Bruno Zamborlin in a London based artificial intelligence researcher who makes electronic instruments that use contact microphones and augmented reality. He is known for his Hypersurfaces.
Zamborlin's hypersurfaces are an Iterative project that started with making augmented reality musical instruments out of any surfaces that can have contact microphones rigged onto them. The audio recorded by the contact microphones is augmented using an artificial intelligence that can make the sounds recorded more musically engaging. This project evolved to become an artificial intelligence can augment nearly every interaction a person makes with the surfaces around them. This is done by using recordings of an environment (Specifically an indoor environment are presented) where a computer has been extensively been trained on the various sounds of interactions on those surfaces. This robust augmented reality makes it possible for every action the person takes to be understood and recorded by the computer and the effects of those actions used to do various things such as make the interactions have musical output or have the computer dictate the actions the person took.
TED talk on augmented muscial surfaces 1)
TED talk on hyper surfaces 2)
AI & Digital Summit Lecture 3)
Twitter 4)
Instagram 5)
Kickstarted for his Mogees, an early iteration of the hypersurfaces. 6)
I perceive a bit of arrogance from the way that Zamborlin presents. He frequently says he gives a voice to various things for example, trees, so that they can communicate when they are being negatively effected by humans, but he also gives no examples of his work being directed at these kinds of forces and he also understates the ways things such as trees are already able to do that. With his TED presentation he only shows that a tree can have a contact microphone connected to it, and does nothing to demonstrate anything about the kind of information that interfaces with the tree. His work in the presentations he makes are very commercial centric and he repeatedly gives examples otherwise without showing any work in that direction, which I find suspicious. He also often presents his creations and playful and engaging but understates the alarming undertones of the data use and ai used in them. There also seems to be a shift in his tone from the time he was working with the goal of music to the goal of broad augmented reality.