I love watching companies when they’re thinking out loud. Because it gets me thinking too (not necessarily in the same direction).
Case in point: two new products from Nintendo.
Watch Nintendo’s announcement video for Alarmo (YouTube), their new shiny round red alarm clock with some fun features:
Alarmo responds to your body’s movement with game sounds, so you can feel like you’re waking up in the game world itself.
There’s a sequence where the person is rolling in bed, half asleep, and Mario coin sounds are rattling off. Subtitle: [Super Mario Odyssey sounds continue]
Oooookay. Love it. Super weird.
Btw if two people are in bed then they both have to get up before Alarmo will silence.
How does it work? WELL.
Alarmo’s millimeter-wave presence sensor works with bed sizes ranging from twin to king…
That presence sensor is mmWave radar, and this is cutting edge tech.
Radar chips have applications in autonomous vehicles and robotics, but putting them in consumer electronics is fascinating. Radar is hard to interpret - it’s not a straightforward computer vision problem - but it can see through (non-conductive) walls, it can be used (in theory) to pick out gestures and eye blinks and breathing and heartbeats because it’s high resolution and building up a 3D scene, and it’s on a chip and doesn’t require a camera.
Oh, and mmWave radar is low power – though interpreting the data requires serious compute. Here’s the Infineon site for their radar sensors.
Like… what would you even do with mmWave radar?
What novel interactions would be enabled?
How would you, as a design team and as a company, develop sufficient opinions about how mmWave radar behaves in real-world environments and what you could do with it? And what is it like to integrate, and what is the supply chain like, and so on?
If you wanted to learn enough to develop (say) a whole console and ecosystem around a brand new set of interactions enabled by a new technology, you’d probably start with something self-contained first.
Like an alarm clock.
I’m not so interested when companies make concept videos. Sure, that promotes internal and market alignment. But you’re not learning anything from at a product strategy level.
I think, for really valuable thinking out loud, a company has to embark on a path that ticks every cell of a business model canvas. It’s design pathfinding but scaled up a powers-of-10 level or two.
That said, too much of this approach can be poisonous. Google is most notorious… Killed by Google catalogues products that must have taught Google an absolute ton internally, but users and customers feel somewhat burnt that they bought into something that was then shut down.
Ideally you want something a product which is more self-contained.
Alarmo is in that wonderful Goldilocks zone.
RELATED: the South Sudan coffee supply chain.
I remember hearing Nespresso talk about making limited edition capsules with a blend of coffee from South Sudan. Released in 2015.
South Sudan established as a country only in 2011.
Between 2011 and 2015, Nespresso worked with South Sudanese coffee farmers to revive their country’s coffee industry. Four years!
So imagine what they had to work out… How to have communications channels and on-the-ground representatives to manage quality control, how to move money around, how to move trucks around, how import/export works with a brand new country, and so on.
So it’s a cross between thinking and loud and building the right muscles.
The second product from Nintendo, a new app:
Here’s the Nintendo Music announcement (YouTube), available on iOS and Android.
So if you want to listen to the music from Animal Crossing or The Legend of Zelda, that’s where to go. (If you’re a Switch Online subscriber anyway, which regretfully I am not.)
And then there’s this feature, which easily makes Nintendo Music as interesting as Alarmo:
You can also extend the length of certain tracks. By extending the length or looping a track, you can spend more time with a particular song.
Wha.
You can extend certain special tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
I wonder, I wonder what the underlying technology is that enables this. What loops and samples are stored with what metadata; how is an exactly 60 minute track made with satisfying narrative progression?
NOW.
I’ve talked before about how the interplay of today’s music apps, ID3 tags, charts, the user interfaces, how people are paid… how all of it makes cements the 3 minute track. It’s self-reinforcing; systemically obdurate.
But that captures such a narrow set of experiences with music.
Such as… well, I’m sure you’ve listened to lofi hip hop radio (YouTube) – beats to relax/study to
by Lofi Girl, with her infinite book studying and Paris rooftops outside the window. (It is such a missed opportunity for YouTube not to be leaning into their live streams.)
It’s so good.
I want Pomodoro music; music with a dramatic arc to take me through an evening hacking on a weird proto; music to hit that deadline in exactly 53 minutes; environmental music that is more like opening a sound window.
Video games provide the ideal material and technology for this alternative world, right?
As previously discussed: Video game soundtracks, and a format for adaptive long music (2020).
If anyone could create and popularise a new music format, maybe it’s Nintendo?
Because these extrapolated tracks…
Extrapolation is very now. I would love for us, culturally, to lean into extrapolated art (2023). Like, let’s figure out how to make silk purse art from sculpted AI slop.
So I hope that’s what the folks at Nintendo are thinking about, the new interactions possible with mmWave radar chips and extrapolated music both.
More organizations should explore and learn at this level.
Because I love trying to read the tea leaves. And also the groundless speculation and imagination. All good fun.
BONUS LINK:
A video of the orchestra recording Gusty Garden from Super Mario Galaxy (YouTube).
I love watching companies when they’re thinking out loud. Because it gets me thinking too (not necessarily in the same direction).
Case in point: two new products from Nintendo.
Watch Nintendo’s announcement video for Alarmo (YouTube), their new shiny round red alarm clock with some fun features:
There’s a sequence where the person is rolling in bed, half asleep, and Mario coin sounds are rattling off. Subtitle:
Oooookay. Love it. Super weird.
Btw if two people are in bed then they both have to get up before Alarmo will silence.
How does it work? WELL.
That presence sensor is mmWave radar, and this is cutting edge tech.
Radar chips have applications in autonomous vehicles and robotics, but putting them in consumer electronics is fascinating. Radar is hard to interpret - it’s not a straightforward computer vision problem - but it can see through (non-conductive) walls, it can be used (in theory) to pick out gestures and eye blinks and breathing and heartbeats because it’s high resolution and building up a 3D scene, and it’s on a chip and doesn’t require a camera.
Oh, and mmWave radar is low power – though interpreting the data requires serious compute. Here’s the Infineon site for their radar sensors.
Like… what would you even do with mmWave radar?
What novel interactions would be enabled?
How would you, as a design team and as a company, develop sufficient opinions about how mmWave radar behaves in real-world environments and what you could do with it? And what is it like to integrate, and what is the supply chain like, and so on?
If you wanted to learn enough to develop (say) a whole console and ecosystem around a brand new set of interactions enabled by a new technology, you’d probably start with something self-contained first.
Like an alarm clock.
I’m not so interested when companies make concept videos. Sure, that promotes internal and market alignment. But you’re not learning anything from at a product strategy level.
I think, for really valuable thinking out loud, a company has to embark on a path that ticks every cell of a business model canvas. It’s design pathfinding but scaled up a powers-of-10 level or two.
That said, too much of this approach can be poisonous. Google is most notorious… Killed by Google catalogues products that must have taught Google an absolute ton internally, but users and customers feel somewhat burnt that they bought into something that was then shut down.
Ideally you want something a product which is more self-contained.
Alarmo is in that wonderful Goldilocks zone.
RELATED: the South Sudan coffee supply chain.
I remember hearing Nespresso talk about making limited edition capsules with a blend of coffee from South Sudan. Released in 2015.
South Sudan established as a country only in 2011.
Between 2011 and 2015, Nespresso worked with South Sudanese coffee farmers to revive their country’s coffee industry. Four years!
So imagine what they had to work out… How to have communications channels and on-the-ground representatives to manage quality control, how to move money around, how to move trucks around, how import/export works with a brand new country, and so on.
So it’s a cross between thinking and loud and building the right muscles.
The second product from Nintendo, a new app:
Here’s the Nintendo Music announcement (YouTube), available on iOS and Android.
So if you want to listen to the music from Animal Crossing or The Legend of Zelda, that’s where to go. (If you’re a Switch Online subscriber anyway, which regretfully I am not.)
And then there’s this feature, which easily makes Nintendo Music as interesting as Alarmo:
Wha.
You can extend certain special tracks to 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
I wonder, I wonder what the underlying technology is that enables this. What loops and samples are stored with what metadata; how is an exactly 60 minute track made with satisfying narrative progression?
NOW.
I’ve talked before about how the interplay of today’s music apps, ID3 tags, charts, the user interfaces, how people are paid… how all of it makes cements the 3 minute track. It’s self-reinforcing; systemically obdurate.
But that captures such a narrow set of experiences with music.
Such as… well, I’m sure you’ve listened to lofi hip hop radio (YouTube) – by Lofi Girl, with her infinite book studying and Paris rooftops outside the window. (It is such a missed opportunity for YouTube not to be leaning into their live streams.)
It’s so good.
I want Pomodoro music; music with a dramatic arc to take me through an evening hacking on a weird proto; music to hit that deadline in exactly 53 minutes; environmental music that is more like opening a sound window.
Video games provide the ideal material and technology for this alternative world, right?
As previously discussed: Video game soundtracks, and a format for adaptive long music (2020).
If anyone could create and popularise a new music format, maybe it’s Nintendo?
Because these extrapolated tracks…
Extrapolation is very now. I would love for us, culturally, to lean into extrapolated art (2023). Like, let’s figure out how to make silk purse art from sculpted AI slop.
So I hope that’s what the folks at Nintendo are thinking about, the new interactions possible with mmWave radar chips and extrapolated music both.
More organizations should explore and learn at this level.
Because I love trying to read the tea leaves. And also the groundless speculation and imagination. All good fun.
BONUS LINK:
A video of the orchestra recording Gusty Garden from Super Mario Galaxy (YouTube).