Not so long ago, the name Midjourney was synonymous with AI imagery. (Remember that brief period when everyone you knew was using an AI-generated selfie on social media?) Now the company is attempting to rebrand itself as a wellness brand.
In a blog post published Wednesday, titled “A New Era for Midjourney,” the company described its plans for a new project, which it said is “a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.” For starters, it’s working on a body scanner technology, which it says will be faster, cheaper, and less invasive than an MRI. The experience they have in mind sounds like a blend between Han Solo being lowered into the pit at Jabba’s Palace before getting blasted with carbonite and an ayahuasca trip report. Here’s how Midjourney describes it in their blog post:
It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.
All of this should take no more than a minute, the blog post added.
Midjourney envisions a ring of half a million sensors within the scanner, each about the size of a grain of sand, blasting ultrasonic waves at your body and using the reverberations to create a detailed 3-D map of what’s happening inside. “Envisions” is the key word, there: The announcement didn’t make clear what stage of R&D the scanner is currently in, but it did admit that the company still needs to figure out a “major computational task,” namely, how to transform all those noisy waves into static images.
The process will reportedly harvest “terabytes of data each second,” based on the idea that the more information you collect about your body, the clearer and more complete a picture you can build of your individual health profile.
“You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible,” the company wrote. “In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many megabytes per second per dollar of information about your body.”
Midjourney is going to great lengths to contrast its body scanner with MRIs, which—as anyone who’s had to go into one will already know—aren’t particularly comfortable. In fact, the company is going so far as to make its scanning technology the centerpiece of a new spa, which it plans to open in downtown San Francisco before the end of next year.
It’s here that the “a little weird” part starts to feel like a pretty monumental understatement. The Midjourney Spa, as it’s being called, will have the typical accouterments of a high-end spa, like hot tubs and cold plunges, along with “cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body.” Midjourney says the spa will be open 24/7 and will be so comfortable, so inviting, as to make guests almost completely forget about the fact that their insides are being scanned by millions of tiny, ultrasonic sensors.
“The scans are a side-effect,” the company wrote. “You barely think of them when going to the spa. But suddenly, you have a huge library of data about your health.”
The announcement added that Midjourney aims to open additional spas in more cities beginning in 2028, and that the company’s next step will be to submit early test results from its body-scanning device to the FDA in the hopes of getting regulatory clearance to build devices with “increased capabilities.”
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