughs. The first was new mathematical concepts of attention, which really means that we now have a way that a machine can figure out which parts of the context it should actually focus on, just the way our brains do. Right? I mean, if you’re a clinician and somebody is talking to you, the majority of that conversation is not relevant for the diagnosis. But, you know how to zoom in on the parts that matter. That’s a super powerful mathematical concept. The second one is this idea of self-supervision. So, I think one of the fundamental problems of machine learning has been that you have to train on labeled training data and labels are expensive, which means data sets are small, which means the final models are very narrow and brittle. And the idea of self-supervision is that you can just get a model to automatically learn concepts, and the language is just predict the next word. And what’s important about that is that leads to models that can actually manipulate and understand really messy text and pull out what’s important about that, and then and then stitch that back together in interesting ways. And the third concept, that came out of those first two, was just the observational scale. And that’s that more is better, more data, more compute, bigger models. And that really leads to a reason to keep investing. And for these models to keep getting better. So that as a as a groundwork, that’s what led to ChatGPT. That’s what led to our ability now to not just have rule-based systems or simple machine learning based systems to take a messy EHR record, say, and pull out a couple concepts. But to really feed the whole thing in and say, okay, I need you to figure out which concepts are in here. And is this particular attribute there, for example. That’s now led to the next breakthrough, which is all those core ideas apply to images as well. They apply to proteins, to DNA. And so we’re starting to see models that understand images and the concepts of images, and can actually map those back to text as well.  So, you can look at a pathology image and say, not just at the cell, but it appears that there’s some certain sort of cancer in this particular, tissue there. And then you take those two things together and you layer on the fact that now you have a model, or a set of models, that can understand intent, can understand human concepts and biomedical concepts, and you can start stitching them together into specialized agents that can actually reason with each other, which at some level gives you an API as a developer to say, okay, I need to focus on a pathology model and get this really, really, sound while somebody else is focusing on a radiology model, but now allows us to stitch these all together with a user interface that we can now talk to through natural language.  RUNDE: I’d like to double click a little bit on that medical abstraction piece that you mentioned. Just the amount of data, clinical data that there is for each individual patient. Let’s think about cancer patients for a second to make this real. Right. For every cancer patient, it could take a couple of hours to structure their information. And why is that important? Because, you have to get that information in a structured way and abstract relevant information to be able to unlock precision health applications right, for each patient. So, to be able to match them to a trial, right, someone has to sit there and go through all of the clinical notes from their entire patient care journey, from the beginning to the end. And that’s not scalable. And so one thing that we’ve been doing in an active project that we’ve been working on with a handful of our partners, but Providence specifically, I’ll call out, is using AI to actually abstract and curate that information. So that gives time back to the health care provider to spend with patients, instead of spending all their time curating this information.  And this is super important because it sets the scene and the backbone for all those precision health applications. Like I mentioned, clinical trial matching, tumor boards is another really important example here. Maybe Matt, you can talk to that a little bit. LUNGREN: It’s a great example. And you know it’s so funny. We’ve talked about this use case and the you know the health And a tumor board is a critical meeting that happens at many cancer centers where specialists all get together, come with their perspective, and make a comment on what would be the best next step in treatment. But the background in preparing for that is you know, again, organizing the data. But to your point, also, what are the clinical trials that are active? There are thousands of clinical trials. There’s hundreds every day added. How can anyone keep up with that? And these are the kinds of use cases that start to bubble up. And you realize that a technology that understands concepts, context and can reason over vast amounts of data with a language interface-that is a powerful tool. Even before we get to some of the, you know, unlocking new insights and even precision medicine, this is that idea of saving time before lives to me. And there’s an enormous amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting that happens in health GUYMAN: And we’ve packaged these agents, the manual abstraction work that, you know, manually takes hours. Now we have an agent. It’s in Foundry along with the clinical trial matching agent, which I think at Providence you showed could double the match rate over the baseline that they were using by using the AI for multiple data sources. So, we have that and then we have this orchestration that is using this really neat technology from Microsoft Research. Semantic Kernel, Magentic There’s turn taking, there’s negotiation between the agents. So, there’s this really interesting system that’s emerging. And again, this is all possible to be used through Teams. And there’s some great extensibility as well. We’ve been talking about that and working on some cool tools.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think if I have to geek out a little bit on how all this agent tech orchestrations are coming up, like I’ve been in software engineering for decades, it’s kind of a next version of distributed systems where you have these services that talk to each other. It’s a more natural way because LLMs are giving these natural ways instead of a structured API ways of conversing. We have these agents which can naturally understand how to talk to each other. Right. So this is like the next evolution of our systems now. And the way we’re packaging all of this is multiple ways based on all the standards and innovation that’s happening in this space. So, first of all, we are building these agents that are very good at specific tasks, like, Will was saying like, a trial matching agent or patient timeline agents.  So, we take all of these, and then we package it in a workflow and an orchestration. We use the standard, some of these coming from research. The Semantic Kernel, the Magentic-One. And then, all of these also allow us to extend these agents with custom agents that can be plugged in. So, we are open sourcing the entire agent orchestration in AI Foundry templates, so that developers can extend their own agents, and make their own workflows out of it. So, a lot of cool innovation happening to apply this technology to specific scenarios and workflows.  LUNGREN: Well, I was going to ask you, like, so as part of that extension. So, like, you know, folks can say, hey, I have maybe a really specific part of my workflow that I want to use some agents for, maybe one of the agents that can do PubMed literature search, for example. But then there’s also agents that, come in from the outside, you know, sort of like I could, I can imagine a software company or AI company that has a built-in agent that plugs in as well.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you can bring your own agent. And then we have these, standard ways of communicating with agents and integrating with the orchestration language so you can bring your own agent and extend this health care agent, agent orchestrator to your own needs.  LUNGREN: I can just think of, like, in a group chat, like a bunch of different specialist agents. And I really would want an orchestrator to help find the right tool, to your point earlier, because I’m guessing this ecosystem is going to expand quickly. Yeah. And I may not know which tool is best for which question. I just want to ask the question. Right.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah.  CARLSON: Well, I think to that point to I mean, you said an important point here, which is tools, and these are not necessarily just AI tools. Right? I mean, we’ve known this for a while, right? LLMS are not very good at math, but you can have it use a calculator and then it works very well. And you know you guys both brought up the universal medical abstraction a couple times.  And one of the things that I find so powerful about that is we’ve long had this vision within the precision health community that we should be able to have a learning hospital system. We should be able to actually learn from the actual real clinical experiences that are happening every day, so that we can stop practicing medicine based off averages.  There’s a lot of work that’s gone on for the last 20 years about how to actually do causal inference. That’s not an AI question. That’s a statistical question. The bottleneck, the reason why we haven’t been able to do that is because most of that information is locked up in unstructured text. And these other tools need essentially a table.  And so now you can decompose this problem, say, well, what if I can use AI not to get to the causal answer, but to just structure the information. So now I can put it into the causal inference tool. And these sorts of patterns I think again become very, not just powerful for a programmer, but they start pulling together different specialties. And I think we’ll really see an acceleration, really, of collaboration across disciplines because of this.  CARLSON: So, when I joined Microsoft Research 18 years ago, I was doing work in computational biology. And I would always have to answer the question: why is Microsoft in biomedicine? And I would always kind of joke saying, well, it is. We sell Office and Windows to every health SALIGRAMA: A lot of healthcare organizations already use Microsoft productivity tools, as you mentioned. So, they asked the developers, build these agents, and use our healthcare orchestrations, to plug in these agents and expose these in these productivity tools. They will get access to all these healthcare workers. So the healthcare agent orchestrator we have today integrates with Microsoft Teams, and it showcases an example of how you can atmention these agents and talk to them like you were talking to another person in a Teams chat. And then it also provides examples of these agents and how they can use these productivity tools. One of the examples we have there is how they can summarize the assessments of this whole chat into a Word Doc, or even convert that into a PowerPoint presentation, for later on. CARLSON: One of the things that has struck me is how easy it is to do. I mean, Will, I don’t know if you’ve worked with folks that have gone from 0 to 60, like, how fast? What does that look like?  GUYMAN: Yeah, it’s funny for us, the technology to transfer all this context into a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation for a doctor to take to a meeting is relatively straightforward compared to the complicated clinical trial matching multimodal processing. The feedback has been tremendous in terms of, wow, that saves so much time to have this organized report that then I can show up to meeting with and the agents can come with me to that meeting because they’re literally having a Teams meeting, often with other human specialists. And the agents can be there and ask and answer questions and fact check and source all the right information on the fly. So, there’s a nice integration into these existing tools.  LUNGREN: We worked with several different centers just to kind of understand, you know, where this might be useful. And, like, as I think we talked about before, the ideas that we’ve come up with again, this is a great one because it’s complex. It’s kind of hairy. There’s a lot of things happening under the hood that don’t necessarily require a medical license to do, right, to prepare for a tumor board and to organize data. But, it’s fascinating, actually. So, you know, folks have come up with ideas of, could I have an agent that can operate an MRI machine, and I can ask the agent to change some parameters or redo a protocol. We thought that was a pretty powerful use case. We’ve had others that have just said, you know, I really want to have a specific agent that’s able to kind of act like deep research does for the consumer side, but based on the context of my patient, so that it can search all the literature and pull the data in the papers that are relevant to this case. And the list goes on and on from operations all the way to clinical, you know, sort of decision making at some level. And I think that the research community that’s going to sprout around this will help us, guide us, I guess, to see what is the most high-impact use cases. Where is this effective? And maybe where it’s not effective. But to me, the part that makes me so, I guess excited about this is just that I don’t have to think about, okay, well, then we have to figure out Health IT. Because it’s always, you know, we always have great ideas and research, and it always feels like there’s such a huge chasm to get it in front of the health care workers that might want to test this out. And it feels like, again, this productivity tool use case again with the enterprise security, the possibility for bringing in third parties to contribute really does feel like it’s a new surface area for innovation. CARLSON: Yeah, I love that. Look. Let me end by putting you all on the spot. So, in three years, multimodal agents will do what? Matt, I’ll start with you.  LUNGREN: I am convinced that it’s going to save massive amount of time before it saves many lives.  RUNDE: I’ll focus on the patient care journey and diagnostic journey. I think it will kind of transform that process for the patient itself and shorten that process.  GUYMAN: Yeah, I think we’ve seen already papers recently showing that different modalities surfaced complementary information. And so we’ll see kind of this AI and these agents becoming an essential companion to the physician, surfacing insights that would have been overlooked otherwise.  SALIGRAMA: And similar to what you guys were saying, agents will become important assistants to healthcare workers, reducing a lot of documentation and workflow, excess work they have to do.  CARLSON: I love that. And I guess for my part, I think really what we’re going to see is a massive unleash of creativity. We’ve had a lot of folks that have been innovating in this space, but they haven’t had a way to actually get it into the hands of early adopters. And I think we’re going to see that really lead to an explosion of creativity across the ecosystem.  LUNGREN: So, where do we get started? Like where are the developers who are listening to this? The folks that are at, you know, labs, research labs and developing health care solutions. Where do they go to get started with the Foundry, the models we’ve talked about, the healthcare agent orchestrator. Where do they go? GUYMAN: So AI.azure.com is the AI Foundry. It’s a website you can go as a developer. You can sign in with your Azure subscription, get your Azure account, your own VM, all that stuff. And you have an agent catalog, the model catalog. You can start from there. There is documentation and templates that you can then deploy to Teams or other applications.  LUNGREN: And tutorials are coming. Right. We have recordings of tutorials. We’ll have Hackathons, some sessions and then more to come. Yeah, we’re really excited.   LUNGREN: Thank you so much, guys for joining us.  CARLSON: Yes. Yeah. Thanks.  SALIGRAMA: Thanks for having us.   #collaborators #healthcare #innovation #impact
    WWW.MICROSOFT.COM
    Collaborators: Healthcare Innovation to Impact
    JONATHAN CARLSON: From the beginning, healthcare stood out to us as an important opportunity for general reasoners to improve the lives and experiences of patients and providers. Indeed, in the past two years, there’s been an explosion of scientific papers looking at the application first of text reasoners and medicine, then multi-modal reasoners that can interpret medical images, and now, most recently, healthcare agents that can reason with each other. But even more impressive than the pace of research has been the surprisingly rapid diffusion of this technology into real world clinical workflows.  LUNGREN: So today, we’ll talk about how our cross-company collaboration has shortened that gap and delivered advanced AI capabilities and solutions into the hands of developers and clinicians around the world, empowering everyone in health and life sciences to achieve more. I’m Doctor Matt Lungren, chief scientific officer for Microsoft Health and Life Sciences.  CARLSON: And I’m Jonathan Carlson, vice president and managing director of Microsoft Health Futures.  LUNGREN: And together we brought some key players leading in the space of AI and health CARLSON: We’ve asked these brilliant folks to join us because each of them represents a mission critical group of cutting-edge stakeholders, scaling breakthroughs into purpose-built solutions and capabilities for health LUNGREN: We’ll hear today how generative AI capabilities can unlock reasoning across every data type in medicine: text, images, waveforms, genomics. And further, how multi-agent frameworks in healthcare can accelerate complex workflows, in some cases acting as a specialist team member, safely secured inside the Microsoft 365 tools used by hundreds of millions of healthcare enterprise users across the world. The opportunity to save time today and lives tomorrow with AI has never been larger. [MUSIC FADES]  MATTHEW LUNGREN: Jonathan. You know, it’s been really interesting kind of observing Microsoft Research over the decades. I’ve, you know, been watching you guys in my prior academic career. You are always on the front of innovation, particularly in health  JONATHAN CARLSON: I mean, it’s some of what’s in our DNA, I mean, we’ve been publishing in health and life sciences for two decades here. But when we launched Health Futures as a mission-focused lab about 7 or 8 years ago, we really started with the premise that the way to have impact was to really close the loop between, not just good ideas that get published, but good ideas that can actually be grounded in real problems that clinicians and scientists care about, that then allow us to actually go from that first proof of concept into an incubation, into getting real world feedback that allows us to close that loop. And now with, you know, the HLS organization here as a product group, we have the opportunity to work really closely with you all to not just prove what’s possible in the clinic or in the lab, but actually start scaling that into the broader community.  CAMERON RUNDE: And one thing I’ll add here is that the problems that we’re trying to tackle in health CARLSON: So, Matt, back to you. What are you guys doing in the product group? How do you guys see these models getting into the clinic? LUNGREN: You know, I think a lot of people, you know, think about AI is just, you know, maybe just even a few years old because of GPT and how that really captured the public’s consciousness. Right? And so, you think about the speech-to-text technology of being able to dictate something, for a clinic note or for a visit, that was typically based on Nuance technology. And so there’s a lot of product understanding of the market, how to deliver something that clinicians will use, understanding the pain points and workflows and really that Health IT space, which is sometimes the third rail, I feel like with a lot of innovation in healthcare.  But beyond that, I mean, I think now that we have this really powerful engine of Microsoft and the platform capabilities, we’re seeing, innovations on the healthcare side for data storage, data interoperability, with different types of medical data. You have new applications coming online, the ability, of course, to see generative AI now infused into the speech-to-text and, becoming Dragon Copilot, which is something that has been, you know, tremendously, received by the community.  Physicians are able to now just have a conversation with a patient. They turn to their computer and the note is ready for them. There’s no more this, we call it keyboard liberation. I don’t know if you heard that before. And that’s just been tremendous. And there’s so much more coming from that side. And then there’s other parts of the workflow that we also get engaged in — the diagnostic workflow. So medical imaging, sharing images across different hospital systems, the list goes on. And so now when you move into AI, we feel like there’s a huge opportunity to deliver capabilities into the clinical workflow via the products and solutions we already have. But, I mean, we’ll now that we’ve kind of expanded our team to involve Azure and platform, we’re really able to now focus on the developers. WILL GUYMAN: Yeah. And you’re always telling me as a doctor how frustrating it is to be spending time at the computer instead of with your patients. I think you told me, you know, 4,000 clicks a day for the typical doctor, which is tremendous. And something like Dragon Copilot can save that five minutes per patient. But it can also now take actions after the patient encounter so it can draft the after-visit summary.  It can order labs and medications for the referral. And that’s incredible. And we want to keep building on that. There’s so many other use cases across the ecosystem. And so that’s why in Azure AI Foundry, we have translated a lot of the research from Microsoft Research and made that available to developers to build and customize for their own applications.  SMITHA SALIGRAMA: Yeah. And as you were saying, in our transformation of moving from solutions to platforms and as, scaling solutions to other, multiple scenarios, as we put our models in AI Foundry, we provide these developer capabilities like bring your own data and fine LUNGREN: Well, I want to do a reality check because, you know, I think to us that are now really focused on technology, it seems like, I’ve heard this story before, right. I, I remember even in, my academic clinical days where it felt like technology was always the quick answer and it felt like technology was, there was maybe a disconnect between what my problems were or what I think needed to be done versus kind of the solutions that were kind of, created or offered to us. And I guess at some level, how Jonathan, do you think about this? Because to do things well in the science space is one thing, to do things well in science, but then also have it be something that actually drives health CARLSON: Yeah. I mean, as you said, I think one of the core pathologies of Big Tech is we assume every problem is a technology problem. And that’s all it will take to solve the problem. And I think, look, I was trained as a computational biologist, and that sits in the awkward middle between biology and computation. And the thing that we always have to remember, the thing that we were very acutely aware of when we set out, was that we are not the experts. We do have, you know, you as an M.D., we have everybody on the team, we have biologists on the team.  But this is a big space. And the only way we’re going to have real impact, the only way we’re even going to pick the right problems to work on is if we really partner deeply, with providers, with EHR (electronic health records) vendors, with scientists, and really understand what’s important and again, get that feedback loop.  RUNDE: Yeah, I think we really need to ground the work that we do in the science itself. You need to understand the broader ecosystem and the broader landscape, across healthwe think are important. Because, as Jonathan said, we’re not the experts in health CARLSON: When we really launched this, this mission, 7 or 8 years ago, we really came in with the premise of, if we decide to stop, we want to be sure the world cares. And the only way that’s going to be true is if we’re really deeply embedded with the people that matter–the patients, the providers and the scientists. LUNGREN: And now it really feels like this collaborative effort, you know, really can help start to extend that mission. Right. I think, you know, Will and Smitha, that we definitely feel the passion and the innovation. And we certainly benefit from those collaborations, too. But then we have these other partners and even customers, right, that we can start to tap into and have that flywheel keep spinning.  GUYMAN: Yeah. And the whole industry is an ecosystem. So, we have our own data sets at Microsoft Research that you’ve trained amazing AI models with. And those are in the catalog. But then you’ve also partnered with institutions like Providence or Page AI . And those models are in the catalog with their data. And then there are third parties like Nvidia that have their own specialized proprietary data sets, and their models are there too. So, we have this ecosystem of open source models. And maybe Smitha, you want to talk about how developers can actually customize these.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. So we use the Azure AI Foundry ecosystem. Developers can feel at home if they’re using the AI Foundry. So they can look at our model cards that we publish as part of the models we publish, understand the use cases of these models, how to, quickly, bring up these APIs and, look at different use cases of how to apply these and even fine LUNGREN: Yeah it has been interesting to see we have these health GUYMAN: Well, the general-purpose large language models are amazing for medical general reasoning. So Microsoft Research has shown that that they can perform super well on, for example, like the United States medical licensing exam, they can exceed doctor performance if they’re just picking between different multiple-choice questions. But real medicine we know is messier. It doesn’t always start with the whole patient context provided as text in the prompt. You have to get the source data and that raw data is often non-text. The majority of it is non-text. It’s things like medical imaging, radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology. It goes on and on. And there’s endless signal data, lab data. And so all of this diverse data type needs to be processed through specialized models because much of that data is not available on the public internet.  And that’s why we’re taking this partner approach, first party and third party models that can interpret all this kind of data and then connect them ultimately back to these general reasoners to reason over that.  LUNGREN: So, you know, I’ve been at this company for a while and, you know, familiar with kind of how long it takes, generally to get, you know, a really good research paper, do all the studies, do all the data analysis, and then go through the process of publishing, right, which takes, as, you know, a long time and it’s, you know, very rigorous.  And one of the things that struck me, last year, I think we, we started this big collaboration and, within a quarter, you had a Nature paper coming out from Microsoft Research, and that model that the Nature paper was describing was ready to be used by anyone on the Azure AI Foundry within that same quarter. It kind of blew my mind when I thought about it, you know, even though we were all, you know, working very hard to get that done. Any thoughts on that? I mean, has this ever happened in your career? And, you know, what’s the secret sauce to that?  CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, the time scale from research to product has been massively compressed. And I’d push that even further, which is to say, the reason why it took a quarter was because we were laying the railroad tracks as we’re driving the train. We have examples right after that when we are launching on Foundry the same day we were publishing the paper.  And frankly, the review times are becoming longer than it takes to actually productize the models. I think there’s two things that are going on with that are really converging. One is that the overall ecosystem is converging on a relatively small number of patterns, and that gives us, as a tech company, a reason to go off and really make those patterns hardened in a way that allows not just us, but third parties as well, to really have a nice workflow to publish these models.  But the other is actually, I think, a change in how we work, you know, and for most of our history as an industrial research lab, we would do research and then we’d go pitch it to somebody and try and throw it over the fence. We’ve really built a much more integrated team. In fact, if you look at that Nature paper or any of the other papers, there’s folks from product teams. Many of you are on the papers along with our clinical collaborators. RUNDE: Yeah. I think one thing that’s really important to note is that there’s a ton of different ways that you can have impact, right? So I like to think about phasing. In Health Futures at least, I like to think about phasing the work that we do. So first we have research, which is really early innovation. And the impact there is getting our technology and our tools out there and really sharing the learnings that we’ve had.  So that can be through publications like you mentioned. It can be through open-sourcing our models. And then you go to incubation. So, this is, I think, one of the more new spaces that we’re getting into, which is maybe that blurred line between research and product. Right. Which is, how do we take the tools and technologies that we’ve built and get them into the hands of users, typically through our partnerships?  Right. So, we partner very deeply and collaborate very deeply across the industry. And incubation is really important because we get that early feedback. We get an ability to pivot if we need to. And we also get the ability to see what types of impact our technology is having in the real world. And then lastly, when you think about scale, there’s tons of different ways that you can scale. We can scale third-party through our collaborators and really empower them to go to market to commercialize the things that we’ve built together.  You can also think about scaling internally, which is why I’m so thankful that we’ve created this flywheel between research and product, and a lot of the models that we’ve built that have gone through research, have gone through incubation, have been able to scale on the Azure AI Foundry. But that’s not really our expertise. Right? The scale piece in research, that’s research and incubation. Smitha, how do you think about scaling?  SALIGRAMA: So, there are several angles to scaling the models, the state-of-the-art models we see from the research team. The first angle is, the open sourcing, to get developer trust, and very generous commercial licenses so that they can use it and for their own, use cases. The second is, we also allow them to customize these models, fine GUYMAN: And as one example, you know, University of Wisconsin Health, you know, which Matt knows well. They took one of our models, which is highly versatile. They customized it in Foundry and they optimized it to reliably identify abnormal chest X-rays, the most common imaging procedure, so they could improve their turnaround time triage quickly. And that’s just one example. But we have other partners like Sectra who are doing more of operations use cases automatically routing imaging to the radiologists, setting them up to be efficient. And then Page AI is doing, you know, biomarker identification for actually diagnostics and new drug discovery. So, there’s so many use cases that we have partners already who are building and customizing. LUNGREN: The part that’s striking to me is just that, you know, we could all sit in a room and think about all the different ways someone might use these models on the catalog. And I’m still shocked at the stuff that people use them for and how effective they are. And I think part of that is, you know, again, we talk a lot about generative AI and healthcare and all the things you can do. Again, you know, in text, you refer to that earlier and certainly off the shelf, there’s really powerful applications. But there is, you know, kind of this tip of the iceberg effect where under the water, most of the data that we use to take care of our patients is not text. Right. It’s all the different other modalities. And I think that this has been an unlock right, sort of taking these innovations, innovations from the community, putting them in this ecosystem kind of catalog, essentially. Right. And then allowing folks to kind of, you know, build and develop applications with all these different types of data. Again, I’ve been surprised at what I’m seeing.  CARLSON: This has been just one of the most profound shifts that’s happened in the last 12 months, really. I mean, two years ago we had general models in text that really shifted how we think about, I mean, natural language processing got totally upended by that. Turns out the same technology works for images as well. It doesn’t only allow you to automatically extract concepts from images, but allows you to align those image concepts with text concepts, which means that you can have a conversation with that image. And once you’re in that world now, you are a place where you can start stitching together these multimodal models that really change how you can interact with the data, and how you can start getting more information out of the raw primary data that is part of the patient journey. LUNGREN: Well, and we’re going to get to that because I think you just touched on something. And I want to re-emphasize stitching these things together. There’s a lot of different ways to potentially do that. Right? There’s ways that you can literally train the model end to end with adapters and all kinds of other early fusion fusions. All kinds of ways. But one of the things that the word of the I guess the year is going to be agents and an agent is a very interesting term to think about how you might abstract away some of the components or the tasks that you want the model to, to accomplish in the midst of sort of a real human to maybe model interaction. Can you talk a little bit more about, how we’re thinking about agents in this, in this platform approach?  GUYMAN: Well, this is our newest addition to the Azure AI Foundry. So there’s an agent catalog now where we have a set of pre-configured agents for health care. And then we also have a multi-agent orchestrator that can jump LUNGREN: And, and I really like that concept because, you know, as, as a, as a from the user personas, I think about myself as a user. How am I going to interact with these agents? Where does it naturally fit? And I and I sort of, you know, I’ve seen some of the demonstrations and some of the work that’s going on with Stanford in particular, showing that, you know, and literally in a Teams chat, I can have my clinician colleagues and I can have specialized health It is a completely mind-blowing thing for me. And it’s a light bulb moment for me to I wonder, what have we, what have we heard from folks that have, you know, tried out this health care agent orchestrator in this kind of deployment environment via Teams? GUYMAN: Well, someone joked, you know, are you sure you’re not using Teams because you work at Microsoft? [LAUGHS] But, then we actually were meeting with one of the, radiologists at one of our partners, and they said that that morning they had just done a Teams meeting, or they had met with other specialists to talk about a patient’s cancer case, or they were coming up with a treatment plan.  And that was the light bulb moment for us. We realized, actually, Teams is already being used by physicians as an internal communication tool, as a tool to get work done. And especially since the pandemic, a lot of the meetings moved to virtual and telemedicine. And so it’s a great distribution channel for AI, which is often been a struggle for AI to actually get in the hands of clinicians. And so now we’re allowing developers to build and then deploy very easily and extend it into their own workflows.  CARLSON: I think that’s such an important point. I mean, if you think about one of the really important concepts in computer science is an application programing interface, like some set of rules that allow two applications to talk to each other. One of the big pushes, really important pushes, in medicine has been standards that allow us to actually have data standards and APIs that allow these to talk to each other, and yet still we end up with these silos. There’s silos of data. There’s silos of applications. And just like when you and I work on our phone, we have to go back and forth between applications. One of the things that I think agents do is that it takes the idea that now you can use language to understand intent and effectively program an interface, and it creates a whole new abstraction layer that allows us to simplify the interaction between not just humans and the endpoint, but also for developers.  It allows us to have this abstraction layer that lets different developers focus on different types of models, and yet stitch them all together in a very, very natural, way, not just for the users, but for the ability to actually deploy those models.  SALIGRAMA: Just to add to what Jonathan was mentioning, the other cool thing about the Microsoft Teams user interface is it’s also enterprise ready. RUNDE: And one important thing that we’re thinking about, is exactly this from the very early research through incubation and then to scale, obviously. Right. And so early on in research, we are actively working with our partners and our collaborators to make sure that we have the right data privacy and consent in place. We’re doing this in incubation as well. And then obviously in scale. Yep.  LUNGREN: So, I think AI has always been thought of as a savior kind of technology. We talked a little bit about how there’s been some ups and downs in terms of the ability for technology to be effective in health care. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of new innovations that are really making a difference. But then we kind of get, you know, we talked about agents a little bit. It feels like we’re maybe abstracting too far. Maybe it’s things are going too fast, almost. What makes this different? I mean, in your mind is this truly a logical next step or is it going to take some time?  CARLSON: I think there’s a couple things that have happened. I think first, on just a pure technology. What led to ChatGPT? And I like to think of really three major breakthroughs. The first was new mathematical concepts of attention, which really means that we now have a way that a machine can figure out which parts of the context it should actually focus on, just the way our brains do. Right? I mean, if you’re a clinician and somebody is talking to you, the majority of that conversation is not relevant for the diagnosis. But, you know how to zoom in on the parts that matter. That’s a super powerful mathematical concept. The second one is this idea of self-supervision. So, I think one of the fundamental problems of machine learning has been that you have to train on labeled training data and labels are expensive, which means data sets are small, which means the final models are very narrow and brittle. And the idea of self-supervision is that you can just get a model to automatically learn concepts, and the language is just predict the next word. And what’s important about that is that leads to models that can actually manipulate and understand really messy text and pull out what’s important about that, and then and then stitch that back together in interesting ways. And the third concept, that came out of those first two, was just the observational scale. And that’s that more is better, more data, more compute, bigger models. And that really leads to a reason to keep investing. And for these models to keep getting better. So that as a as a groundwork, that’s what led to ChatGPT. That’s what led to our ability now to not just have rule-based systems or simple machine learning based systems to take a messy EHR record, say, and pull out a couple concepts. But to really feed the whole thing in and say, okay, I need you to figure out which concepts are in here. And is this particular attribute there, for example. That’s now led to the next breakthrough, which is all those core ideas apply to images as well. They apply to proteins, to DNA. And so we’re starting to see models that understand images and the concepts of images, and can actually map those back to text as well.  So, you can look at a pathology image and say, not just at the cell, but it appears that there’s some certain sort of cancer in this particular, tissue there. And then you take those two things together and you layer on the fact that now you have a model, or a set of models, that can understand intent, can understand human concepts and biomedical concepts, and you can start stitching them together into specialized agents that can actually reason with each other, which at some level gives you an API as a developer to say, okay, I need to focus on a pathology model and get this really, really, sound while somebody else is focusing on a radiology model, but now allows us to stitch these all together with a user interface that we can now talk to through natural language.  RUNDE: I’d like to double click a little bit on that medical abstraction piece that you mentioned. Just the amount of data, clinical data that there is for each individual patient. Let’s think about cancer patients for a second to make this real. Right. For every cancer patient, it could take a couple of hours to structure their information. And why is that important? Because, you have to get that information in a structured way and abstract relevant information to be able to unlock precision health applications right, for each patient. So, to be able to match them to a trial, right, someone has to sit there and go through all of the clinical notes from their entire patient care journey, from the beginning to the end. And that’s not scalable. And so one thing that we’ve been doing in an active project that we’ve been working on with a handful of our partners, but Providence specifically, I’ll call out, is using AI to actually abstract and curate that information. So that gives time back to the health care provider to spend with patients, instead of spending all their time curating this information.  And this is super important because it sets the scene and the backbone for all those precision health applications. Like I mentioned, clinical trial matching, tumor boards is another really important example here. Maybe Matt, you can talk to that a little bit. LUNGREN: It’s a great example. And you know it’s so funny. We’ve talked about this use case and the you know the health And a tumor board is a critical meeting that happens at many cancer centers where specialists all get together, come with their perspective, and make a comment on what would be the best next step in treatment. But the background in preparing for that is you know, again, organizing the data. But to your point, also, what are the clinical trials that are active? There are thousands of clinical trials. There’s hundreds every day added. How can anyone keep up with that? And these are the kinds of use cases that start to bubble up. And you realize that a technology that understands concepts, context and can reason over vast amounts of data with a language interface-that is a powerful tool. Even before we get to some of the, you know, unlocking new insights and even precision medicine, this is that idea of saving time before lives to me. And there’s an enormous amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting that happens in health GUYMAN: And we’ve packaged these agents, the manual abstraction work that, you know, manually takes hours. Now we have an agent. It’s in Foundry along with the clinical trial matching agent, which I think at Providence you showed could double the match rate over the baseline that they were using by using the AI for multiple data sources. So, we have that and then we have this orchestration that is using this really neat technology from Microsoft Research. Semantic Kernel, Magentic There’s turn taking, there’s negotiation between the agents. So, there’s this really interesting system that’s emerging. And again, this is all possible to be used through Teams. And there’s some great extensibility as well. We’ve been talking about that and working on some cool tools.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think if I have to geek out a little bit on how all this agent tech orchestrations are coming up, like I’ve been in software engineering for decades, it’s kind of a next version of distributed systems where you have these services that talk to each other. It’s a more natural way because LLMs are giving these natural ways instead of a structured API ways of conversing. We have these agents which can naturally understand how to talk to each other. Right. So this is like the next evolution of our systems now. And the way we’re packaging all of this is multiple ways based on all the standards and innovation that’s happening in this space. So, first of all, we are building these agents that are very good at specific tasks, like, Will was saying like, a trial matching agent or patient timeline agents.  So, we take all of these, and then we package it in a workflow and an orchestration. We use the standard, some of these coming from research. The Semantic Kernel, the Magentic-One. And then, all of these also allow us to extend these agents with custom agents that can be plugged in. So, we are open sourcing the entire agent orchestration in AI Foundry templates, so that developers can extend their own agents, and make their own workflows out of it. So, a lot of cool innovation happening to apply this technology to specific scenarios and workflows.  LUNGREN: Well, I was going to ask you, like, so as part of that extension. So, like, you know, folks can say, hey, I have maybe a really specific part of my workflow that I want to use some agents for, maybe one of the agents that can do PubMed literature search, for example. But then there’s also agents that, come in from the outside, you know, sort of like I could, I can imagine a software company or AI company that has a built-in agent that plugs in as well.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you can bring your own agent. And then we have these, standard ways of communicating with agents and integrating with the orchestration language so you can bring your own agent and extend this health care agent, agent orchestrator to your own needs.  LUNGREN: I can just think of, like, in a group chat, like a bunch of different specialist agents. And I really would want an orchestrator to help find the right tool, to your point earlier, because I’m guessing this ecosystem is going to expand quickly. Yeah. And I may not know which tool is best for which question. I just want to ask the question. Right.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah.  CARLSON: Well, I think to that point to I mean, you said an important point here, which is tools, and these are not necessarily just AI tools. Right? I mean, we’ve known this for a while, right? LLMS are not very good at math, but you can have it use a calculator and then it works very well. And you know you guys both brought up the universal medical abstraction a couple times.  And one of the things that I find so powerful about that is we’ve long had this vision within the precision health community that we should be able to have a learning hospital system. We should be able to actually learn from the actual real clinical experiences that are happening every day, so that we can stop practicing medicine based off averages.  There’s a lot of work that’s gone on for the last 20 years about how to actually do causal inference. That’s not an AI question. That’s a statistical question. The bottleneck, the reason why we haven’t been able to do that is because most of that information is locked up in unstructured text. And these other tools need essentially a table.  And so now you can decompose this problem, say, well, what if I can use AI not to get to the causal answer, but to just structure the information. So now I can put it into the causal inference tool. And these sorts of patterns I think again become very, not just powerful for a programmer, but they start pulling together different specialties. And I think we’ll really see an acceleration, really, of collaboration across disciplines because of this.  CARLSON: So, when I joined Microsoft Research 18 years ago, I was doing work in computational biology. And I would always have to answer the question: why is Microsoft in biomedicine? And I would always kind of joke saying, well, it is. We sell Office and Windows to every health SALIGRAMA: A lot of healthcare organizations already use Microsoft productivity tools, as you mentioned. So, they asked the developers, build these agents, and use our healthcare orchestrations, to plug in these agents and expose these in these productivity tools. They will get access to all these healthcare workers. So the healthcare agent orchestrator we have today integrates with Microsoft Teams, and it showcases an example of how you can at (@) mention these agents and talk to them like you were talking to another person in a Teams chat. And then it also provides examples of these agents and how they can use these productivity tools. One of the examples we have there is how they can summarize the assessments of this whole chat into a Word Doc, or even convert that into a PowerPoint presentation, for later on. CARLSON: One of the things that has struck me is how easy it is to do. I mean, Will, I don’t know if you’ve worked with folks that have gone from 0 to 60, like, how fast? What does that look like?  GUYMAN: Yeah, it’s funny for us, the technology to transfer all this context into a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation for a doctor to take to a meeting is relatively straightforward compared to the complicated clinical trial matching multimodal processing. The feedback has been tremendous in terms of, wow, that saves so much time to have this organized report that then I can show up to meeting with and the agents can come with me to that meeting because they’re literally having a Teams meeting, often with other human specialists. And the agents can be there and ask and answer questions and fact check and source all the right information on the fly. So, there’s a nice integration into these existing tools.  LUNGREN: We worked with several different centers just to kind of understand, you know, where this might be useful. And, like, as I think we talked about before, the ideas that we’ve come up with again, this is a great one because it’s complex. It’s kind of hairy. There’s a lot of things happening under the hood that don’t necessarily require a medical license to do, right, to prepare for a tumor board and to organize data. But, it’s fascinating, actually. So, you know, folks have come up with ideas of, could I have an agent that can operate an MRI machine, and I can ask the agent to change some parameters or redo a protocol. We thought that was a pretty powerful use case. We’ve had others that have just said, you know, I really want to have a specific agent that’s able to kind of act like deep research does for the consumer side, but based on the context of my patient, so that it can search all the literature and pull the data in the papers that are relevant to this case. And the list goes on and on from operations all the way to clinical, you know, sort of decision making at some level. And I think that the research community that’s going to sprout around this will help us, guide us, I guess, to see what is the most high-impact use cases. Where is this effective? And maybe where it’s not effective. But to me, the part that makes me so, I guess excited about this is just that I don’t have to think about, okay, well, then we have to figure out Health IT. Because it’s always, you know, we always have great ideas and research, and it always feels like there’s such a huge chasm to get it in front of the health care workers that might want to test this out. And it feels like, again, this productivity tool use case again with the enterprise security, the possibility for bringing in third parties to contribute really does feel like it’s a new surface area for innovation. CARLSON: Yeah, I love that. Look. Let me end by putting you all on the spot. So, in three years, multimodal agents will do what? Matt, I’ll start with you.  LUNGREN: I am convinced that it’s going to save massive amount of time before it saves many lives.  RUNDE: I’ll focus on the patient care journey and diagnostic journey. I think it will kind of transform that process for the patient itself and shorten that process.  GUYMAN: Yeah, I think we’ve seen already papers recently showing that different modalities surfaced complementary information. And so we’ll see kind of this AI and these agents becoming an essential companion to the physician, surfacing insights that would have been overlooked otherwise.  SALIGRAMA: And similar to what you guys were saying, agents will become important assistants to healthcare workers, reducing a lot of documentation and workflow, excess work they have to do.  CARLSON: I love that. And I guess for my part, I think really what we’re going to see is a massive unleash of creativity. We’ve had a lot of folks that have been innovating in this space, but they haven’t had a way to actually get it into the hands of early adopters. And I think we’re going to see that really lead to an explosion of creativity across the ecosystem.  LUNGREN: So, where do we get started? Like where are the developers who are listening to this? The folks that are at, you know, labs, research labs and developing health care solutions. Where do they go to get started with the Foundry, the models we’ve talked about, the healthcare agent orchestrator. Where do they go? GUYMAN: So AI.azure.com is the AI Foundry. It’s a website you can go as a developer. You can sign in with your Azure subscription, get your Azure account, your own VM, all that stuff. And you have an agent catalog, the model catalog. You can start from there. There is documentation and templates that you can then deploy to Teams or other applications.  LUNGREN: And tutorials are coming. Right. We have recordings of tutorials. We’ll have Hackathons, some sessions and then more to come. Yeah, we’re really excited.  [MUSIC]  LUNGREN: Thank you so much, guys for joining us.  CARLSON: Yes. Yeah. Thanks.  SALIGRAMA: Thanks for having us.  [MUSIC FADES] 
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  • How long designs survive

    The Internet has greatly shortened product life cycles. Objects that stood the test of time offer lessons for today. So do designs that are intentionally ephemeral.Designing applications or websites means your designs don’t survive very long. Even if your product or app survives for a decade or more, there will be pressure to update the design every few years. This got me wondering how long designs of other things stay around. So here is a curated survey of how long our designs survive.Sticky NotesThe sticky note… a lab experiment gone awry — The ubiquitous sticky note famously emerged from a lab experiment gone awry. Glue that wasn’t very sticky. Although sticky notes have been around for 45 years, the life of any single sticky note is probably measured in hours, not days. Nevertheless they have been a boon to brainstorming sessions and design sprints around the world. Their ephemeral nature is the key to their value. Don’t like what you wrote? Throw it out and write another one. Don’t think it belongs in this group? Move it to another. Sticky notes are the rare object that is as easily used digitally as their physical counterparts.Sand MandalaA finished sand mandala — Attribution: By the original uploader was Colonel Warden at English Wikipedia. — Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by SMasters using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, use for a few days or weeks) — A sand mandala is a symbolic representation of the universe made of colored sand. Creating them is a ceremonial act practiced by Tibetan monks and nuns and takes a few days to several weeks to create. Constructing one is an act of meditation requiring immense focus. After the mandala is finished, it is on view for only a short period of time. It is then destroyed in a dissolution ceremony meant to emphasize the impermanence of all things. Finally the sand is released into a river to transfer the spirits embodied in the mandala back into nature and the rest of the world.The first time I saw a video of this process, it shocked my world. The design was vivid, ornate, and beautiful. To see something so beautiful then destroyed by the people who made it jolted me. When swept into a pile, the vivid pigments quickly become a single gray mass. They are an amazing lesson about the nature of our lives and the world of things.WebsitesThe SF bay area edition of Craigslist.com barely changed from when it launched in 1995! — The lifespan of your average website is about 2 years according to this post. Many sites are up for much longer but even those tend to need a refresh. Craigslist is the notable exception by still proudly sporting its original 1995 web 1.0 look and feel. I’ve worked on around 14 websites and apps. Of those, only 2are live and still reflect the design I worked on. As dominant as the Internet is in today’s culture, “built to last” simply does not apply. Permanence is an anti-pattern.Thonet №14 ChairThe Thonet №14 Chair — Attribution: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. — Michael Thonet’s №14 Chair is a design classic. Simple and minimal. Introduced in 1859, It was the first chair to be mass produced but does not look like an industrial product. It is sometimes called the cafe chair due to its strong association with Parisian cafes. It was also sometimes referred to as the “lion-tamer chair”. You can see one in use in this post.BicycleThe ‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycle. Since the 1950s, over 500 million of these bikes have been produced and sold. — The bicycle was invented in Germany and introduced in Paris around 1817. It is an amazing design object matched only by its engineering simplicity. The basic triangular geometry is minimal, strong, and still recognizable 200 years after being invented. There have been many improvements to the underlying technologies but the basic design remains.BuildingsThe Pantheon of Rome — Attribution: By Macrons — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Pantheon in Rome was completed around 126 AD and has been in continuous use for almost 2000 years. It is widely considered the oldest building still in continuous use today. It began as a Roman temple. For the ceiling of the Parthenon, the Romans used cement mixed with ash which kept it light but strong. In the 7th century, it became a Christian church, the Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs. Adaptive reuse helped preserve it through centuries of war, weather, and regime changes.“Built to last” is a phrase sometimes used for things like old cars, buildings, and walls. It certainly applies to the pyramids and the Pantheon. It is much less frequently applied to objects today. It doen’t apply to the majority of objects we use in our daily lives. Consumer culture has driven us towards a throw away culture. This impacts the environment and our ability to build things to last.What does it take to build something that will last?This is a question asked by Louis Kahn, one of the great American architects. His Exeter Library is his answer. He wanted to pursue an architecture that would stand the test of time. He wanted to build something that would be monumental, strong and, like the pyramids, remain beautiful even in ruin.The interior of the Phillips Exeter Academy Library showing the raw, monumental cement building structure. Image source: use for 11,000 years) — The title of oldest continuously inhabited city is a subject of debate but Damascus is often credited as the oldest city still in use today. Jericho is older but was not in continuous use. Jerusalem & Athens both date back about 5000 years. From a design perspective, I marvel at Venice. It’s been in existence for over 1000 years. Its lasting beauty is amazing when you realize it was originally built to escape invaders on the mainland. The buildings, plazas, along with the canals and bridges that connect them are an amazing experience.The Bucentaur Returns to the Pier at the Doge’s Palaceby Canaletto — Attribution: Google Arts & Culture — mwEV7sO9uSFCpw, Public Domain, & PestleThe mortar & pestle — symbol of the pharmacist — Attribution: Image by Evan-Amos — Own work, Public Domain, using our teeth, we’ve been grinding up food and other materials for about 37,000 years. The Mortar & Pestle was likely used initially to prepare grains and seeds to be more digestible but they had many other uses.They are still widely used todayand have come to symbolize the pharmaceutical profession. As someone who cooks, I’m glad we figured out ground spices makes tastier dishes.Pyramids — The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure in the world for 3800 years. I’m including pyramids for age reference only. How long they’ve been “in use” raises tricky questions. Should we measure use by the initial construction; as amazing ruins we only look at; or as a tomb for a dead pharaoh? They certainly were amazing feats of engineering.Bow & arrow / stone arrowheads — These two designs are best taken as a connected journey. Arrows are an evolution of the stone-tipped spear. The bow & arrow was a leap in the efficiency and precision of throwing a spear. The innovation allowed hunters to remain farther away from their prey. The bow, arrow, and stone arrowhead built on the previous technology. Each element required an increase in precision and skill and offered advances over the previous tool. Older arrowheads were mostly focused on the general shape and cutting edges. Later versions were shaped to be more firmly lashed to wooden spears. As the first to enter the battlefield, U.S. Marines sometimes refer to themselves as, “the tip of the spear”. A 74,000 year old metaphor that is still understandable today.Hand axeIllustration of a hand axe.Imagine designing a product that was so good it was used for a million years. That’s 1,000,000 years! I remember seeing a hand axe in the “Tools: Extending Our Reach” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. I pondered it as a design object that dwarfed my career as a designer. The hand axe is a physical testament to both the slowness of early hominid evolution and the enduring utility of the object. The key innovation was the ever more skilled chipping away of flakes to create the cutting edge. Older versions of the axe are barely recognizable as being intentionally created. Later versions however, show two distinct functional requirements. The part that you held needed to be broad and round so as to be comfortable in the hand. While “the business end” had sharp, carefully-shaped cutting edges. I marvel at anything being used for this incomprehensible span of time.Final thoughts“If you want to go quickly, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” — African ProverbAs I wrote this post, I thought about the lessons of these very different objects. Here are my takeaways.Monumental acts take monumental teams — It takes incredible effort by many people to build something that has great impact and will last. Monumental achievements are never accomplished by one person. Each hand axe was likely created by one person but the concept we now know as the hand axe happened over a million years of usage. Venice is a singular experience. But building it required the work of many people over centuries.Adaptation is key to survival — The Pantheon survived in part because it is a space flexible in use. If your designs are to survive, you must hand them off to others. Loving caretakers are as important as passionate creators.Celebrate the ephemeral — Sand mandalas and sticky notes allow us to create something without becoming too attached to it. Having worked on lots of long-term projects, I’ve always found making dinner to be a positive antidote. Chopping vegetables can be meditative. A meal is finished in an hour or 2 and then you get to enjoy the creation. Simple acts are still creative.A graph showing how long these designs have been use. The hand axe was excluded because its million years of use reduces the other objects to tiny, barely visible bars.ReferenceTimeline of oldest human inventions — WikipediaOldest still standing buildings — WikipediaHow long designs survive was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
    #how #long #designs #survive
    How long designs survive
    The Internet has greatly shortened product life cycles. Objects that stood the test of time offer lessons for today. So do designs that are intentionally ephemeral.Designing applications or websites means your designs don’t survive very long. Even if your product or app survives for a decade or more, there will be pressure to update the design every few years. This got me wondering how long designs of other things stay around. So here is a curated survey of how long our designs survive.Sticky NotesThe sticky note… a lab experiment gone awry — The ubiquitous sticky note famously emerged from a lab experiment gone awry. Glue that wasn’t very sticky. Although sticky notes have been around for 45 years, the life of any single sticky note is probably measured in hours, not days. Nevertheless they have been a boon to brainstorming sessions and design sprints around the world. Their ephemeral nature is the key to their value. Don’t like what you wrote? Throw it out and write another one. Don’t think it belongs in this group? Move it to another. Sticky notes are the rare object that is as easily used digitally as their physical counterparts.Sand MandalaA finished sand mandala — Attribution: By the original uploader was Colonel Warden at English Wikipedia. — Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by SMasters using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, use for a few days or weeks) — A sand mandala is a symbolic representation of the universe made of colored sand. Creating them is a ceremonial act practiced by Tibetan monks and nuns and takes a few days to several weeks to create. Constructing one is an act of meditation requiring immense focus. After the mandala is finished, it is on view for only a short period of time. It is then destroyed in a dissolution ceremony meant to emphasize the impermanence of all things. Finally the sand is released into a river to transfer the spirits embodied in the mandala back into nature and the rest of the world.The first time I saw a video of this process, it shocked my world. The design was vivid, ornate, and beautiful. To see something so beautiful then destroyed by the people who made it jolted me. When swept into a pile, the vivid pigments quickly become a single gray mass. They are an amazing lesson about the nature of our lives and the world of things.WebsitesThe SF bay area edition of Craigslist.com barely changed from when it launched in 1995! — The lifespan of your average website is about 2 years according to this post. Many sites are up for much longer but even those tend to need a refresh. Craigslist is the notable exception by still proudly sporting its original 1995 web 1.0 look and feel. I’ve worked on around 14 websites and apps. Of those, only 2are live and still reflect the design I worked on. As dominant as the Internet is in today’s culture, “built to last” simply does not apply. Permanence is an anti-pattern.Thonet №14 ChairThe Thonet №14 Chair — Attribution: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. — Michael Thonet’s №14 Chair is a design classic. Simple and minimal. Introduced in 1859, It was the first chair to be mass produced but does not look like an industrial product. It is sometimes called the cafe chair due to its strong association with Parisian cafes. It was also sometimes referred to as the “lion-tamer chair”. You can see one in use in this post.BicycleThe ‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycle. Since the 1950s, over 500 million of these bikes have been produced and sold. — The bicycle was invented in Germany and introduced in Paris around 1817. It is an amazing design object matched only by its engineering simplicity. The basic triangular geometry is minimal, strong, and still recognizable 200 years after being invented. There have been many improvements to the underlying technologies but the basic design remains.BuildingsThe Pantheon of Rome — Attribution: By Macrons — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Pantheon in Rome was completed around 126 AD and has been in continuous use for almost 2000 years. It is widely considered the oldest building still in continuous use today. It began as a Roman temple. For the ceiling of the Parthenon, the Romans used cement mixed with ash which kept it light but strong. In the 7th century, it became a Christian church, the Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs. Adaptive reuse helped preserve it through centuries of war, weather, and regime changes.“Built to last” is a phrase sometimes used for things like old cars, buildings, and walls. It certainly applies to the pyramids and the Pantheon. It is much less frequently applied to objects today. It doen’t apply to the majority of objects we use in our daily lives. Consumer culture has driven us towards a throw away culture. This impacts the environment and our ability to build things to last.What does it take to build something that will last?This is a question asked by Louis Kahn, one of the great American architects. His Exeter Library is his answer. He wanted to pursue an architecture that would stand the test of time. He wanted to build something that would be monumental, strong and, like the pyramids, remain beautiful even in ruin.The interior of the Phillips Exeter Academy Library showing the raw, monumental cement building structure. Image source: use for 11,000 years) — The title of oldest continuously inhabited city is a subject of debate but Damascus is often credited as the oldest city still in use today. Jericho is older but was not in continuous use. Jerusalem & Athens both date back about 5000 years. From a design perspective, I marvel at Venice. It’s been in existence for over 1000 years. Its lasting beauty is amazing when you realize it was originally built to escape invaders on the mainland. The buildings, plazas, along with the canals and bridges that connect them are an amazing experience.The Bucentaur Returns to the Pier at the Doge’s Palaceby Canaletto — Attribution: Google Arts & Culture — mwEV7sO9uSFCpw, Public Domain, & PestleThe mortar & pestle — symbol of the pharmacist — Attribution: Image by Evan-Amos — Own work, Public Domain, using our teeth, we’ve been grinding up food and other materials for about 37,000 years. The Mortar & Pestle was likely used initially to prepare grains and seeds to be more digestible but they had many other uses.They are still widely used todayand have come to symbolize the pharmaceutical profession. As someone who cooks, I’m glad we figured out ground spices makes tastier dishes.Pyramids — The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure in the world for 3800 years. I’m including pyramids for age reference only. How long they’ve been “in use” raises tricky questions. Should we measure use by the initial construction; as amazing ruins we only look at; or as a tomb for a dead pharaoh? They certainly were amazing feats of engineering.Bow & arrow / stone arrowheads — These two designs are best taken as a connected journey. Arrows are an evolution of the stone-tipped spear. The bow & arrow was a leap in the efficiency and precision of throwing a spear. The innovation allowed hunters to remain farther away from their prey. The bow, arrow, and stone arrowhead built on the previous technology. Each element required an increase in precision and skill and offered advances over the previous tool. Older arrowheads were mostly focused on the general shape and cutting edges. Later versions were shaped to be more firmly lashed to wooden spears. As the first to enter the battlefield, U.S. Marines sometimes refer to themselves as, “the tip of the spear”. A 74,000 year old metaphor that is still understandable today.Hand axeIllustration of a hand axe.Imagine designing a product that was so good it was used for a million years. That’s 1,000,000 years! I remember seeing a hand axe in the “Tools: Extending Our Reach” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. I pondered it as a design object that dwarfed my career as a designer. The hand axe is a physical testament to both the slowness of early hominid evolution and the enduring utility of the object. The key innovation was the ever more skilled chipping away of flakes to create the cutting edge. Older versions of the axe are barely recognizable as being intentionally created. Later versions however, show two distinct functional requirements. The part that you held needed to be broad and round so as to be comfortable in the hand. While “the business end” had sharp, carefully-shaped cutting edges. I marvel at anything being used for this incomprehensible span of time.Final thoughts“If you want to go quickly, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” — African ProverbAs I wrote this post, I thought about the lessons of these very different objects. Here are my takeaways.Monumental acts take monumental teams — It takes incredible effort by many people to build something that has great impact and will last. Monumental achievements are never accomplished by one person. Each hand axe was likely created by one person but the concept we now know as the hand axe happened over a million years of usage. Venice is a singular experience. But building it required the work of many people over centuries.Adaptation is key to survival — The Pantheon survived in part because it is a space flexible in use. If your designs are to survive, you must hand them off to others. Loving caretakers are as important as passionate creators.Celebrate the ephemeral — Sand mandalas and sticky notes allow us to create something without becoming too attached to it. Having worked on lots of long-term projects, I’ve always found making dinner to be a positive antidote. Chopping vegetables can be meditative. A meal is finished in an hour or 2 and then you get to enjoy the creation. Simple acts are still creative.A graph showing how long these designs have been use. The hand axe was excluded because its million years of use reduces the other objects to tiny, barely visible bars.ReferenceTimeline of oldest human inventions — WikipediaOldest still standing buildings — WikipediaHow long designs survive was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story. #how #long #designs #survive
    UXDESIGN.CC
    How long designs survive
    The Internet has greatly shortened product life cycles. Objects that stood the test of time offer lessons for today. So do designs that are intentionally ephemeral.Designing applications or websites means your designs don’t survive very long. Even if your product or app survives for a decade or more, there will be pressure to update the design every few years. This got me wondering how long designs of other things stay around. So here is a curated survey of how long our designs survive.Sticky NotesThe sticky note… a lab experiment gone awry(average lifespan: several hours) — The ubiquitous sticky note famously emerged from a lab experiment gone awry. Glue that wasn’t very sticky. Although sticky notes have been around for 45 years, the life of any single sticky note is probably measured in hours, not days. Nevertheless they have been a boon to brainstorming sessions and design sprints around the world. Their ephemeral nature is the key to their value. Don’t like what you wrote? Throw it out and write another one. Don’t think it belongs in this group? Move it to another. Sticky notes are the rare object that is as easily used digitally as their physical counterparts.Sand MandalaA finished sand mandala — Attribution: By the original uploader was Colonel Warden at English Wikipedia. — Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by SMasters using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16371236(in use for a few days or weeks) — A sand mandala is a symbolic representation of the universe made of colored sand. Creating them is a ceremonial act practiced by Tibetan monks and nuns and takes a few days to several weeks to create. Constructing one is an act of meditation requiring immense focus. After the mandala is finished, it is on view for only a short period of time. It is then destroyed in a dissolution ceremony meant to emphasize the impermanence of all things. Finally the sand is released into a river to transfer the spirits embodied in the mandala back into nature and the rest of the world.The first time I saw a video of this process, it shocked my world. The design was vivid, ornate, and beautiful. To see something so beautiful then destroyed by the people who made it jolted me. When swept into a pile, the vivid pigments quickly become a single gray mass. They are an amazing lesson about the nature of our lives and the world of things.WebsitesThe SF bay area edition of Craigslist.com barely changed from when it launched in 1995!(in use for 32 years) — The lifespan of your average website is about 2 years according to this post. Many sites are up for much longer but even those tend to need a refresh. Craigslist is the notable exception by still proudly sporting its original 1995 web 1.0 look and feel. I’ve worked on around 14 websites and apps. Of those, only 2 (7%) are live and still reflect the design I worked on. As dominant as the Internet is in today’s culture, “built to last” simply does not apply. Permanence is an anti-pattern.Thonet №14 ChairThe Thonet №14 Chair — Attribution: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.(in use for 166 years) — Michael Thonet’s №14 Chair is a design classic. Simple and minimal. Introduced in 1859, It was the first chair to be mass produced but does not look like an industrial product. It is sometimes called the cafe chair due to its strong association with Parisian cafes. It was also sometimes referred to as the “lion-tamer chair”. You can see one in use in this post.BicycleThe ‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycle. Since the 1950s, over 500 million of these bikes have been produced and sold.(in use for 208 years) — The bicycle was invented in Germany and introduced in Paris around 1817. It is an amazing design object matched only by its engineering simplicity. The basic triangular geometry is minimal, strong, and still recognizable 200 years after being invented. There have been many improvements to the underlying technologies but the basic design remains.BuildingsThe Pantheon of Rome — Attribution: By Macrons — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49683083The Pantheon in Rome was completed around 126 AD and has been in continuous use for almost 2000 years. It is widely considered the oldest building still in continuous use today. It began as a Roman temple. For the ceiling of the Parthenon, the Romans used cement mixed with ash which kept it light but strong. In the 7th century, it became a Christian church, the Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs. Adaptive reuse helped preserve it through centuries of war, weather, and regime changes.“Built to last” is a phrase sometimes used for things like old cars, buildings, and walls. It certainly applies to the pyramids and the Pantheon. It is much less frequently applied to objects today. It doen’t apply to the majority of objects we use in our daily lives. Consumer culture has driven us towards a throw away culture. This impacts the environment and our ability to build things to last.What does it take to build something that will last?This is a question asked by Louis Kahn, one of the great American architects. His Exeter Library is his answer. He wanted to pursue an architecture that would stand the test of time. He wanted to build something that would be monumental, strong and, like the pyramids, remain beautiful even in ruin.The interior of the Phillips Exeter Academy Library showing the raw, monumental cement building structure. Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePornCities(in use for 11,000 years) — The title of oldest continuously inhabited city is a subject of debate but Damascus is often credited as the oldest city still in use today. Jericho is older but was not in continuous use. Jerusalem & Athens both date back about 5000 years. From a design perspective, I marvel at Venice. It’s been in existence for over 1000 years. Its lasting beauty is amazing when you realize it was originally built to escape invaders on the mainland. The buildings, plazas, along with the canals and bridges that connect them are an amazing experience.The Bucentaur Returns to the Pier at the Doge’s Palace (c. 1730) by Canaletto — Attribution: Google Arts & Culture — mwEV7sO9uSFCpw, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22572210Mortar & PestleThe mortar & pestle — symbol of the pharmacist — Attribution: Image by Evan-Amos — Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12038229Beyond using our teeth, we’ve been grinding up food and other materials for about 37,000 years. The Mortar & Pestle was likely used initially to prepare grains and seeds to be more digestible but they had many other uses.They are still widely used today (guacamole anyone?) and have come to symbolize the pharmaceutical profession. As someone who cooks, I’m glad we figured out ground spices makes tastier dishes.Pyramids(built 4000 years ago) — The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure in the world for 3800 years. I’m including pyramids for age reference only. How long they’ve been “in use” raises tricky questions. Should we measure use by the initial construction; as amazing ruins we only look at; or as a tomb for a dead pharaoh? They certainly were amazing feats of engineering.Bow & arrow / stone arrowheads(in use for 37,000–74,000 years) — These two designs are best taken as a connected journey. Arrows are an evolution of the stone-tipped spear. The bow & arrow was a leap in the efficiency and precision of throwing a spear. The innovation allowed hunters to remain farther away from their prey. The bow, arrow, and stone arrowhead built on the previous technology (an interesting concept known as “the adjacent possible” richly described by Steven Johnson in, ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’). Each element required an increase in precision and skill and offered advances over the previous tool. Older arrowheads were mostly focused on the general shape and cutting edges. Later versions were shaped to be more firmly lashed to wooden spears. As the first to enter the battlefield, U.S. Marines sometimes refer to themselves as, “the tip of the spear”. A 74,000 year old metaphor that is still understandable today.Hand axeIllustration of a hand axe.Imagine designing a product that was so good it was used for a million years. That’s 1,000,000 years! I remember seeing a hand axe in the “Tools: Extending Our Reach” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. I pondered it as a design object that dwarfed my career as a designer. The hand axe is a physical testament to both the slowness of early hominid evolution and the enduring utility of the object. The key innovation was the ever more skilled chipping away of flakes to create the cutting edge. Older versions of the axe are barely recognizable as being intentionally created. Later versions however, show two distinct functional requirements. The part that you held needed to be broad and round so as to be comfortable in the hand. While “the business end” had sharp, carefully-shaped cutting edges. I marvel at anything being used for this incomprehensible span of time.Final thoughts“If you want to go quickly, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” — African ProverbAs I wrote this post, I thought about the lessons of these very different objects. Here are my takeaways.Monumental acts take monumental teams — It takes incredible effort by many people to build something that has great impact and will last. Monumental achievements are never accomplished by one person. Each hand axe was likely created by one person but the concept we now know as the hand axe happened over a million years of usage. Venice is a singular experience. But building it required the work of many people over centuries.Adaptation is key to survival — The Pantheon survived in part because it is a space flexible in use. If your designs are to survive, you must hand them off to others. Loving caretakers are as important as passionate creators.Celebrate the ephemeral — Sand mandalas and sticky notes allow us to create something without becoming too attached to it. Having worked on lots of long-term projects, I’ve always found making dinner to be a positive antidote. Chopping vegetables can be meditative. A meal is finished in an hour or 2 and then you get to enjoy the creation. Simple acts are still creative.A graph showing how long these designs have been use. The hand axe was excluded because its million years of use reduces the other objects to tiny, barely visible bars.ReferenceTimeline of oldest human inventions — WikipediaOldest still standing buildings — WikipediaHow long designs survive was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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  • Games Inbox: Who is the best third party video game publisher?

    Who do you think is the best publisher?The Friday letters page tries to work out what’s been going on with Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders this week, as one reader gives up on the Xbox format.
    To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk
    East vs. West
    I agree with the reader yesterday, who said that Capcom, and other similar companies, improve their reputation simply by putting out good games and not being anti-consumer, whether you’re interested in a particular title or not. I also agree that failure of Western publishers to earn that sort of popularity is why no one is loyal to them.So that got me thinking: who is the best third party publisher at the moment, i.e. not Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft? I’d say it probably is Capcom, but there’s a lot of Japanese publishers that are doing good work at the moment, where I’m automatically interested in almost anything they do.
    But what about Western companies? It’s not EA or Activision or Ubisoft, I’m sure most people would agree. Or Warner Bros. or Take-Two, who have barely released anything in years. Bethesda’s track record is very bumpy and the who else even is there anymore? No wonder people think first party games are so important.Dempsy
    Astronomically big
    It’s crazy to think that GTA 6 is big enough that even releasing a game next autumn is a risk. It’s like a black hole, creating a gravity well so deep that nothing can escape. I’d like to see Resident Evil 9 next year, but I understand Capcom not wanting to risk that. I think instead we’ll get a minor release, like the Resident Evil Zero remake, to keep things ticking along and that’s it.I think the situation is going to be mirrored to a degree by the Switch 2, which is going to have a big launch this summer but then still be the hottest thing this Christmas. Nintendo must be over the moon about the GTA 6 delay, but I have to agree with recent letters that their post-launch line-up is not very exciting, and I’m surprised at that, given how long they’ve had to get ready.Danson
    Final Edition
    Is there a chance in the future, providing the manufacturers don’t stop adding discs, the companies will sell game of the year editions on disc? By this I mean a fully patched and finalised game can be bought from Xbox or PlayStation stores and sent to your house for you to keep and display. Companies like Limited Run and PlayAsia do something like this and it seems popular.It would be a middle ground of giving more options and providing sales maybe a year after release. Every time I look at Limited Run they’ve sold out.Bobwallett
    GC: It sort of happens sometimes, with things like The Last Of Us compilation, but you’re right in suggesting that places like Limited Run are the only ones likely to do it on a regular basis. But even then we don’t think they guarantee that downloads are not necessary.
    Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk
    Bad timing
    I downloaded Nine Sols on Game Pass, as I like the games it was said to be a mix of: Hollow Knight and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The combat is centred around parrying.It’s been rough though. I’m just not that great at parrying in games and that’s why l found Sekiro the most difficult FromSoftware game to get to grips with.
    The Soulsborne games difficulty are less about reaction skills and about harsh punishment on death and a lack of handholding.
    Although I’m rubbish, I think I’ll persist. Everything about the game is very intriguing and high quality so far, I’m surprised it seems to have been largely overlooked. Also, like any parry-based combat, when you nail it it’s very satisfying.Simundo
    GC: It’s probably the game we most regret not reviewing in the last few years, as we’re big fans of Red Candle Games. We still haven’t played it, as both its release dates were at very inconvenient times.
    Correct opinion
    I’ve been going through the Mass Effect trilogy and have just finished 2. That last mission is one of the best last levels in any game, in my opinion. Pure action and I just didn’t know who was going to die and thankfully the teammates I wasn’t fond off all got killed and I kept the ones I like alive. Great end to a great game.I know it was a disappointment at the time, but I’m looking forward to going through 3 again and giving it another go. I remember at the time the ending didn’t bother me too much, but I’ll see how I feel about it this time!Simon
    PS: I managed to get the entire regular crew of the Normandy killed, so that wasn’t quite so good! A new crew awaits in 3…Calling it a day
    I have been meaning to write with a list of things that annoyed me with Xbox over the years, none of them were deal breakers until the Xbox One.The massive original controller for the original Xbox. Why?
    The enormous external power supply things. Something else to gather dust.
    The introduction of avatars during the Xbox 360 era. We know why, but why?
    My Xbox One turning itself on and staying on. This was the nail in the coffin for Xbox and me.
    Forza Motorsport, when racing in first person view, especially when racing against American cars, the car in front used to take up too much of the screen. It was like racing in the slipstream of a garage door, not a racing car. It lacked graphical and physical finesse.
    This last one was when I gave up on Forza Horizon 4. I used to drive to and from work every day, some of the journeys were quite arduous and stressful. Later in the evening when I got a chance to play Forza Horizon 4 I was forced to drive greater distances between races or to another garage find. I thought to myself, ‘Hang on, this isn’t fun. This is just adding to my daily commute.’ I think this was another case of games becoming larger than necessary.
    So that was that, I gave up on Forza Horizon and I gave up on Xbox.
    The fact is, I enjoyed the original Xbox, Project Gotham Racing, Jet Set Radio, and Splinter Cell. I used the Xbox 360 mostly for racing games, including Ridge Racer and Burnout, which I loved. But by the Xbox One the choice had worsened.
    I have bought and kept all the mainstream consoles and handheldssince the SNES era and I still love gaming. But Xbox will probably fail to get my attention again. I have an extensive games backlog and Nintendo and PlayStation will probably continue to provide me with enough enjoyment for the rest of my days.Ed
    PS: it’s taken me a very long time to mention this, but the Xbox 360 controller got a lot of praise when it first came out, which was deserved, but did anyone else think that ergonomically it was very similar to the GameCube Wavebird? Button configuration very different obviously.Try it yourself
    Just thought I’d mention there is a good free demo on Xboxfor Star Wars Outlaws. I was very impressed.I will be getting the full game at some point.Johnny Alpha SD
    Currently playing: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Halo infinite, and Doom EternalGC: As we’ve said before, it’s really not a bad game. It’s not a great game either, certainly not compared to something like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but we do feel its reputation is unfairly earned.
    Rolling the dice
    I’ve been watching the pre-orders of the Switch 2 with interest. I ordered mine when they opened last month, however having bought every Nintendo console on day one since the N64 I have been burnt a few times with a lack of software support, early price cuts, and a shortened lifespan.With these previous experiences I always find it a nervy time when Nintendo launch their latest; have I invested in a dudor will it be a resounding success and a great purchase? Only time will tell, however to me the Switch was the perfect console, and the Switch 2 seems to have refined this further. How can it be anything other than a colossal hit? Of course, in my eyes, all Nintendo consoles have been brilliant in their own right, with excellent first party games on each.
    Perhaps the spike in availability in the past few days has been to do with Nintendo redistributing North American stock following Trump’s tariffs, maybe it’s a lack of interest or it has plateaued, perhaps it’s too expensive for most families in these hard times or perhaps Nintendo have simply made more to meet demand.
    It has certainly been more readily available and easier to pre-order than I anticipated, a good thing as far as battling scalpers is concerned. But a part of me looks at the preorders every time a new Nintendo console is released and wonders…will this one get the support a Nintendo console deserves? I should really wait it out and see what happens, but I just cant resist a shiny new Nintendo console.Elliott
    GC: The stock issue has been puzzling the last few days, but originally the plan was that there would be enough to go around and there wouldn’t be any shortages. It may be that initially everything was diverted to the US, to get in before the tariffs, and now things are beginning to even out.
    Inbox also-rans
    Very are selling two Nintendo Switch 2 bundles as I’m writing this.DavidGC: Thank you. Very has had bundles available for the last two days. Which ones they are varies a lot, but they’ve never entirely run out of stock.
    Wow… just finished Act 1 in Clair Obscur: 33 Expedition… I’m not crying. A fly flew into my eye. What a game! Enjoying every moment, highly recommend if you haven’t picked it up just yet.Adam_Lion_23More Trending

    Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk
    The small printNew Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content.
    You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.
    You can also leave your comments below and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.
    Arrow
    MORE: Games Inbox: Is it weird to not like GTA games?

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    #games #inbox #who #best #third
    Games Inbox: Who is the best third party video game publisher?
    Who do you think is the best publisher?The Friday letters page tries to work out what’s been going on with Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders this week, as one reader gives up on the Xbox format. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk East vs. West I agree with the reader yesterday, who said that Capcom, and other similar companies, improve their reputation simply by putting out good games and not being anti-consumer, whether you’re interested in a particular title or not. I also agree that failure of Western publishers to earn that sort of popularity is why no one is loyal to them.So that got me thinking: who is the best third party publisher at the moment, i.e. not Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft? I’d say it probably is Capcom, but there’s a lot of Japanese publishers that are doing good work at the moment, where I’m automatically interested in almost anything they do. But what about Western companies? It’s not EA or Activision or Ubisoft, I’m sure most people would agree. Or Warner Bros. or Take-Two, who have barely released anything in years. Bethesda’s track record is very bumpy and the who else even is there anymore? No wonder people think first party games are so important.Dempsy Astronomically big It’s crazy to think that GTA 6 is big enough that even releasing a game next autumn is a risk. It’s like a black hole, creating a gravity well so deep that nothing can escape. I’d like to see Resident Evil 9 next year, but I understand Capcom not wanting to risk that. I think instead we’ll get a minor release, like the Resident Evil Zero remake, to keep things ticking along and that’s it.I think the situation is going to be mirrored to a degree by the Switch 2, which is going to have a big launch this summer but then still be the hottest thing this Christmas. Nintendo must be over the moon about the GTA 6 delay, but I have to agree with recent letters that their post-launch line-up is not very exciting, and I’m surprised at that, given how long they’ve had to get ready.Danson Final Edition Is there a chance in the future, providing the manufacturers don’t stop adding discs, the companies will sell game of the year editions on disc? By this I mean a fully patched and finalised game can be bought from Xbox or PlayStation stores and sent to your house for you to keep and display. Companies like Limited Run and PlayAsia do something like this and it seems popular.It would be a middle ground of giving more options and providing sales maybe a year after release. Every time I look at Limited Run they’ve sold out.Bobwallett GC: It sort of happens sometimes, with things like The Last Of Us compilation, but you’re right in suggesting that places like Limited Run are the only ones likely to do it on a regular basis. But even then we don’t think they guarantee that downloads are not necessary. Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk Bad timing I downloaded Nine Sols on Game Pass, as I like the games it was said to be a mix of: Hollow Knight and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The combat is centred around parrying.It’s been rough though. I’m just not that great at parrying in games and that’s why l found Sekiro the most difficult FromSoftware game to get to grips with. The Soulsborne games difficulty are less about reaction skills and about harsh punishment on death and a lack of handholding. Although I’m rubbish, I think I’ll persist. Everything about the game is very intriguing and high quality so far, I’m surprised it seems to have been largely overlooked. Also, like any parry-based combat, when you nail it it’s very satisfying.Simundo GC: It’s probably the game we most regret not reviewing in the last few years, as we’re big fans of Red Candle Games. We still haven’t played it, as both its release dates were at very inconvenient times. Correct opinion I’ve been going through the Mass Effect trilogy and have just finished 2. That last mission is one of the best last levels in any game, in my opinion. Pure action and I just didn’t know who was going to die and thankfully the teammates I wasn’t fond off all got killed and I kept the ones I like alive. Great end to a great game.I know it was a disappointment at the time, but I’m looking forward to going through 3 again and giving it another go. I remember at the time the ending didn’t bother me too much, but I’ll see how I feel about it this time!Simon PS: I managed to get the entire regular crew of the Normandy killed, so that wasn’t quite so good! A new crew awaits in 3…Calling it a day I have been meaning to write with a list of things that annoyed me with Xbox over the years, none of them were deal breakers until the Xbox One.The massive original controller for the original Xbox. Why? The enormous external power supply things. Something else to gather dust. The introduction of avatars during the Xbox 360 era. We know why, but why? My Xbox One turning itself on and staying on. This was the nail in the coffin for Xbox and me. Forza Motorsport, when racing in first person view, especially when racing against American cars, the car in front used to take up too much of the screen. It was like racing in the slipstream of a garage door, not a racing car. It lacked graphical and physical finesse. This last one was when I gave up on Forza Horizon 4. I used to drive to and from work every day, some of the journeys were quite arduous and stressful. Later in the evening when I got a chance to play Forza Horizon 4 I was forced to drive greater distances between races or to another garage find. I thought to myself, ‘Hang on, this isn’t fun. This is just adding to my daily commute.’ I think this was another case of games becoming larger than necessary. So that was that, I gave up on Forza Horizon and I gave up on Xbox. The fact is, I enjoyed the original Xbox, Project Gotham Racing, Jet Set Radio, and Splinter Cell. I used the Xbox 360 mostly for racing games, including Ridge Racer and Burnout, which I loved. But by the Xbox One the choice had worsened. I have bought and kept all the mainstream consoles and handheldssince the SNES era and I still love gaming. But Xbox will probably fail to get my attention again. I have an extensive games backlog and Nintendo and PlayStation will probably continue to provide me with enough enjoyment for the rest of my days.Ed PS: it’s taken me a very long time to mention this, but the Xbox 360 controller got a lot of praise when it first came out, which was deserved, but did anyone else think that ergonomically it was very similar to the GameCube Wavebird? Button configuration very different obviously.Try it yourself Just thought I’d mention there is a good free demo on Xboxfor Star Wars Outlaws. I was very impressed.I will be getting the full game at some point.Johnny Alpha SD Currently playing: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Halo infinite, and Doom EternalGC: As we’ve said before, it’s really not a bad game. It’s not a great game either, certainly not compared to something like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but we do feel its reputation is unfairly earned. Rolling the dice I’ve been watching the pre-orders of the Switch 2 with interest. I ordered mine when they opened last month, however having bought every Nintendo console on day one since the N64 I have been burnt a few times with a lack of software support, early price cuts, and a shortened lifespan.With these previous experiences I always find it a nervy time when Nintendo launch their latest; have I invested in a dudor will it be a resounding success and a great purchase? Only time will tell, however to me the Switch was the perfect console, and the Switch 2 seems to have refined this further. How can it be anything other than a colossal hit? Of course, in my eyes, all Nintendo consoles have been brilliant in their own right, with excellent first party games on each. Perhaps the spike in availability in the past few days has been to do with Nintendo redistributing North American stock following Trump’s tariffs, maybe it’s a lack of interest or it has plateaued, perhaps it’s too expensive for most families in these hard times or perhaps Nintendo have simply made more to meet demand. It has certainly been more readily available and easier to pre-order than I anticipated, a good thing as far as battling scalpers is concerned. But a part of me looks at the preorders every time a new Nintendo console is released and wonders…will this one get the support a Nintendo console deserves? I should really wait it out and see what happens, but I just cant resist a shiny new Nintendo console.Elliott GC: The stock issue has been puzzling the last few days, but originally the plan was that there would be enough to go around and there wouldn’t be any shortages. It may be that initially everything was diverted to the US, to get in before the tariffs, and now things are beginning to even out. Inbox also-rans Very are selling two Nintendo Switch 2 bundles as I’m writing this.DavidGC: Thank you. Very has had bundles available for the last two days. Which ones they are varies a lot, but they’ve never entirely run out of stock. Wow… just finished Act 1 in Clair Obscur: 33 Expedition… I’m not crying. A fly flew into my eye. What a game! Enjoying every moment, highly recommend if you haven’t picked it up just yet.Adam_Lion_23More Trending Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk The small printNew Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content. You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot. You can also leave your comments below and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. Arrow MORE: Games Inbox: Is it weird to not like GTA games? GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy #games #inbox #who #best #third
    METRO.CO.UK
    Games Inbox: Who is the best third party video game publisher?
    Who do you think is the best publisher? (Capcom) The Friday letters page tries to work out what’s been going on with Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders this week, as one reader gives up on the Xbox format. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk East vs. West I agree with the reader yesterday, who said that Capcom, and other similar companies, improve their reputation simply by putting out good games and not being anti-consumer, whether you’re interested in a particular title or not. I also agree that failure of Western publishers to earn that sort of popularity is why no one is loyal to them.So that got me thinking: who is the best third party publisher at the moment, i.e. not Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft? I’d say it probably is Capcom, but there’s a lot of Japanese publishers that are doing good work at the moment, where I’m automatically interested in almost anything they do. But what about Western companies? It’s not EA or Activision or Ubisoft, I’m sure most people would agree. Or Warner Bros. or Take-Two, who have barely released anything in years. Bethesda’s track record is very bumpy and the who else even is there anymore? No wonder people think first party games are so important.Dempsy Astronomically big It’s crazy to think that GTA 6 is big enough that even releasing a game next autumn is a risk. It’s like a black hole, creating a gravity well so deep that nothing can escape. I’d like to see Resident Evil 9 next year, but I understand Capcom not wanting to risk that. I think instead we’ll get a minor release, like the Resident Evil Zero remake, to keep things ticking along and that’s it.I think the situation is going to be mirrored to a degree by the Switch 2, which is going to have a big launch this summer but then still be the hottest thing this Christmas. Nintendo must be over the moon about the GTA 6 delay, but I have to agree with recent letters that their post-launch line-up is not very exciting, and I’m surprised at that, given how long they’ve had to get ready.Danson Final Edition Is there a chance in the future, providing the manufacturers don’t stop adding discs, the companies will sell game of the year editions on disc? By this I mean a fully patched and finalised game can be bought from Xbox or PlayStation stores and sent to your house for you to keep and display. Companies like Limited Run and PlayAsia do something like this and it seems popular.It would be a middle ground of giving more options and providing sales maybe a year after release. Every time I look at Limited Run they’ve sold out.Bobwallett GC: It sort of happens sometimes, with things like The Last Of Us compilation, but you’re right in suggesting that places like Limited Run are the only ones likely to do it on a regular basis. But even then we don’t think they guarantee that downloads are not necessary. Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk Bad timing I downloaded Nine Sols on Game Pass, as I like the games it was said to be a mix of: Hollow Knight and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The combat is centred around parrying.It’s been rough though. I’m just not that great at parrying in games and that’s why l found Sekiro the most difficult FromSoftware game to get to grips with. The Soulsborne games difficulty are less about reaction skills and about harsh punishment on death and a lack of handholding. Although I’m rubbish, I think I’ll persist. Everything about the game is very intriguing and high quality so far, I’m surprised it seems to have been largely overlooked. Also, like any parry-based combat, when you nail it it’s very satisfying.Simundo GC: It’s probably the game we most regret not reviewing in the last few years, as we’re big fans of Red Candle Games. We still haven’t played it, as both its release dates were at very inconvenient times. Correct opinion I’ve been going through the Mass Effect trilogy and have just finished 2. That last mission is one of the best last levels in any game, in my opinion. Pure action and I just didn’t know who was going to die and thankfully the teammates I wasn’t fond off all got killed and I kept the ones I like alive (Garrus, Miranda, and Mordin). Great end to a great game.I know it was a disappointment at the time, but I’m looking forward to going through 3 again and giving it another go. I remember at the time the ending didn’t bother me too much, but I’ll see how I feel about it this time!Simon PS: I managed to get the entire regular crew of the Normandy killed, so that wasn’t quite so good! A new crew awaits in 3…Calling it a day I have been meaning to write with a list of things that annoyed me with Xbox over the years, none of them were deal breakers until the Xbox One.The massive original controller for the original Xbox. Why? The enormous external power supply things. Something else to gather dust. The introduction of avatars during the Xbox 360 era. We know why, but why? My Xbox One turning itself on and staying on. This was the nail in the coffin for Xbox and me. Forza Motorsport (not Horizon), when racing in first person view, especially when racing against American cars, the car in front used to take up too much of the screen. It was like racing in the slipstream of a garage door, not a racing car. It lacked graphical and physical finesse. This last one was when I gave up on Forza Horizon 4. I used to drive to and from work every day, some of the journeys were quite arduous and stressful. Later in the evening when I got a chance to play Forza Horizon 4 I was forced to drive greater distances between races or to another garage find. I thought to myself, ‘Hang on, this isn’t fun. This is just adding to my daily commute.’ I think this was another case of games becoming larger than necessary. So that was that, I gave up on Forza Horizon and I gave up on Xbox. The fact is, I enjoyed the original Xbox, Project Gotham Racing, Jet Set Radio, and Splinter Cell. I used the Xbox 360 mostly for racing games, including Ridge Racer and Burnout, which I loved. But by the Xbox One the choice had worsened. I have bought and kept all the mainstream consoles and handhelds (and some of the less mainstream) since the SNES era and I still love gaming. But Xbox will probably fail to get my attention again. I have an extensive games backlog and Nintendo and PlayStation will probably continue to provide me with enough enjoyment for the rest of my days.Ed PS: it’s taken me a very long time to mention this, but the Xbox 360 controller got a lot of praise when it first came out, which was deserved, but did anyone else think that ergonomically it was very similar to the GameCube Wavebird? Button configuration very different obviously.Try it yourself Just thought I’d mention there is a good free demo on Xbox (maybe PlayStation 5 too?) for Star Wars Outlaws. I was very impressed.I will be getting the full game at some point.Johnny Alpha SD Currently playing: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Halo infinite, and Doom EternalGC: As we’ve said before, it’s really not a bad game. It’s not a great game either, certainly not compared to something like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but we do feel its reputation is unfairly earned. Rolling the dice I’ve been watching the pre-orders of the Switch 2 with interest. I ordered mine when they opened last month, however having bought every Nintendo console on day one since the N64 I have been burnt a few times with a lack of software support, early price cuts, and a shortened lifespan (Wii U and 3DS, I’m looking at you… although the 3DS turned out fine in the end).With these previous experiences I always find it a nervy time when Nintendo launch their latest; have I invested in a dud (Wii U) or will it be a resounding success and a great purchase (Switch 1 and Wii)? Only time will tell, however to me the Switch was the perfect console, and the Switch 2 seems to have refined this further. How can it be anything other than a colossal hit? Of course, in my eyes, all Nintendo consoles have been brilliant in their own right, with excellent first party games on each. Perhaps the spike in availability in the past few days has been to do with Nintendo redistributing North American stock following Trump’s tariffs, maybe it’s a lack of interest or it has plateaued, perhaps it’s too expensive for most families in these hard times or perhaps Nintendo have simply made more to meet demand. It has certainly been more readily available and easier to pre-order than I anticipated, a good thing as far as battling scalpers is concerned. But a part of me looks at the preorders every time a new Nintendo console is released and wonders…will this one get the support a Nintendo console deserves? I should really wait it out and see what happens, but I just cant resist a shiny new Nintendo console.Elliott GC: The stock issue has been puzzling the last few days, but originally the plan was that there would be enough to go around and there wouldn’t be any shortages. It may be that initially everything was diverted to the US, to get in before the tariffs, and now things are beginning to even out. Inbox also-rans Very are selling two Nintendo Switch 2 bundles as I’m writing this.DavidGC: Thank you. Very has had bundles available for the last two days. Which ones they are varies a lot, but they’ve never entirely run out of stock. Wow… just finished Act 1 in Clair Obscur: 33 Expedition… I’m not crying. A fly flew into my eye. What a game! Enjoying every moment, highly recommend if you haven’t picked it up just yet.Adam_Lion_23 (gamertag/PSN ID) More Trending Email your comments to: gamecentral@metro.co.uk The small printNew Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers’ letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content. You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader’s Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot. You can also leave your comments below and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. Arrow MORE: Games Inbox: Is it weird to not like GTA games? GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy
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  • Rig Demo (shortened version) - Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 | Body Composition

    Our good friend Olov Burman (@olovburman), was kind enough to make a cool breakdown with this rig we did for Samsung Galaxy Watch.

    Animation Director: Olov Burman @olovburman
    Animations: Helio Takahashi @heliotak & Olov Burman @olovburman
    Post house: SAUVAGE.TV @sauvagetv
    Rigging: kippcase rigging studio @kippcase.rigging
    Modeling: Pedro Conti @pedrodtconti
    CG generalist: Carlos Arandia @eldudie
    Character design: Maroto Bambinomonkey @bambinomonkey


    #samsung #galaxywatch6 #exercise #commercial #cgi #3d #characteranimation #cartoony #abs #situps #makingof #breakdown #behindthescenes #rigdemo #shortened #rig #3drigging #3drig #rigging #rigging3d #maya #animation #3danimation #kippcase
    Rig Demo (shortened version) - Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 | Body Composition Our good friend Olov Burman (@olovburman), was kind enough to make a cool breakdown with this rig we did for Samsung Galaxy Watch. Animation Director: Olov Burman @olovburman Animations: Helio Takahashi @heliotak & Olov Burman @olovburman Post house: SAUVAGE.TV @sauvagetv Rigging: kippcase rigging studio @kippcase.rigging Modeling: Pedro Conti @pedrodtconti CG generalist: Carlos Arandia @eldudie Character design: Maroto Bambinomonkey @bambinomonkey #samsung #galaxywatch6 #exercise #commercial #cgi #3d #characteranimation #cartoony #abs #situps #makingof #breakdown #behindthescenes #rigdemo #shortened #rig #3drigging #3drig #rigging #rigging3d #maya #animation #3danimation #kippcase
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