Swarovski AX Visio: The Binoculars That Know the Birds by Name

By Ali Kaya

Isaw the Swarovski AX Visio and I liked it; it's that simple. I don't own one yet, and maybe one day I will. A well-designed object impresses you first and makes you think second, and this is one of those objects. Let's look at what it does and why it has held my attention.

The AX Visio is the world's first AI binocular: it recognizes the bird you're looking at and writes its name into your field of view, from a database of more than nine thousand species, without your eye ever leaving the branch. Cornell's Merlin database sits behind the glass; while you stare at the branch, the machine turns through its records and hands you two words: Cardinalis cardinalis. You lower the binoculars — the branch is the same branch, the bird the same bird. But now it has a name, and nothing with a name stays quite the way it was.

We tend to treat naming as the end of curiosity — learned it, done. More often it's the beginning. You learn the name, then the migration route, then the song, and before long you're reading about the throat anatomy of nocturnal songbirds. What this device does isn't hand you the knowledge; it shortens the long, often discouraging distance between curiosity and knowledge. It doesn't answer the question. It sharpens the appetite for it. If the idea of a machine that recognizes the living world interests you, the way these systems actually work is the subject of How Smart Machines Think.

The design is by Marc Newson — the man behind the Lockheed Lounge, the Apple Watch, the Qantas cabin seats. It's his second collaboration with Swarovski, and it took five years. The body is made of roughly three hundred and ninety parts, yet it looks poured in a single cast: green, softly contoured, a kind of dignified frog. Between the two conventional barrels sits a third eye — a 13-megapixel camera — so you can photograph and keep what you saw. Binocular, camera, and field notebook in one body.

My favorite feature is the quietest one. They call it “Share Discoveries”: once you've found the bird, you pass the binoculars to a friend, and the red arrows that appear in the field of view lead them to the same branch. Anyone who's watched birds knows the oldest scene of all: “There, to the left of the dead branch, no, no, the other dead branch—” The bird flies off, the friendship takes a hit. Newson's arrows bury that scene for good. The most touching trick of a four-thousand-eight-hundred-dollar device is that it finally lets one person say to another, “there — right there.”

Being unable to describe the beauty you see is a kind of loneliness. This binocular put the description itself behind the glass.

It has its faults, I know. It weighs over a kilogram, and the battery lasts about two hours under heavy use. The price is what it is: $4,799 — in Arkansas that buys a running car. But a car doesn't name birds. And anyway I'm not a buyer, I'm an admirer; an admirer isn't in the accounting business. The man looking up at a cathedral doesn't tally the cost of the roof.

Maybe one day, I tell myself. For now I stand at the edge of my son's practice, looking at the tree line with the naked eye, and when something red beats its wings I pause — not because I know its name, but because I don't. Then I don't reach for my phone. I want there to be evenings when the bird passes unnamed — and yet, at the same time, I think about that green, frog-faced device that knows nine thousand names by heart. There's a mercy in the objects you don't own: they never disappoint you. The binocular in the window always looks clearer than any binocular you finally hold.

Technical detail: Swarovski Optik, New Atlas, T3, Design Milk, Outdoor Life
Swarovski Optik AX Visio — AI Binoculars, designed by Marc Newson
List price ~$4,799 USD ·  Amazon price may vary
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