PTC makes software used to design complex objects, like cars. After carefully considering how they might address the future of objects, PTC made a series of acquisitions in foundational Augmented Reality and Internet of Things technology. THING EVENT was their first announcement about how they had integrated those technologies to create an almost magical way of seeing objects, their histories, how they are made, and how to repair them.

SMITH was asked to develop a film to open the THING EVENT conference. We used objects constructed from paper as a metaphor to communicate the magic of the technology—how it brings complex systems to an easily understood, human scale. As they saw the world that the film opened up, the clients realized that there were many other places and ways to tell this story. SMITH suggested social media components and then the floodgates opened, with large format posters and a 20 foot sculpture of a jet engine resulting from their requests.

This was all possible to do ‘on the fly’ because of SMITH’s process which involves hi-rez image capture and data acquisition. This makes downstream executions for virtually any platform, possible.


IBM has created a new family of processors to work with the vast quantities of data that are generated and combed through for AI to work. The story was, to say the least, dry and laden with tech references. Our job was to present this information in a way that was both engaging and easily understood by the C Suite who would be spending millions of dollars to bring this new technology to new areas. Not least in the world of retail and public areas.


This piece was created as an experiment to show what could be done with web-gl. While this is a video record of the piece, the actual program consisted of globe sitting in a modern looking environment. All of the animated graphics that appear are driven by choices made by the user. The globe is connected to live feeds of wikipedia, traffic services, weather services and nation statistics bureaux. Any chosen location would show information that was the most recent available.


An installation that was created for Audi and a show in China. Information shown in a physical and an audio way.


Motion graphics representing loops and strands of information.


Here is an extremely literal representation of data. In this instance we 'hacked' an XBox Kinect 3D depth sensor. We then mounted the Kinect on top of a regular video camera and combined the information coming from both cameras. You can see the results below - a point cloud from the depth sensor combined with regular live action shots.


This is an example of procedural animation. Here we took the audio data and had it drive the animation taking place on the surface of the liquid metal ball.


Below are some examples of data represented in print.