UK avant-soul artist Nao has been putting out music since 2014 and her second album, Saturn, was released last October.

Keeping with the celestial theme, the latest single from that album is ‘Orbit’ and it comes with a bespoke horoscope video for users. Nao is signed to RCA and the video is the latest showcase for Sony Music UK’s 4th Floor Creative division – built in partnership with Microsoft.

The bespoke site says, “Join me in Orbit: Enter your birthday to launch this interactive music video. Microsoft AI will find your star sign, along with other constellations in the night sky.”

On entering your birthday, the track starts playing and your star sign is formed from a constellation of stars. For the purposes of this exercise, sandbox is a Gemini and so we got two figures made of light dancing together and thought the twin theme was well done. But then we entered a date for a Libra and got the same two figures – and so were a bit deflated.

You can also adjust the settings so that the background colour, the star colour and the colour of the human figures are to your liking, using the mouse to shift the camera angle.

Knowing nothing about horoscopes, sandbox was perhaps not attuned to the astrological references that were buried in the animation, but it all looked very nice and it was fun to play around with. We were invited to share the results on our social networks by either connecting to Facebook/Twitter or downloading a square or vertical video rendering of the animation as an MP4 to upload to our social platform of choice (but we politely declined).

It’s all a bells-and-whistles showcase for Microsoft Azure Custom Vision Service (i.e. Microsoft’s AI technology) and it is encouraging that they want to work with a musician to show what is possible here. Just as long as we don’t get targeted ads for tatty T-shirts with star signs on them we’ll be happy.