Since I was unfortunately unable to go to maker faire in person, I spent the entirety of yesterday and today watching the livestream of the big names having their conferences in the auditorium. I have to say it was the longest stream I’ve ever stayed to watch, not because my grade depended on it but because it was so interesting. The talks I think I found the most interesting were Jared Ficklin’s view on design and how it can be used in different ways to do much more than what it was meant to do. He was the most fun to listen to and he had some really wacky projects as well. His kinect projects were really cool as well. Here’s a link to a kinect project of his where he controls the lights in a room with voice and motion commands:
Also, I really liked John Long’s discussion about autonomous robots and how he tided it in with Darwin’s theories on how if we were to make autonomous robots, how would they react in certain situations? He also studies and designs robots that mimic actions of real life animals.
Chris Anderson talks about drones and his company that makes DIY drones and Stephen Wolfram speaks about this amazing search engine he created that calculates answers to questions by comparing statistics. Overall it was very interesting and my thoughts are all over the place right now so I’ll end up updating this later again so it’s more coherent.
When I went to maker faire i was talking to this dude who made some sorta of mini tank drone type of robot. Someone ask him how many years until we get an autonomous robot he laugh it off and said they already exist.
I must have this! It will open doors for me 😀 Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a closed network of Kinects throughout the house so they would do everything for you?
oh snap son, you got links to his project?
I wish.
Ugh smilies.