I’m back from Maker Fair 2011 in NY. It was absolutely amazing. I spent nearly all my time in the Microsoft tent running the “Drive an EDDIE with Your Body Using Kinect” demo.

Here is some of what the press had to say…

More about the contest we are running here…

Here are some of my impressions from the Microsoft tent…

Everything about the tent was awesome… the wandering Photo taker (AKA Party-Bot, AKA Stalker-Bot, AKA Robo-Ratzi,), the setup crew, the decor, the layout, the video screens and hand-out materials, etc, etc. We got an “Editors choice blue-ribbon award” for an “excellent exhibit”.

The ‘Driving Eddie with Kinect’ demo was a big hit. There were lines to try it much of the day both days. I had to make some last minute adjustments to the code when we first set it up and fine tune it for one of the bots, but other than that, it ran flawlessly for hours and people were just amazed. The only down time was to swap laptop batteries every few hours or to switch to a charged robot toward the end of the day and I got those down-times to under 3 minutes.

I can’t begin to tell you how many giggling kids and fascinated adults absolutely loved it. I got to see people’s faces light up all day long. I was constantly saying “OK… we have a line… times up… who’s next?” I repeatedly heard… “that is just amazing”… “incredible!”. So many people wanted to know more and loved hearing all about it. And many wanted to try it over and over again. Many parents would take extra time to explain to their very young kids what was going on and make sure they realized how amazing it was. You could tell they saw this as something important that should be understood. No one was disappointed and everyone left with a smile and many took time to learn more about the EDDIE and the software. It was a great lead-in to talking about RDS, the contest and Microsoft’s vision of advanced software for robots.

Everyone tall enough to see over the monitor into the robot pen could get the hang of how to drive it quickly and it was fascinating to watch them learn to drive and develop their own driving style. The best thing was when people would come and watch the robot moving around in the pen for a while without knowing how it was being controlled… then they would see a kid to the side with his hands out rolling back and forth like an airplane and they would put one-and-one together and I could see them just light up with excitement and get in line. Then there were people who got in line without knowing what was going on. They saw people waving in front of a big screen and wanted to try. When they stepped up and I told them they would be controlling that robot over there with their body they couldn’t believe it and when it responded to them the smile was priceless. It pleased men, women, boys, and girls of all ages.

There was one girl, probably 12 or 13 years old, who got my usual 15 second instruction and then immediately was driving it around like a pro… I could tell by the way she stood and the fluid, graceful motion of her arms and how her wrists and fingers perfectly matched her arm movements that she was a dancer… probably ballet. The robot was gracefully swimming around the pen better than I had ever seen before. I asked her if she was a dancer and she smiled and said she was. I told her that the robot was moving more fluidly and beautifully than it had for anyone before her and she smiled and continued to make it dance and swirl for a few minutes. I was so impressed. I felt like I was in a PBS special about computer human interaction.

I purposely had some of the demo code showing behind the demo screen and lots of people asked about it… “Is that the code”, “did you write that”, “what language is that?”, “was it hard to write?”, “how many lines of code?”. I would take time to answer them and/or feed them to another team member so I could keep the line moving. We were praised in the Scientific American article for how we were able to explain what was going on to young and old alike at whatever level was appropriate to their knowledge and skill.

It’s a fun time to be working in robotics!

-Gershon

What part of “Bwahaahahaaaahahahaahahaahaa” don’t you understand?