Describe any product and Gemini will reason through its industrial composition purely through vision. We typically judge a model’s thinking by the language it puts between turns, which leaves out the part of thinking that cannot be as easily communicated verbally as it can visually. Also an experiment in adaptive interfaces: describe a bike, and get a UI for adjusting handlebars and suspension; describe a synthesizer, and get your choice of knobs and keys. Swap materials, blow it into an exploded view, watch it code in OpenCAD. Gemini models like Omni are overcoming machine aphantasia.

Google Cloud

Directed the end-to-end creation of an AI tool that extracts 3D athletic biomechanics from standard video, built on a groundbreaking model from Google DeepMind. Designed alongside U.S. Ski & Snowboard head coaches and star athletes, it uses state-of-the-art markerless motion capture to derive precise 3D pose and structured safety and performance feedback for elite competitors. Adoption forthcoming across a range of professional sports leagues.

sports.withgoogle.com · The math

We took the markerless motion capture system built for the athletes and adapted it for live broadcast, so NBC’s analysts could put metrics on air that had never been available without sensors strapped to a competitor. New numbers meant new visual treatments, which I helped design — among them the Cork Ribbon, a continuous surface tracing the plane a rider rotates through, so axis drift becomes legible to someone watching at home. Six segments ran during the Games.

Watch a segment · How it was built

For Stephen Curry, a jump shot is one motion he stopped having to think about decades ago. For the rest of us it’s about ten things going wrong at once, none of them visible to the person doing them. Built with Curry for Curry Camp — his three-day clinic for the best high schoolers in the country — it runs four Pixel cameras and MediaPipe on-device across knee bend, elbow, release, arc and follow-through, and Gemini 2.5 Pro says the correction out loud between shots.

The announcement · At Curry Camp

Draw something badly and it will make a “film” out of it. I designed the flow: a doodle, a sentence or a torn-up collage goes in, stills come back first so you can fix the look, then motion.

A reel of Veo 2 tests. The prompts are mostly camera specs — focal length, aperture, shutter angle, stock — plus a lot of iteration on motion blur, which is the thing that most reliably gives generated video away. I was chasing footage that survives being watched by someone who knows what a 35mm lens does. It mostly does now, which is the unsettling part.

Watch the reel

A daily podcast with an audience of one. Designed to read your calendar, your mail and the morning’s news, write a briefing, and hand it to a synthetic host you pick.

A swing coach that fits in a phone. Computer vision reads pelvis lift, chest rotation and body position through the motion, and the feedback comes back in under a minute without the hedging you get in a pro shop. We built it at Pebble Beach and handed it to Bryson DeChambeau and his teammates to try to break.

The AI Crusher

Dites-le avec des fleurs. Tell it you’re shopping for a little girl who likes brutalism and it returns something grey, heavy and architectural; ask for Cézanne and you get the ochres and dusty greens of a Provençal still life. Really this is a demo about driving image generation with structured data — a million-plus flower photographs read for their actual petals rather than their labels. Not an automated attempt to pick flowers for my wife.

Google Cloud

An embedding safari. Ask for hippos bathing, or insects that move in groups, or the longest-living lizards in Nevada, and it finds them across 7.3 million photographs — retrieved by meaning rather than keyword. The part I care about isn’t the search. It’s that the screen has no fixed layout: it assembles itself around whatever you happened to ask.

Google Cloud

Eight research hospitals, dozens of interviews, three years, and a rendering method we had to build ourselves — a CT scan is made to be read by a radiologist, not looked at by a reader. The piece follows people who caught Covid in the first weeks of 2020 and still can’t take a full breath. I reported it, edited it, and directed the 3D.

Read at The New York Times

Society of News Design gold medal, 2024

Two years leading a team of engineers, artists and reporters on a single question: what does a story do once it can stand in your living room at true scale? Dozens of attempts — spatial stories, real-scale explainers, 3D reconstructions, environments you walk into.

Read at The New York Times

The largest fire of 2021 got big enough to make its own thunderstorms — pyrocumulus clouds that threw lightning and started new fires miles downwind. We rebuilt one of them in 3D from satellite and radar so you could stand underneath and look up.

Read at The New York Times

A new study put it at roughly 1-in-50, in any given year, that a storm parks over California and doesn’t leave for a month. We took the model output and built the part you can actually picture: where the water goes, how deep it gets, and how long it sits there.

Read at The New York Times

The gymnast, Sunisa Lee. The hurdler, Dalilah Muhammad. The climber, Adam Ondra. We motion-captured all three and rebuilt their events in 3D, so you can stop the half-second that decides a medal and walk around it.

Read at The New York Times

Newsroom AR mostly means a 3D object floating on a pedestal, because the tools to do anything else don’t exist. So we built some and handed them to working reporters. This is what came back.

Read at The New York Times

Covid emptied the churches. It didn’t silence the choirs. We photogrammetry-scanned singers from Harlem’s gospel congregations one at a time and rebuilt the choir in 3D, with a light show, because in the spring of 2021 that was the only way to get them in a room together.

Read at The New York Times

Doyers Street is one crooked block in Chinatown with a century of restaurant on it. We scanned it so you can walk it — Nom Wah’s tea parlor, the barbershops, the bend they used to call the Bloody Angle — and then out into the monuments and parks around it.

Read at The New York Times

We simulated the air in a real New York City classroom — one teacher, a full class, one window — so you can watch the exposure risk drop the moment it opens. That year’s reopening fight was enormous and almost entirely abstract. This put it in a room people recognized.

Read at The New York Times

NYT Publisher Award · Online Journalism Award

Down to the scale of a single droplet, to show what a mask physically does to one. In late 2020 the whole country was arguing about this without anybody having seen it happen.

Read at The New York Times

Malofiej gold · Online Journalism Award · SPD Award

The S&P 500 emits about as much carbon as the Amazon absorbs. The finding underneath it is the awkward one: drop the heaviest emitters out of the index and returns barely move. Which means the case for holding them was never really a financial case.

Read at Quartz

Digiday Best Data Viz finalist, 2020

Every coal plant China was financing outside its own borders, on one map — 60 of them, across Asia, Europe, Africa and South America. Built, they’d emit roughly what Spain does.

Read at Quartz

Digiday Best Data Viz finalist, 2020

Things Kogonada would prefer to discuss instead of making small talk: The question of existence, what it means to be modern, all our choices.

What should one expect from a 3-hour German comedy? It’s hysterical and devastating all at once. I left the American premier with tears pooled in my dimples, still hyperventilating, still trying to comprehend what worked so well absent any hallmarks of contemporary American or British humor.

Just imagine, your every emotion bottlenecking at your orbital cavity… Much of Bauby’s tragedy stems not from the future he’s lost, but from the past he’s squandered.

Lincoln is one of cinema’s most portrayed film characters. He ranks eighth at 263 appearances, preceded only by Dracula at 274, Hitler at 335, Napoleon at 337, God at 340, Jesus at 350, Santa Claus at 814, and the Devil at 848. Counting out the supernatural, preternatural, and downright fictitious — we can place him third.

Brando performed his roles the way most of us wish to perform our lives: perfectly. Though Brando was only perfect for the moments he was on screen.

For James Agee, the only man who really survived the flood of sound cinema was Chaplin, the only one who was rich, proud and popular enough to afford to stay silent.