About
Conner Ward is a creative technologist who builds physical, realtime AI interaction systems — across hybrid AI, fabrication, and in-car / vehicle UX research at Mercedes-Benz and BMW R&D.
I like building things you can stand in front of. Most of what I make takes a capability that usually lives behind an API and gives it a body — a sensor, a screen in a moving car, a slab of material on a CNC bed.
These days that's in-cabin AI and UX research at Mercedes-Benz R&D, and before that at BMW. Off the clock it's open-source tools, small hardware, and a chronophotograph relief that throws MIDI-driven light around a room.
FAQ
Who is Conner Ward?
Conner Ward is a creative technologist who builds physical, realtime AI interaction systems. He works across hybrid AI, fabrication, and in-car / vehicle UX research, with in-cabin AI/UX research at Mercedes-Benz R&D North America and earlier computer-vision and UX research at BMW of North America's Experience Design Lab.
What does Conner Ward work on at Mercedes-Benz and BMW?
At Mercedes-Benz R&D North America — across the Silicon Valley AI Labs (oneAI) and the Carlsbad Design Studio — Conner Ward works on in-cabin AI and UX research: realtime 3DOF in-car head tracking for AR glasses (fusing a stereo camera, IMU, and face-landmark sensing in Unity), generative outpainting of album art across pillar-to-pillar cabin displays at fleet scale, and UX research for an LLM-disambiguated "fuzzy input" intent UI studied against telemetry spanning more than 21 million daily transactions. At BMW of North America's Experience Design Lab he built ATRIA, a visual social playlist for the car cabin (a Unity card UI with AirDrop handoff over a Raspberry Pi receiver and Spotify playback), and Smart Objects, a rear-seat object tracker using Intel RealSense, NVIDIA Jetson, and AWS Rekognition Custom Labels (2020–2021, before the foundation-model era).
What open-source tools has Conner Ward built?
Conner Ward has released mcp-apple-notes (an MCP server roughly 6,800× faster than the scripted path, reading Apple Notes via direct SQLite and protobuf decoding), Muser (a topographical embedding map of images and notes), comfyui-save-image-xmp (ComfyUI nodes for XMP metadata), Trak (macOS menu-bar time tracking), and SmartSpaceBucket (distributable hydroponic urban agriculture on ESP microcontrollers over MQTT). He also teaches a ComfyUI crash course. His code is on GitHub at github.com/connerkward.
What is bas.run?
bas.run is a fabrication and art piece by Conner Ward: a chronophotograph CNC relief paired with live, MIDI-driven projection. It was installed at Gray Area's Grand Theater in April 2026.