Tech Zone at this year's Changing Media Summit
Guardian VR: 6x9
Photograph: Guardian

6x9 is an innovative virtual reality experience created by the Guardian about solitary confinement. 6x9 places viewers in a virtual cell, telling a story of the psychological damage extreme isolation. Right now, more than 80,000 people are in solitary confinement in the US. They spend 22-24 hours a day in their cells, with little to no human contact for days or even decades. The photo-realistic cell is made in CGI referencing real solitary cells. Inside, as you turn your head, are the contents of a typical cell: the poured concrete bed you are sitting on, a poured concrete desk opposite, a combination sink/toilet. Five books are on the desk, a letter, a roll of toilet paper. All the voices you hear are real. We interviewed seven people who were in solitary in California and New York. The sound design in the piece is from a Secure Housing Unit (SHU) in Maine. It was recorded for a Frontline documentary called Solitary Nation.
Guardian VR: Underworld
Photograph: Guardian
Essential info for the Changing Media Summit 2017
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Beneath London lies a vast network of Victorian sewers – hundreds of miles of ornate brick tunnels. They are still in use today, although few people ever get to experience them. Underworld reveals this subterranean world. Plunged into darkness, your Daydream controller is your lifeline, your torch and your navigator. Guided by urban explorer Bradley Garrett, you make your way down the old river Fleet, one of London’s lost waterways, walking through the blood sewer under Smithfield meat market to reach the floodgates of the river Thames. Along the way learn of the perils of exploring – if it rains the sewer system will fill to the ceiling, and if your torch goes, you will never make your way out. Historian Richard Barnett joins to explain the impetus for the building of the sewer system – the Great Stink – and Will Self tells of the mythological allure of underworld as a place for the dead. Don’t get lost!
Dash & Dot
Photograph: Makewonder
Dash & Dot are real robots that teach your kids to code while they play. Using our free apps and a compatible tablet or smartphone, kids learn to code while they make Dash sing, dance and navigate all around the house. Sensors on the robot mean they react to the environment around them, including your kids. Learn more: www.makewonder.com.
Marty the Robot
Photograph: Robotical
Robotics is best learnt by doing, and Robotical makes a real robot accessible to the engineers of tomorrow. We’ve created Marty - a walking robot that’s more than a toy. His patent-pending design reduces the cost of producing a robot that can walk, turn, dance, play football and more. Marty is wifi-connected, programmable, expandable with devices like the Raspberry Pi, and even customisable with 3D printed parts. Robotical provides kits, add-ons, educational materials, and an app store for software and hardware. Marty can help you learn programming (from Scratch to Python and C++), electronics, engineering science, and encourage creativity. Dr Sandy Enoch, the roboticist behind Marty, wants to inspire future generations, demonstrating that the move towards automation should be viewed as a pathway of opportunity rather than a threat.
LIX Pen
Photograph: LIX
LIX Pen is a 3D Printing Pen that enables you to make free standing structures in the air. With LIX you can create anything from small to big, from details to prototypes, complicated and high detailed creations. It allows you to express your creativity on a whole new level. This is possible with plastic filaments used by LIX instead of ordinary ink. Straight plastic rods are heated and extruded already melted which is how you can create volumetric creations in the air. LIX Pen works with straight plastic rods (ABS/PLA). They are 20cm long and with a diameter of 1.75mm. Extrusion is 0.7mm.
Candy Mechanics
Photograph: Candy Mechanics
Candy Mechanics create customised candy from the future. The food tech startup brings together new technology, engineering and traditional chocolate making techniques to make wonderfully unique candy products.
The team will showcase the ultimate in product personalisation by 3D scanning customers and carving chocolate heads in a matter of minutes. Called Lolpops - because what’s funnier than a miniature chocolate replica of your own head?
You’ll never look at a sweet treat in the same way again.
Flash Drives for Freedom
Photograph: Flash Drives for Freedom
It is HRF’s belief that information and education (rather than diplomacy or military action) are the keys to change inside North Korea. Once enough of the population learns about the outside world, the Kim regime will no longer be able to survive. That’s why HRF created the Flash Drives for Freedom campaign. HRF is collecting flash drives to donate to local partners in South Korea that are helping guide the flow of information into, and out of, the hermit kingdom.
CrowdEmotion
Photograph: CrowdEmotion
Campaigns and advertising have traditionally measured success based on clicks and shares, despite poor correlation with genuine brand uplift.
CrowdEmotion’s cloud-based facial coding + eye-tracking detection software provides an unobtrusive way to measure emotional engagement and gaze path. Meanwhile, implicit association testing detects subconscious change.
By layering our e-score on top of existing business metrics, we help clients co-create a proprietary emotion data model. Think content effectiveness, emotional journeys and customer segmentation by emotion profiles.
Recently, we have just launched our Alpha Programme where our methodology is packaged into a rinse-and-repeat process. Check out the latest results from our award winning work with the BBC.
Elysium
Photograph: The Elysium chair
In 2002, British inventor and furniture designer, Dr David Wickett, set out to create a chair that would simulate weightlessness. In his pursuit, he completed a PhD in bioengineering, becoming one of the few designers to unify art and science. From his 10-year research he wrote an equation defining posture and gravitational force. That equation became Elysium technology.
The result is arguably one of the most advanced and comfortable chairs available. There are no electric motors or spring mechanisms. Weightlessness is achieved through an elegant array of roller bearings that follow a specific path, giving frictionless continuous balance. On a sensory level, the experience is akin to saltwater floatation. And with versions acoustically transparent above the shoulders, perfect for the audiophile and cinephile.
IBM Watson: Celebrity Match
Photograph: IBM
Ever wondered what celebrity’s personality matches your own? Well wonder no more! The Celebrity Match application uses the Watson Personality Insights Service and Twitter data to identify celebrities on Twitter whose tweets are conceptually closest to your own.
IBM Watson: News Explorer
Photograph: IBM
IBM News Explorer automatically constructs a news information network and presents large volumes of news results in an understandable fashion. Now that we are able to extract semantic data from the news with advanced Watson NLP technology, we can provide new ways of visualising and understanding news as it occurs.
IBM Watson: BB8 Mind Control Droid
Photograph: IBM
Star Wars has led many people to imagine what life would be like in a world inhabited by The Force. While we may never be able to control each other’s minds, the ability to manipulate the physical world through our speech, and even our thoughts, is very much a reality today. It is a reality being made more possible all the time by advances in technology like Natural Language Processing, sensors and IoT. Using IBM tech, we created a BB8 droid that can be controlled using your mind.
Fanbytes
Photograph: Fanbytes
Fanbytes are a Snapchat video advertising platform helping brands create, distribute and optimise Snapchat video ad campaigns to reach Generation Z at scale. Headed up by two 22-year-old computer scientists and mechanical engineers, Fanbytes uses a combination of data, a creative network and reach to help brands reach the most sought after audiences where they are – on their mobile phones.
people.io
Photograph: people.io
people.io is a European start-up who are giving people ownership of their data; their vision is to establish a firewall for people. Their first consumer product provides brands and advertisers with a GDPR compliant way of engaging consumers at an individual level, using first party declared and observed data provided and controlled by the consumer themselves.
Based in London, UK, people.io has received investment from a number of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs, are a part of the Unilever Foundry 50 programme and were named the Nasdaq Rising Star of 2016 at Founders Forum, London.