IBM has a legacy of creating monumental breakthroughs in technology and computing, but also finding ways to make them digestible for the world. (Deep Blue plays chess, Watson plays Jeopardy!)

The IBM Research Lab in Israel had developed an AI that was capable of reviewing a vast data set made up of millions of newspaper and journal articles to find sentences and clauses relevant to a topic in order to formulate an argument. So how do you unveil that to the world? Engage it in a debate with Israeli champion Noa Ovadia. But they had one issue…the audience couldn’t relate to it or believe it was working on it’s own.

Our team worked with IBM to design an avatar for the Debater AI that was capable of expressing emotion and complex processes. After exploring a wide range of concepts from humanoid to abstract, we settled on what we called “the pill” because it was a simple, recognizable shape but we felt that we could make it very flexible and malleable to our needs.

By introducing a fluid inside the pill, we could show ripples for speaking as well as momentum and some real world physical property that the audience could understand. We also took a little creative liberty allowing the pill shape to compress and even break apart into smaller circles. This allowed us to create our “3 card monte” animation for Processing and the ubiquitous “texting bubbles” Thinking.

In the end, we produced several dynamic emotions or expressions that were loopable for the IBM engineers to implement into their front end interface for the Debater AI. This project was thrilling to have a front row seat to the emerging Artificial Intelligence advancements.

Studio: Perception

Chief Creative: John LePore

Producer: Eric Daly

Artists: Oscar Mar, Chris Mennuto, Steve Savalle, Bruno William