San Francisco bar Folsom Street Foundry typically serves cocktails and hosts social events well into the night. But before the sun came up on Wednesday morning, it held a dance party with a high-tech twist.
Daybreaker — the organization that holds morning dance parties, which start with a 6 a.m. workout — partnered with IBM for the first “cognitive dance party,” powered by artificial intelligence engine Watson.
Watson is used in hospitals, banks and classrooms, but the company showed off its playful side for hundreds of early risers in the Bay Area. The system assigned workouts, powered the dance floor, created breakfast recipes, and pulled data from social media as an LED sun rose inside.
Upon registering, participants used Watson’s Personality Insights service to analyze their strongest personality traits based on tweets or a short survey. Each personality received a color — purple for conscientious, red for outgoing and yellow for expressive. Dancers wore their colors to the event.
Color groups also designated specialized fitness activities before the dance party. Yoga for the purple participants, capoeira for reds and high-intensity interval training for the yellow crew. Chef Watson, the company’s AI-powered cooking assistant, created color-coded recipes.
“This is a chance for us to provide a hands-on experience that shows how Watson works and how [people] can use it to come up with new ideas,” Gabrielle Gugliocciello, a spokeswoman for IBM said. “Pushing the boundaries of people’s imagination is a central part of extending this impact, and events like Daybreaker help us inspire the thinking that fuels this potential.”
The dance floor was illuminated by everyone’s “energy.” colors. Meanwhile, a “sun” rose on the dance floor and changed colors based on the sentiment of the morning’s tweets.
Daybreaker, which not only takes place in clubs but also on boats, attracts a variety of people in the Bay Area, including tech workers, startup founders, and “burners,” the folks who go to Burning Man each year. Daybreakers are also gaining in popularity around the world, from Boston and New York to Shanghai.
Although it may sound strange to wake up early and go dancing, Daybreaker goers find it invigorating.
Oakland resident Kat, a 29-year-old who works at a tech company in San Francisco, attended Wednesday’s event with a colleague.
“It’s way to get away from everything that’s going on right now,” she told CNN.
