Remixing Technology at Applied Minds Danny Hillis http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_spkr/2093 At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference San Diego, California, 15 March 2005 Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- I started remixing at the breakfast table: oatmeal plus Rice Krispies -- it was science and art, and occasionally edible Applied Minds is a place that I started b/c I wasn't having enough fun at Disney. I wanted to mix art, design tech and science and create version 1.0 of things. How do we avoid creating version 2? We'll use partners to do that. We work with companies as big as GM, inventing stuff and licensing them out to others. Here's a picture of Applied Minds: * Warehouse district of LA, an industrial wasteland * Our setup in inside a warehouse: offices, computers, stockrooms with electron microscopes, lasers, etc; machine shops with lathes and computer-controlled cutters * 40 projects at a time * Little things like mixing materials * Software projects (SF office is all software) * One project: fully balanced, articulated dinosaur I built for Disneyland * Mechanics, electronics, software * Also "show" -- aesthetics -- Robots: * The fun part is the little models of the robots, trying various ideas * Shows six-legged NASA robot that can move in any direction, audience goes Ohhh * Four legged sickle-shaped robot that moves very cutely * Another one that rocks back and forth, "It looks like it's having so much fun" * We sim these inside of computers, do drawings and calcs and then build * One thing we were very interested in was a snake robot * The movement is eerie and creepy -- We have musicians, artists and even an astronaut around, which lets us exploit a real mix of talents and viewpoints. Shows an amazing desert-exploration vehicle with a high-masted Infrared camera, the ability to inflated/deflate tires from inside, every legal radio band, etc. -- a project for fun, called the Multimog. Remixing toy: You can connect a car, a robot and a connector. They all work together. We've licensed this to a toy vendor, but the problem is that we have no way to know if they'll ever bring it to market. Here's a cancer-simulator visualization that attempts to discover the chemical signature of which cancer drug works for which patient -- lots of cancer drugs are only effective for five percent of patents, which makes them useless. -- Maps: * I want a paper map that you can zoom in on by gesturing with your hands. * Took it to San Diego cartographers' conference with 15,000 attendees * Shows a video of this -- it's amazing. He can peel back layers and go from satellite maps to street maps by leaning on it, etc * Shows two different map-users trading their views across two map-displayers in a network * People came up in tears after this -- it was very emotional for mapmakers * This is people who fell in love with maps b/c they saw maps on tables * But now they work with maps on little computer screens * Better, it's got all the nice stuff for letting you zoom, etc * But tabletop digital maps recapture the emotion * Here's the new table we're building -- it can deform into mountains etc, by bending its screen, to show three-dee views -- audience bursts into spontaneous applause -- Ten years ago, the info-exchange between people didn't have much to do with the Internet, and if they were using the net, it was email or vanity publishing on the Web. As people built on that, the two seeds took over a much larger set of functions that became "Internet things to do" including commerce. There's something important happening with wikis, blogs, etc, but it hasn't crystallized. Here's how Amazon and eBay and wikis and blogs work: it's not "put something on the web and publish," rather it's "contribute to the database and let a publisher produce a view into that database" The problem is that all these individual databases aren't shared. Semantic Web tries to solve this, but as useful as Semantic Web is, it won't come together. I want everyone to be able to contribute to the same database and view it, to make a Google Maps or Zagat's by relying on public data. A lot of our software projects are oriented around that, but I can't really get into it because I'm out of time!