I thought for a while about where to post this post because it’s really as personal as it is professional, but eventually I decided to post it here instead of on my personal blog. It is a post about inspiration.
I’m going to show you a film clip here that is not exactly new (or, well, it was posted in May this year), but it, and the clips preceding it, have been very important to me for several reasons.
But first a little bit of back story. At the university where I got my Master of Science-degree in Media Technology we had a virtual reality lab. It contained crazy expensive equipment where you could simulate different things in 3-dimentional virtual reality (even 4-dimentional if you include haptic feedback). One of the more memorable moments was when some of my class mates created a Jedi-training simulator where you actually held a “real” light sabre in your hands fighting off attackers.
What always bothered me about the lab though was that it was so expensive. How could we ever make anything there that we could actually use outside of that environment? At least within a reasonable timespan?
Then one day, I saw something that was posted on the internet. Someone had taken a $50 Nintendo Wii-remote and written a piece of software so that it could basically do what our super expensive lab could do. More than that, he released the software on his site, and the technology actually got implemented in real games, making the time from the lab to a commercial product ridiculously short. This guys name was Johnny Lee, and he was a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.
What had happened here? Well – two things. First of all Johnny had taken an invention and transformed it into something entirely different. The inventors of the Wii remote didn’t know what they had invented, and the product development was democratized, or rather, collaborative. That is what I think will happen to a lot of product development. It’s basically a high tech mash-up. Secondly, the technology was released for free on the internet and developed by others in a collaborative way. Had Johnny, like a lot of people would, tried to protect his invention and keep it secret, it would never have gotten this important this quickly.
To me personally, this is one of the most inspiring things I have seen. I frequently go back to this video to remind myself that anything is possible, and that the seed for something fantastic might sit right under my nose, in my fridge, in my closet or somewhere else where I never expected to see it. It has already changed my life, and I know that many more great things lay ahead.
Now go look in your own fridge.
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The Whiteboard thing would be very useful in schools but is it as easy as he makes it? Dont you have to know a lot about computers and electronic to really make it work?
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