Disney + Microsoft - 'Magic of Nature'

Brief

A 12 week collaboration between Microsoft and Disney to rebuild trust, demonstrate advanced AI development, and modernize animal conservation for Purple Martins.

Jobs

Engineering, ID, UX lead
Envisioning
Product strategy
Manufacturing

Outcomes

First 3rd party guest experience in Animal Kingdom (press)
Led to 5 year innovation partnership with Disney (press)
100x behavioral dataset growth with second accuracy
First embedded AI model for avian facial recognition

Photo of a Purple Martin nest cluster, plastic gourds handing from a central metal pole, several birds sitting atop the pole. — Nests instrumented with IoT monitoring devices.

Technical drawing of two plastic enclosures that mount on a plastic gourd nest to monitor Purple Martin bird behavior — Nest and perch mounted IoT monitoring devices

System architecture diagram - showing the relationships between the raspberry pi and nvidia jetson boards to Azure IoT Hub, and processing through to output applications. — System architecture for the Purple Martins project

"Taking Flight" AR Application - Guest Facing Experience

Detailed articles

Illustration of two plastic housings containing raspberry pi computers.

Designing a weatherproof IoT device

There were a lot of challenges in delivering the Purple Martins project, and one of the thorniest was the hardware. Unlike software, there's no continuous integration of new hardware into the wild. Electronics Due solely to the time constraints of the project (8 weeks) - we had to

A village of Native Americans doing daily tasks, Purple Martins make their nests in drying gourds on a scaffold.

The story behind the 'Magic of Nature'

‘Magic of nature’: Disney’s smart birdhouses reveal the secret lives of purple martins | TransformDigital transformations and the new face of businessTransformBill Briggs Background - from maintenance to martins I didn't start with a project pitch to understand a bird species. My incredible colleague Molly McCarthy and the