When you see some of the demos available out there, it’s easy to see why so many people get excited by technology. Look at Jeff Han’s Multitouch Demos. Or what Johnny Lee has been doing with Wii Remotes.
My favourite has to be this, however. The reaction of a robot sentry.
The creator intends to sell them.
There’s a lot of initiatives to get people in schools to get into technology and science as a career as numbers for these disciplines aren’t what the gubmint thinks they need to be. This is why Momentum (my new employer) is running a series of open days for ICT in QUB, UUJ, UUM and UUC in September and why I think it would be great to have some local tech gurus to attend and help explain to schoolkids why they love working in the tech field.
I’ve done about half a dozen of these demo days over the years (long before the whole Digital Circle thing came up) and thoroughly enjoyed them. If you’re interested in contributing and spending a bit of time explaining why tech is a good career choice, then please get in touch. Obviously it helps if you’re IN Northern Ireland, duh!
(PaintballSentry via nigelcooke.com)
If you can stop being condescending to Microsoft employees, I’d be happy to do this.
A large portion of my life in the ICT world involves nothing more than shunting bits around the world and controlling the flow of those bits. An abstract idea that isn’t always east to grasp for somebody still trying to pick out a career.
The parts of technology that have always amazed me the most is when you see something physically react to something you have done on a computer. When I was at school we always built simple systems for demonstration on school open days, things like a smarty atm built out of lego (push in the right card and you get sweets), a mini robot that played the towers of Hanoi. All thoroughly impressive in the late 80s.
This stuff still works for me, robotic tape libraries, home automation, all impressive & engaging.
But I wonder if this has all just become passe now, expected and not out of the ordinary?
In striving to make technology appear simple & more appealing to a wide audience, are we hiding the intriguing problems that fascinate those of us who enjoy doing tech for a living?
@John – as I tweeted, it’s much easier to be nice about MS when they have a human face. They lost Scoble, they got you. See?
@Simon – You just like robots?
There’s some cool tech demos doing the tour with Momentum including a sci-fi ‘body scanner’ which will give a 3D image of your body after a few moments to scan.
The problem I see is that non-techies do not appreciate the difficulty of these things. It’s a bit depressing when I labour for several hours over some simple code, get it running and I’m ten times more impressed than anyone I show it to. Because they see my red-headed stepchild of an application and make a direct comparison to, say, Word or Photoshop.
Sounds like you’ve got a cool new job!
As for the Paintball sentry – very nice. I have to say that the ‘trampoline drop’ segment is hilarious!
I work with teams that make things explode, fly, sing, and dance. I’ve got a pretty cool job. That’s technology that kids would like. I’d learn C# to write my own XNA games if I was 11..
Scoble. Hmm. I couldn’t read his internal emails. They were just “As I told Steve Ballmer.. ” and “When I met (sometone else relatively well known in the industry)..”. If he didn’t namedrop at least twice in an email, I bought myself a coffee. Complete twonk.
If he really did bring Blogging to MS, they I am grateful to him. But god, he was annoying.
He STILL IS annoying 🙂 Just annoying AND irrelevant now.
Who would I have to bribe to get someone from the XBOX team to come up and demo something at these demos we’re hosting? Especially the exploding and singing….
Robots?! No – never really got into the whole humanoids thing, I think it’s more about seeing a physical things react or respond to a command.
(is it strange that I found the old school top loading VHS players eject/load mechanism fascinating?)
Well, when I think of ‘robot’, I don’t think of anything humanshape. I think of automatic machines.
I was more fascinated by microbes, DNA…
I have just the name for you.
And it’s not even me.