Your monthly non-spammy-gif-heavy newsletter from your friends at oio.

Hello friends, welcome to another issue of oio news! This one's a special one, and for many, the first one. That's right, plenty of new faces around here, and if you are one of them: welcome! and thank you for subscribing. Take a look at the previous issues, to find out more about oio!

This issue is all about mur mur, our most recent launch, but don't worry, we didn't forget about your favourite section: cool links and oio stonks!

A few days ago, we launched something special • a little experiment we've been cooking for a while called “mur mur.” Like a murmur, it is a feeble sound from within. We’ve been creating a series of worlds: tiny simulations, similar to video games, that live inside the small speaker. The best part is that you can actually look inside to see their lives unfold and listen to the sounds they make in real time.

We couldn't come up with something this cool on our own, this was the result of a collaboration between many people. We started working with our friends at Mattering studio a few months ago, and then collaboratively built a bunch of little experiments and prototypes, that eventually culminated into mur mur. Their work is really great, go and check their website.

We started exploring the idea of creating small worlds inside simple objects to produce something other than work.

We initially thought of a small film crew inside a TV, or a band living inside an MP3 player, but we became hooked on the idea of creating an actual ecosystem • something capable of generating those soothing soundscapes of nature or office spaces that people often use as background companionship for their daily lives.

Instead of generating an infinite stream of ambient audio, we decided to build an actual simulation of a small world. We created tiny environments with weather patterns and agents, such as animals or objects, that inhabit these spaces to produce ambient sounds.

We used these to create a sort of world sound engine. The weather and time influence the ambient and noise layers. The interactions and storylines between the agents in the world are heard as sound effects and ghostly melodies. Everything is accompanied by a melody layer that is influenced by the overall vibe of the world at that moment. Essentially, we created an infinite world that you primarily hear, rather than playing it like a video game.

After creating these worlds and designing music around them, we developed a new type of device: a speaker that allows you to look inside to see what is happening.

We created three different worlds, each with its own dedicated speaker, so people can choose the vibe they want to experience:

There's the Pond, a marine ecosystem where soothing waves come alive with fish, ducks, and occasional boats. Then there is the Plot: a lively forest full of chirping birds, crackling leaves, and the occasional lost hiker. Finally, there is the Block, a tiny city and its society, complete with morning rush hours, street musicians, delivery robots, and pigeons.

This could have been just a render or an AI-generated image, but that would have been boring and is something everyone does nowadays. We actually enjoy making things, so we decided to build one.

We modelled the actual speaker and 3D printed it. After purchasing all the necessary components": the speakers, the screen, and the microcontroller, we wrote the software and assembled the unit. Currently, it consists of an ESP32 with a round display and an SD card containing many hours of pre-generated worlds. This is only version one; we are already exploring a V2 with more powerful hardware capable of simulating worlds and music in real time.

This project is undergoing heavy iteration. As we speak, our lead designer, Bjørn, is preparing a GitHub repository with instructions for you to build your own. This will be a simplified version that does not run worlds in real time, but allows you to upload hours of pre-recorded world sounds. While true generative capabilities are possible and part of our future plans with more advanced hardware, we are taking this one step at a time.

In the meantime, you can listen to an infinitely simulated world directly in your browser:

Well, you can't. Or at least not yet. We did not expect such a positive reaction to it, and so many people interested in actually buying this. So we're exploring the idea of making a small production run, and send out a few prototypes. In the meantime, you can also try to build one. Next week, we will publish a DIY GitHub repository for you to follow. Most of the components can be purchased from Amazon and other retailers, and the shell can be 3D printed. If you are interested, we will send updates here, on our Discord, and on Instagram.

The little creatures living inside mur mur are effectively autonomous agents. They live lives of their own, constrained by the rules of the simulation we have created for them. This is not far removed from the agent simulations seen in popular frameworks like Claw3D or pioneered years ago in OpenBMB’s ChatDev.

The problem with these visions of AI and agents is skeuo-human-morphism. We project our capitalistic logic onto creatures that should set us free, locking them into dystopian cubicle offices and forcing them to work for us.

However, having one or multiple agents, each with their own role and knowledge, living inside a piece of software or a device raises interesting new questions:

Like who are those agents? Do they have some form or organisation? Where and how do they actually work? And maybe even what do they do when they don’t churn out code? Consequently, designing software or devices feels less like traditional information architecture and more like world-building: designing a place or a small ecosystem.

This is not our first experiment with this approach. A few years ago, we created Walkcast, an endlessly generated podcast produced by a team of agents. We also have Roby, our locally hosted AI agent, which lives in its own world on a Mac Mini under our desk. Last year, we built the Hot Air Factory: a small house for AI agents designed for your living room, running entirely locally.

From Matrix to Rick and Morty, all the way to Plato, the idea of us just being fish in a bowl is nothing really new. Popular culture plays and entertain us with these simulations ideas, and forces us all to think about a fundamental question, well expressed by one of the comments under our reel:

It has not even been a full week since this project launched, and we have already surpassed one million views, thousands of likes, and hundreds of messages from people interested in what we are doing. We would love to stay in touch with you all. The best way to do so is by keeping an eye on this newsletter, joining our Discord, and following us on Instagram. Lastly, creating cool products is just one of the many things we do here at oio. We also run a summer school, where we work on these wild projects together in a beautiful Italian location, and we organise various events and product launches. If you like mur mur, you will love the rest of oio.

Another tasty load of handpicked 𝕠𝕚𝕠 𝕔𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕗𝕚𝕖𝕕™ fine goods from our Discord community (not there yet? Join now 🏃‍♂️).

🐟 salmon on cocaine _(wired)
🙆 the human alphabet _{(public domain review)}
🤑 how to survive the information crisis _{(the guardian)}
🦍 bare metal programming _(youtube)
🌈 focus now _(youtube)
🐬 flipper one _(www)
🎮 steam controller is out _(www)
🧠 becoming a physical intelligence _(paper)
🤖 a robot for everyone _(www)
🌱 pikmin 2001 _(www)
📟 90's cursor effects _(www)
🛞 three.js conf paris _(www)
💥 dadabots _(www)

Want to share your cool links? Join us on Discord!

🌐 www: zweikommasieben
🕹 game: need for seat
📁 arena: false planets
📚 wiki: 52-hertz whale
🔧 tool: mole

stay warm

~ M+S+N