IBM is no stranger to transformation. Over its more than 100‑year history, the company has reinvented itself repeatedly, creating one of the most trusted brands in the world and continually earning its stripes as a leading innovator.
At the heart of each IBM Watson Experience Center is an immersion room that surrounds its audience with 45 HD displays. That's 93.3 million pixels! Oblong has worked closely with IBM to develop new spatial visualizations and group interactions for these unique spaces, which host over 15,000 visitors every year.
Customer
- IBM
Industry
- Technology/Business
Study Highlights
- Visualization of artificial intelligence (AI) systems
- Successful collaboration efforts between Oblong and IBM
- Better working sessions for Watson's Teams
The Challenge
Right now, IBM is in the midst of one of its largest reinvention efforts to date, and we’re honored that our engineers and expertise are able to help IBM visualize complex data-sets, and drive meaningful change. We have been working very closely with IBM to develop their THINKTanks and immersive, Watson Experience Center.
IBM’s massive, design-centered pivot, as highlighted in the New York Times last year, is pioneering a paradigm shift in the way organizations solve problems and make decisions. That same dedication to design in the service of enterprise-scale work closely mirrors our focus at Oblong.
The Breakthrough
As a key part of IBM’s transformation, IBM's Watson needed to bring this groundbreaking cognitive computing technology to life for its customers. And working with Oblong's Advanced Technology Group, together we have built a suite of applications atop our exclusive spatial operating environment (g-speak) which enable dynamic, larger-than-life displays at the first Watson Experience Center (WEC) in New York.
The goal of each Watson Experience Center—located in New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge—is to demystify AI and challenge visitor’s expectations through more tangible demonstrations of Watson technology. Visitors are guided through a series of narratives and data interfaces, each grounded in IBM’s current capabilities in machine learning and AI. These sit alongside a host of Mezzanine rooms where participants further collaborate to build solutions together.
The Result
At the heart of each IBM Watson Experience Center is an immersion room that surrounds its audience with 45 HD displays, (and over 93 million pixels!). We've also integrated Mezzanine into the employee's THINKTanks to offer a continuous working experience (with high wow factor) that facilitates collaboration between IBM’s solutions architects and its clients. Underlying both the Experience Centers and THINKTanks is a robust spatial operating environment, g‑speak, which allows our team to position real data in a true spatial context. Every data point within the system, and even the UI itself, is defined in real world coordinates (measured in millimeters, not pixels). Gestures, directional pointing, and proximity to screens help us create interfaces that more closely understand user intent and more effectively humanize the UI.
