When I was a physics student, my father started giving me mechanical pencils. You’d think all possibilities would have been invented by the 1980s. But some of these pencils were incredible feats of engineering with fun new ways to click out and retract the pencil graphite. I think my father had a point that there was always more to be invented, even for something so simple. We'd frequently look at bridges and discuss ways that they could be designed differently to distribute the weight and talk through the engineers' decisions around the common designs around us in the real world. Every time I'd invent something new, I'd diagram it for him with my pencils and he'd ask probing questions about the design choices I had made. One day, for instance, I’d invented a "Runner’s Ratchet Shoe." I was an avid runner in those days and would get sore knees and shin splints. The Runner's Ratchet was a set of levers attaching to the runner's ankle that would put the downward motion of a runner's shoe into softened impact, cushioning the shock to the knees while redirecting that downward force into a forward springing action propelling the runner forward. He looked at my drawing and exclaimed, “Congratulations for re-inventing the bicycle!” It took me a moment to see that the motion of the foot between my invention and the bicycle was the same, while the muscle stress of my design was probably greater, obviating the benefit I was pursuing in the first place.
When I went to college. He started giving me fountain pens. I asked him why he was giving me all these. I could just use a biro pen after all. He said, “If you have a better pen, you’ll write better thoughts.” I could feel the effect of the instrument on the way I framed my thoughts. I was more careful and considered about what I wrote and how. Fountain pens slowed me down a little bit. They force you to write differently and sometimes they alter the pace of your writing and therefore the way you see the initial thought. It feels as if you’re committing something weighty to paper when you write with quill ink. I enjoyed the complexity over time. I took away the lesson that the instrument shapes the experience, emphasis of the path over the goal. Complexity, challenge and adversity in any process can make the end product more refined.
One day, I was working on a new invention that, yet again, had complex moving gears and levers. It was another piece of sports equipment I'd named, Ski Pole Leg Support. This invention was again to address knee soreness, this time from hours of sitting on ski lifts with dangling legs tugged on by heavy skis and ski boots. The device would allow skiers like me to suspend the weight of the legs onto a chair lift through the length of the ski-pole which would suspend a retractable support for the base of the ski boot. As I was visualizing the motion of the device in my head, I thought that what I really needed was a pen that could draw in 3 dimensions directly, the way I saw the device in my mind's eye. That way I could demonstrate the machine in spatial rendering rather than asking my professors to look at my 2D drawings and then asking them to to re-imagine them as 3 dimensional objects, Da Vinci style.
With this new inspiration, I designed a concept of just such a drawing tool. It looked like a fishbowl that had a pen-like proboscis which would move through a viscous solution to draw the lines which would suspend in location supported by the viscosity of the medium. I realized that a fountain pen moving through the solution would disturb the suspension solution itself through friction and therefore damage the rendered image as the drawing got more complex, unless the user drew from the bottom up. So, as an alternative to that approach, I imagined using an array of piezoelectric ultrasound speakers laid out in a grid in the base of the globe to direct shock waves through the solution, converging shock waves on certain points. At the locations where the shock waves would intersect, they would cause destructive interference and therefore increase the fluid pressure at the drawing coordinates desired. The solution at those shock-points would form a visible distillate from the solution's chemicals at these points, which would allow the drawing to persist. (The same way that a cathode ray tube uses a single string of electrons to paint a picture over a grid where the electrons strike the luminescent screen. But I'd use sound instead of electrons.) When the drawing was finished, you could preserve it temporarily, then erase it by spinning the globe. Centripetal rotation would pull the distillate apart so it could settle in the base to dissolve again and be reused, like the way a lava lamp uses its molten wax in solution, re-melting when it falls close to the heated base. I thought of it like a 3D version of the popular 2D Etch-a-sketch toy which was popular during my childhood. Might this drawing globe have market potential I wondered?
Before I shared the concept with toy manufacturers, I met an inventor named Michael Zane who had graduated from my college, Franklin and Marshall. He said he was willing to look over my product concepts and give me some advice. After he stared at my drawings a bit he gave me an approving glance. He said he liked my ideas. But he then commented “If you have any interest or ability outside of inventing, pursue that with a passion!” He thought his career path was not something that he’d wish on anybody. It was incredibly difficult to file and protect patents as you tried to sell your products in a fiercely competitive international market, he explained. He told me stories of many inventors whose lives were consumed and hopes dashed by throwing too much of their lives into one idea. So his advice was to live a different life than he saw on paper as my future. I did go to the US Patent and Trademark Office to research the ideas in the sector of several of my future patent ideas. But over the years I let my dreams my physical hardware inventions trickle out of my mind and focused my inventions on new problems and opportunities in the digital technology and internet space.
Looking back on my 3D Etch-a-sketch concept 30 years later, I see how a fountain pen for aquariums wasn’t going to find a mass market fit, even if I'd thrown all my gusto behind it. Mr. Zane had saved me lots of frustration and door knocking. I’m very glad I pursued those other interests I had at the time. Mechanical pencils and fountain pens are cool. But your life should be about more than something that has been reinvented 1000 times since the dawn of art. The inventions I focused on over the last three decades were team efforts, not lone entrepreneur stories. Coordinating groups of people in a company to build something new is the way to go these days. As the oft quoted adage goes: If you want to go fast, go alone; If you want to go far, go together. My teams have won patents, changed industries and impacted the lives of millions of people. It would have been a different life story if I'd just pursued selling plastic drawing toys at the start of my career.
I say all this because I have been toying around with VR and AR products for the last 8 years since my company decided to leap into the new industry. I’m starting to see echoes of what I’d wanted decades ago, now implemented in products. My colleagues and I go into VR to discuss technology and new product ideas. We tend to use Spatial.io, a virtual reality conferencing platform. One day I drew a diagram in the air with my fingers. I described a product concept I’d debated with one of my friends, Paul Douriaguine, who was a work colleague from my time working at a startup in Sydney. We discussed the concept of using aerial photography and photogrammetry to assemble a virtual reproduction of an oil refinery or other physical facility or factory. We discussed using automated time-lapse captured images from multiple drone flights around the facility to watch for areas of discoloration that might indicate mold, rust or oil leaks which could be used to prevent physical structure damage.
My rendering, pictured above, showed how a drone flight path, conducted autonomously or crowd-sourced, to capture structural images for analysis. Flight path was portrayed in green on the camera angles a drone would follow around the facility depicted in blue. Then my friend John P Joseph, who had actually worked on oil facilities with his own AR company jumped in and diagrammed how his team looked at the problem for long-distance pipeline maintenance and function monitoring.
Then my other friend, Olivier Yiptong, jumped in to talk about how to establish the server architecture to achieve the service we were describing mechanically across pipes, facilities and flying devices.
It was an amazing thing to watch. Three people with entirely different backgrounds (business, product and engineering) had assembled sporadically. In the span of about 15 minutes, all of us were able to rapidly discuss different layers of a product and service initiative to achieve understanding of a range of opportunities and limitations through a process that might have taken hours of preparation and presentation time in any other medium.
The experience made me reflect back in time. My first conception on the best way to draw an invention 3 decades ago was to make a product leap from paper to fish bowl globes. Here I was today, inside the globe with other clever folk inventing in a shared virtualized space. In Spatial, I was able to diagram the concept in a fun and effective way, even if a bit sloppy because I didn't have a 3D ruler and protractor yet! (Wait a tick... what if... oh never mind...)
VR is an old idea receiving heaps of attention and investment right now. Just as some say that the Apollo missions were something the past could afford that the present could not, I think that VR is an idea that couldn’t have found a market when I was young, but that actually can address new use cases and interesting applications now. Perhaps it doesn’t pass the Larry Page toothbrush test: something you’d want to use 2 times a day. But it is significantly valuable in what it can convey experientially. I find myself preferring it over the camera-gaze experience of pandemic life video conferencing platforms. Now when my engineering and product expert friends want to meet, we typically opt for the VR meeting as it feels more human to move and gesture in a space rather than sit transfixed, staring into a camera lens. Perhaps the recent pandemic has created a great enough frustration in general society that we yearn to get back to a 3D experience, even in remote conference meetings. Seeing people through a flat screen while posing to be rendered in 2D is an artifice of the past times. I suspect that eventually people will come to prefer 3D to meet when they can’t meet in person more broadly. 2D seems to be an awkward adolescent phase for our industry in my view.
These VR designing pens are similar to the fountain pens and mechanical pencils of yesteryear, but in a medium that is just being created for our next generation of inventors and future physicists now. Our tools are imprecise at present. But in the coming years they will be honed because of the obvious benefit and efficiency they bring in facilitating social connections and collaboration. Over the pandemic years I've gained a new form of conversational venue that has caused more discussions to happen in better ways than the technologies I'd become used to before. I will continue these brainstorms in virtual 3D environments because, when separate from my team, I still want to communicate and share the way we are used to in physical space. But there, we obviate separations in space while still keeping the robust density of media that we can share in our globe-like environment, unlimited by the restrictions of what can be crammed through a small camera aperture.
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