Technology Day 1997 - "Technology at Play: The World of Sports, Games and Toys"

HECHT: My name is Bill Hecht, for the one or two of you in the audience who are young enough not to know me. I started this job many years ago as a younger alumnus and I've now become an older alumnus. And it has nothing to do with the job, it has to do with this natural process we all go through. Welcome back to Technology Day.

For those of you who are my contemporaries or a bit older, this is Saturday morning class. For you young people, when they softened up MIT, they don't have Saturday morning class anymore. But we were all accustomed to it. And in the thing we call the real world, which is not MIT, there is always Saturday morning class.

My job is to welcome you all, to get you in your chairs, and to introduce the man who is a gift to us, the second gift to us from the University of Michigan. We had a great president given to us many years ago named Jerry Wiesner from the University of Michigan. And lightning struck again a number of years ago when Chuck Vest joined us. Without any further ado, Chuck Vest, president of MIT.

VEST: Thank you very much, Bill. Good morning and welcome home to all of you. Before we begin the excursion into what I think of as serious fun this morning, I do have a somewhat more serious announcement that I have been asked to make by the registrar.

He informed me this morning that due to some sort of an archival error, the registrar no longer has documentary evidence that certain MIT graduates successfully completed their swimming tests. These graduates are therefore required to retake the swimming test immediately. Failure to comply with this will result in revocation of your degrees.

As far as we can tell, the lost records are those belonging to all graduates of the classes of 1957, '62, '67, '72, '77, '82, and '87. So you're asked to report over to the alumni pool immediately. Staff are there prepared to administer the test, and we hope you can hurry back before the end of today's program. Good luck to all of you.

Now, where was I? Today, as I said, it really is a real pleasure to welcome all of you back home to the MIT campus. And we are indeed going to engage in something that goes on around here all the time, which we call serious fun. This is a place of serious work, of serious purpose, but also of serious humor and serious fun. And I'm sure that's something that hasn't changed since the days you were here as students.

There's always been a complex intermingling of fun-- excuse me, of work and of play here at MIT. One reason for this is, of course, that the heart of the Institute, namely its student body, remains forever young. Some people say that staying on the faculty at an institution like this is a little bit like living in the funny papers. Nobody's age ever seems to change. And that's something we value deeply.

But of course, young people prefer to blend pleasure together with their labor. And actually, it's my observation that most of you continue to do that as well. Now, the reason that the brilliance of this community is often and fortunately paired with a vigorous if sometimes warped sense of humor and fun is pretty obvious.

There are lots of scholarly writings on the analogies between humor and scientific discovery. These things are all quite well known. Both humor and scientific discovery very frequently have in common the sudden merging of two seemingly very disparate ideas. This conjugation is something that I think we all have the good fortune to experience from time to time.

So it really is no surprise that humor and sports and games and other diversions are prominent features of the Institute's landscape. Another reason, I suppose, is that this is an extraordinarily competitive community. And the desire to excel infects our play every bit as much as it does our work.

And finally, the last reason I might cite that play is important to us, and it goes right to the heart of something that's very valuable in an MIT education. Because this is a research university and because Paul Gray and so many others on our faculty and staff over the years have helped to really integrate our undergraduates into their research programs, it's fair to say that one of the favorite catch phrases around the Institute a little bit in parallel to our traditional learning by doing might also be learning by playing. And that of course, is a very familiar phenomenon to all of us.

Connections between creativity and playfulness, between intellectual acuity and physical vigor, between mental agility and bodily agility are well established. Now, that's what I was told to say, but as I was thinking about it this morning, I came up with a few counterexamples to that statement that I think I can cite as well. But on the whole, it's correct.

It's for this very reason that we invest so heavily in facilities and programs for both physical and mental recreation. And it's also why our students and our faculty and our staff invest so much of their time and energy in these vital, rewarding, and stimulating pursuits. Let me expand on this just for a moment by saying a couple of words about MIT's athletic programs.

Among American universities, MIT ranks a close second to the number of varsity teams at fields for intercollegiate competition. Harvard beats us, we understand, by two squads. We field about 39 and they have 41. This is a truly extraordinary number if you stop to think about it.

By the time they graduate, around a quarter of our MIT students have participated in varsity sports, often reaping the rewards that come from teamwork, from training, from challenge, and from competition. In fact, one of the anecdotes that I tell people that I come across around the country and world who really don't know a lot about MIT, which to me explained a lot of our spirit when I first came here is the following.

Becky and I follow a tradition that Paul and Priscilla started of hosting our seniors for dinner in a series of eight or nine evenings at the president's house in February. My first year here, I was sitting at the table next to a very petite young woman who was graduating in physics. And I asked her what she was interested in doing in addition to physics.

And she told me that she played women's varsity ice hockey. And I said, well, that's really terrific. And trying to make a little small talk, I said, did you play ice hockey in high school? And she looked at me very seriously and she said, President Vest, I couldn't even skate when I was in high school.

And this year, another senior stood up, also a young woman in this evening. And she said, you know, the thing that I have valued most about MIT is the number of firsts. And what I mean by that is the number of things I did for the first time when I came here.

And I think that's a lot of the spirit that infuses all of our activities in athletics, in theater, in music, and so forth. Very often young people trying out and exploring things for the first time and flowering in ways that no one would ever have predicted. So we think a lot about the importance of intercollegiate sports and clubs sports and recreation here at the Institute.

In addition, of course, there are, as I said, intramural and club activities of all kinds. The workout rooms, the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the squash courts, the basketball courts, the playing fields, and all the other facilities that MIT students have at their disposal are very important elements to the campus. And of course, beyond athletics, there are countless other opportunities for our students to learn by playing, literally. In music, in theater, in dance, in art.

And of course, what begins as play, and that was really the meaning of my couple of anecdotes a moment ago, what often begins as play ends up in deep intellectual and artistic exploration and creativity. And if all this weren't enough, we offer another resource that provides considerable opportunity for ingenious play. Our students have virtually unlimited access to the use of the internet.

At MIT, the use of computers and the World Wide Web, which of course we manage here, are not only essential tools of education, they also provide whole worlds of recreational opportunities. And every now and then, some of these are even constructive. Given the enthusiasm with which MIT students, faculty, and staff alike have embraced the internet and the World Wide Web as a tool for both work and play, it's no wonder that just a few weeks ago, we were ranked number one most wired college or university in the United States by Yahoo, the internet life online magazine.

We're still not sure exactly what this means, but we love things that say we're number one so we're going to accept it. In all these ways and in a good many more, work and play are in fact intertwined in the pursuit of knowledge here at the Institute. It's a tradition of which we are proud and for which I believe we will continue to write new chapters. And I think that will give you a little sense of what this morning and the day are really going to be all about.

Now, we're going to continue this morning in a pretty informal manner. We're not going to have a lot of very lengthy introductions. In a moment, I will introduce our very first speaker of the morning and he will be followed in succession by three others. Seymour Papert of the MIT Media Lab, who I think is known to many of you as the originator of the logo program. Someone who has devoted a career to merging the cognitive sciences and computing technology with a particular emphasis on learning, particularly by children.

Seymour will be followed by Ed Crawley, the head of our Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. A person who conducts a lot of his play time a few thousand feet in the air with no motor. And I don't know, Ed, if you're going to say anything about that today, but Ed is indeed a glider pilot, soaring pilot, and I think has been just a terrific driving force sort of bringing in the new generation of engineering education at MIT, as has the speaker who follows him, Woody Flowers, who if anyone can say that the following speaker needs no introduction, it surely has to be Woody. So I'm not going to say anything more about Woody.

Our first speaker, I think, is going to be a real treat for all of us, Steve Jacobsen. Steve received his doctorate degree here in the mechanical engineering department in 1973. Today he is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. But also holds appointments there in both computer science, in bioengineering, and in the department of surgery in their medical school.

Steve directs the University of Utah Center for Engineering Design, which has collaborated with a number of corporate partners in creating several of today's most exciting and advanced applications of engineering technology. His career as a teacher and a technological innovator offers ample proof that engineering of course can be useful, but it also can be fun and fascinating all at the same time. Steve.

JACOBSEN: Hello? Oh, here we go. Good. Well, it's great to be here. I, as President Vest said, left here in 1973. And I was actually an office-mate of Woody. So I go back a long time. Also as a student of Bob Mann, who I see is in the audience.

One thought I had when we were discussing-- or President Vest was discussing athletics was that this morning I couldn't find anybody who knew that the Jazz won. They'd say, what's a jazz? And the Jazz are in a death struggle here with Michael Jordan, if anybody follows basketball. Yeah? OK, I'll stand to this side. And so it was important to me to find out.

Actually, what I thought about, too, was a lecture I got once about MIT and athletics, which I thought was really important. And that was that the purpose of athletics at MIT-- this was my own conclusion-- was for participation, not observation. Whereas spectator sports are great things, the idea at MIT was to give an opportunity for people to get involved in every kind of sport. And I happen to agree that that's probably the best way for a university to behave.

As a little background so I can explain my biases, and I have to go over and get the clicker here, or the laser printer. I've kind of got a weird background. I went back to Utah actually because they'd give me some freedoms that I couldn't get at other places. And that was to do some things directly and very tightly with industry.

And so I started a place called the Center for Engineering Design. And then at one point, we founded a company called Sarcos, and we were all interested in doing design. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. But we were interested in turning ideas into things, but I mean, like really. Not just talk about it.

And we now grew to about 150 people, and we have about 20 associates and an average of about 13 adult graduate students. By adults, we mean that they fully know where they want to go, and that they have experience, and they come from a lot of different fields-- there's a spider there-- from engineering to science to medicine to art, business, and manufacturing.

And in fact, I guess now we have in the group about 15 sculptors that are quite good at what they do. And we do projects for commercial, government, and internal sponsors. And we usually have about 30 projects going on, ranging from building robotic butterflies for Steve Wynn for his new hotel Bellagio, to doing things that I'll classify, since we're talking about fun, as deep fun.

Now there's fun fun, and there's hard fun, and then there's deep fun. And deep fun is where there's more pain than there is pleasure.

[LAUGHTER]

And sometimes at the end there's ecstasy. But for sure, one thing is true-- you're always in a position where you can lose. And because we take projects that are basically fixed-budget and fixed-schedule, and we embed the R&D kinds of activities we want to do in those projects, and it's a grueling thing, but it's something we believe in because it keeps you from dallying in the valley.

We do commercial design, not designology, and we believe in all methods of design-- CAD/CAM, for sure, and then one that I use to talk about, which is called Pod-POM. And Pod-POM is plain old design and plain old manufacturing, where you think, and I have a personal bias for computers and against computers. The thing for is they are facilitators, but the thing that's bad about them is too many times, you believe them. And so something that comes out of a computer to us is just a prototype. It's not gospel.

We get involved in a lot of different areas, and I have a reason for talking about this. But you can't read all these, and Bob Mann will give me trouble for having too much on my slide. But we get involved in medicine, entertainment, human interactive systems and microsystems.

And that means micro-catheters to go in your brain, and we're actually commercializing that now; programmable drug delivery systems that we're commercializing for things like controlling clots or cancer or whatever; some diabetic catheters; artificial limbs-- the artificial limbs project started here; entertainment of all sorts, a lot of casinos, Disney, Jurassic Park, Universal, and so on; robots to go under the sea. And since all of these things need sensors and computers and actuators, we do a lot of work in micro-systems, and that is using modern technologies from miniaturization to build interesting systems.

And also, you'll see as I discuss things, and this is sort of a plea to schools to not have areas so nicely defined. One nice thing about MIT was they didn't really see departments as the only place you could work. And so Utah got involved in a lot of places, and I just want to announce that since I've also got a position in surgery, I do cheap surgery. So if anybody's got any problems, see me after.

But we get involved in machines that take information to control them, and that sounds like a trite term, and it's a horrible statement. But it means machines that basically use sensors, actuators, controllers, structures, and conduits that have high levels of interdependence. And you'll see when you see the robots that there's sensors, actuators, structures, controllers, and so on that all work together, and if anyone little part doesn't work, then they don't work. So they are nightmares.

The Disney robots we built had up to 50 actuators and 100 sensors in a single robot, and you can see when one of them doesn't work. When we did the project for European Disneyland, it was 9,000 sensors, 4,000 actuators, all sorts of computers and structures, and so on, and rubber faces, and clothing, and so on. And so it all had to work. We also believe in design tools using computers. And again, you can't live without them, but you can die with too many of them.

So today we were going to talk about technology at play, and you can interpret that a lot of different ways. And we talked in the title about sports, games, and toys, and we've been involved in some toys. I didn't bring one up with me, but some Mickey Mouse watches and some little shooter systems and so on that actually are quite technical devices. But they are toys. But we sort of led away and got involved in some other areas, which are theme parks and casinos and location-based entertainment and exhibitions and shows, and we've had some rather sizable projects in those areas.

And just so we don't go to sleep, I thought I'd show you just a short clip on tape number three of this fellow. This is one of the sculpts for Jurassic Park, the ride. And he's in clay, and I'll show you how we come about having those. But he's really wonderful, isn't he? He's so big and fully packed. Why don't you show tape three, please?

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- --are present in this area.

JACOBSEN: This is going on the ride, and this is T-Rex 1. We've got to turn up the sound. Yeah, there we go. And this is T-Rex 2.

[ROARING]

[SCREAMS]

We'll see another shot. This is coming out of the bottom at about 60 miles an hour. And now you'll see a side view of this robot.

[ROARING]

And you'll see some people in a second moving around to show you the size. You can turn that off now. Just put it on pause.

[END PLAYBACK]

And we'll get back to that kind of thing, but just to give you a little preview, those are really not unserious fun. He's 80,000 pounds. He's above the clients, or the guests, and he comes out over them, and so he has to work all the time, and he has to be dynamic and so on. So the process of achieving him was not straightforward.

So one thing people ask us when they-- by the way, when they see the list of all the projects we work on, the venture capitalists say, you're crazy. And other people say you're crazy. Your wife certainly says you're crazy. But we're sort of addicts in the place, and you have a lot of them around here. I tell people usually MIT is sort of full of addicts of various kinds addicted to their work.

But we actually talked about it in our group of maybe the 50 central people and says, why do we keep taking these projects? The last one that came to us, they wanted us to do Godzilla, a giant new kind of Godzilla, not a big furry bear. And we actually turned them down. It was amazing.

But we decided we love machines-- not more than our families, but the whole process of scheming it takes to define a new machine and the teamwork necessary to build competitive systems, and I emphasize competitive, because the things we do are competitive, and they're economically competitive, understanding the technologies and the manufacturing methods required to make them.

If you take a look at the T-Rex there's every kind of computer process to analyze them. There's fiberglass and rubber and clay systems and foam systems, all sorts of different parts, and these have to run, as I'll talk, in terrible environments. The educational processes necessary to create a team that can compete in the real marketplace and especially in the entertainment marketplace is sort of like hamburger. It just sort of churns people up. One of the jokes is that the companies keep going bankrupt, and the people just moved to different companies, so the company names change, but the people never change. They just move to a different company.

We like the participants, the students, and I don't just mean young students. Anybody who does this has to be an old student if they're old. And the competition is fun. It's great to win, and it's great to have the motivation to win. Another thing we like regarding machines which isn't talked about a lot is the people aspects of them. And both Woody and I collect a bunch of old things, and we look at them maybe different than other people.

I always look at them, and I wonder about their relationship with people. Who are the users? And who needed the machine? And who was the manufacturer, and what were their biases? What was the technology that was available in terms of material knowledge and tools? Who paid the bill, and why they did it? And what was the price? And why did they pick a particular look?

I was thinking-- I was mentioning to Woody about Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They're clearly not motorcycles, but I said they're sort of a rolling American trophy, which is wonderful, too, and it's perfectly great to have them. But if you do start thinking about machines in those ways, I think you understand that we're not any smarter now than we were there and then, and they were as smart as we are. And what you do is you work with the tools you have.

Scientists have a certain role, which has to do with discovering nature, issues in nature, and also finding a discovery suitable for their tombstone, some immortal result. And engineers take that information and refine it for use. And designers, though, just try to do the best they can at the time with the tools they have and with the things they have. And so it's a little bit different field.

Well, how we began doing this kind of thing-- how did we get in entertainment-- was an evolution. And it started actually with the Utah Arm, which actually came from MIT. And we built this arm based on some control strategies developed here, and it's been a very successful arm. It's an electromyographic arm that you put on your body, and it picks up the signals, and it's controlled automatically by the flexion of remnant muscles.

We then did another project with MIT's AI lab called the Utah MIT Dexterous Hand, and this is a hand that has three fingers, just like Mickey, and a thumb and a master. And this hand will do anything this master tells it to do or that a computer tells it to do. And it was an interesting study, and that got us into building systems undersea.

And this is the best tele-operator in the world. This can go to the bottom of the ocean, and this person can stay up safely on the boat and operate this device in such a way that there's interaction with both position and force. So anything this robot under the sea feels, this person perceives as a load on their arm, and you can do very complex manipulation that way.

Well, the reason I showed those is that somebody at Disney named Mark Fuller, who now has a little company that makes fountains, saw that, and they were having a lot of trouble with Abraham Lincoln, who you'll see in a second, because his hands kept flying off, and he would break and have all sorts of troubles. And they asked us to come and see if we could do something because we made pretty hands, the arms, and we made rugged robots, and that's the two properties they wanted. They wanted to have graceful motion, and they also wanted to have a very robust operation.

So we started into building anthropomorphic robots, and this is sort of like a Disney robot, but this is one that's at Carnegie Science Museum, and it tells kids about science and technology. We have another one we built for Ford that travels around the world talking about Ford cars.

But before I show a little tape on those robots, one consideration, too, is when we would do this, people would say, oh, this is crazy. There's no money in this. I don't know where it's going. It's too complex, and so on. But actually, we found out that if you want to be in this field, and if some of you are students or the parents of students, there's some rather startling economics, and they're growing rapidly, as I guess we have less more and more fun.

But I got these numbers, and I won't stand behind any of these numbers. I got it from our marketing group, but numbers for some of these designations-- theme parks, 5 billion; arcades and video games, 4 billion; family fun centers, 4 billion. We don't do bowling, spectator sports, box office, or live entertainment, but the numbers get to be good enough to do something in.

The artificial arm market is not very large, and people say, why did you do that? And we say, because we wanted to. And that's about all you can say. But in entertainment, there's money available. If you take a look at themed environments, theme parks, there are major Tier 1 parks. Tier 2 and 3 parks-- there's over 200 Tier 2 parks and over 1,000 Tier 3. And of the major theme parks-- I think this adds up to 43 or something-- but Disney has four, MCA Universal three, Cedar Fair four, Paramount 10, Six Flags 10, Bush 11, and Premier 10.

And there are other entertainment opportunities going on that are absolutely enormous. If you take a look at Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's now going to be $1.6 billion. Japan is putting in a place together with Lotte that's $2 billion, and the things that go in them that we get involved with look like this. And this is just the United States right here, but coasters now are running pretty big amounts. If you see a big roller coaster, it's $1.5 million. If you see some people movers, 1.2. If you see a lot of rides, it ends up being 1.7-- strange kinds of rides like water rides and so on. So just in the little attractions that go in parks, there's a fairly sizable number.

So it is a field is one thing I'd point out, and it's growing. And I don't know why, but people want to go have fun together, or they want to be voyeurs or have riskless risk. I think riskless risk is a big thing. People like to get into something that makes it seem like they're at risk, but they're all strapped in. Escapism, dating, distraction-- whatever it is, it's growing.

And another thing that's happening, in a sense, we're saying for somebody who works in this field is it's changing. When certain of the big companies controlled everything, there was almost no more brutal place you could go as a vendor-- no more better place to be abused. But things are changing. The field is growing 15% to 25% a year, and it's actually more than that. Las Vegas hit 30 million guests last year, which is amazing. I have a very small number of people there in comparison.

The attraction prices, as I mentioned, are increasing. More parks are being built. Just like I said, one little park-- $2 billion. A broader client base is weakening central control. So now, actually, as a result of that, producers can get a piece of the gate. If you see things like Sky Fun, which is that big arch, and you get on this cable, and they pull you up 200 feet and let you go-- and not my wife, though. Not a lot of people Has anybody seen those in theme parks? They let you go, and you swing?

It's pretty amazing. Those are a lot of money, and people pay $25 for the ride. So in addition to getting into the park, you've got to give them $25, and they swing you, and you are adrenaline-depleted after that. I don't know what it does, but it disturbs you a lot. But you can get a piece of the gate, and actually now it's becoming a technical game, and this is important to say. Patents actually work. Before, it was just sort of the little old game that you can hit these little gophers, and they go down a hole.

But if you look at what's happening now, it's getting very technical, and also, some people say these markets are less susceptible to recession, but I don't know if that's true. So I thought I'd give you, before I talked again, a little bit about Jurassic Park. I'll show you another little tape. It's tape number two, if they're listening in there, that shows an evolution of anthropomorphic robots we've built. And let's see if it will come on. But it's a fun tape. It ends up with one of our robots with Larry King Live.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Oh, you've got to turn it up.

[MUSIC PLAYING - THE TEMPTATIONS - "AIN'T TOO PROUD TO BEG"]

(SINGING) I don't mind because you mean that much to me. Ain't too proud to beg.

JACOBSEN: So this is how they're controlled, or they're controlled automatically, but this is really nice. The fellow that's controlling him is a mechanical engineer makeup artist, which is a strange combination. He actually did the makeup for Edward Scissorhands.

Now you can see that the master system can control a virtual image as well as a-- we did these about four years ago.

[ROARING]

A virtual image, as well as a real one. This is the Fort Benning Database for SEMNET with a wolf in it.

[HOWLING]

Now this is the first--

- Now comes the new Disney MGM studios theme park.

JACOBSEN: --fielded robot for Disney. This is the witch right there.

- It was an accident!

- Well, my little pretty. I can cause accidents, too.

- Oh, right. You have no [INAUDIBLE].

- Very well. I'll bide my time. But just try to stay out of way. First try-- I'll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too.

[MANIACAL LAUGHTER]

JACOBSEN: This one has 50 actuators and 100 sensors. It's an interesting one. He has a backup group, you can see there. And they'll work 24 hours a day, no break. We also did the insides of part of King Kong because he was having trouble-- arthritis.

[ROARING]

- And now you binge rats. Do I hear six? Who makes it six? I'm not sponging for rum. It be gold I'm after.

- Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.

- This is CNN.

- We're at the International Auto Show in Detroit. It opens tomorrow, and as we break, we're going to show you the Ford computer, this robot, Sarcos. Let's go now see Sarcos.

- This is Sarcos, the robot from the Ford exhibit. May the Ford be with you.

- May the Ford be with you. Yes.

- Don't forget to listen to Larry King Live every day on CNN.

- Good talk, Sarcos.

- That was good. That was very good. But you know, I wouldn't give up your day job. Is everybody taking off tonight? Because they're all wearing the same suit. Wow, it's such a pleasure to meet you. I'll be back. Hasta la vista, baby.

[MUSIC PLAYING - MARVIN GAYE, "HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE"]

(SINGING) I bet you're wondering how I knew about your plans to make me blue with some other guys we knew before between the two of us guys you know I loved you more. It took me by surprise.

JACOBSEN: It's amazing how many people would stay for 20 or 30 minutes and talk to the robot. But actually they were talking to a New York stand-up comedian, Tommy Cohen, who was at least 60% of the value here. He's really a great guy, and you'll see him in a second describe how they he operated the system.

- I would like to take to our viewers behind the scenes-- yes, to see how you actually work, where all these wires go, and how you are managing to look so-- excuse the term-- human.

- Human? There's no need to insult me.

- This is the secret passage.

- I also do stand-up comedy. We are the human animators of the living robot. I have a camera that is fixed into my headpiece, and I can see through there what Sarcos sees through his eyes. I also have a television monitor which can show me what's happening in the room, and I also can see through the window here in case I need an overview of the entire room. It's actually a lot of fun.

- This operator is a very talented individual, and he has become Sarcos the robot by virtue of this sensor suit. The helmet, obviously, is attached to his head, so wherever his head moves, the sensors mill it and translate that information to the computers that drive the mechanical Sarcos figure. That's also true for the shoulders, the elbows, and the wrists. Each individual finger has a positioning sensor so that it, again, knows and instructs the computer as to what moves are required. Sarcos himself is a very elaborate hydraulic and pneumatic mechanism with other sensors that provide feedback back to the computer, so he literally knows where he is at any point in time.

- I auditioned for this job with many other

JACOBSEN: So if we could turn that off, please.

[END PLAYBACK]

It's funny, but those were interesting machines.

[APPLAUSE]

So we built a bunch of these machines, and I'll talk a little bit later about where we're maybe going to go with them. One problem is not anything to do with the technological performance, but it's cost. A typical one like the Joe Cocker robot is $250,000 to $400,000, and you don't make a lot of money in entertainment doing that kind of thing. These are very, very complicated machines, and they're sort of one of many times. We built 16 robots for Jurassic Park, which is a ferocious project in terms of pain and suffering. It was really deep fun.

But they were mostly all different, and just for the review of that whole thing, the things you have to do-- the size of the ranged from the size of a chicken-- the little compies, if you remember the movie-- up to 80,000 pounds for the T-Rex, and I'll show you some more about that.

We built 16 systems, plus all sorts of support equipment. They're not like movie machines, which can-- but we could never build a spider. Anyway, they're not like movie machines where you can just make it run a couple of times and take 15 shots and then pick the one you want. They have wake up each morning and have to run essentially 365 days a year, 16 hours a day, on and on and on with silicone skins and so on.

So it's a grueling environment-- water, chemicals, heat, steam, plants, and on skin exposure, UVs, direct sunlight, water, chemicals, mechanical flexing, and so on-- it's about the worst environment you could imagine. And we were supposed to have only three robots that were in water. And water, by the way, for anybody who doesn't design machinery, is the worst thing on earth. I mean, it's caused disasters in our place four times-- distinct, horrible disasters-- because we underestimated that water can get into everything and then destroy it. And so having the skins on the machines now and bathed in water is a very tough situation. I guess the guys from the Navy know that because they're always painting things.

But the movements had to be fast, graceful, and impedance-controlled. The person who did the programming for that T-Rex-- and that's not the best program, but that's the only one I could get-- is a guy named Davy Feiten, who is famous at Disney. And he programmed Joe Cocker, and he also programmed Buzz Lightyear for the movie Toy Story. So he's got a very beautiful sense of the way things move, and he did a lot of the robots there.

So you have to, in addition to doing the technology, you have to get an artist who can see the way things move very well. And it's a demanding design from the standpoint that everything had to be approved back and forth up the chain from Steven Spielberg, back down to the lowest person, back up to Steven Spielberg. And the reason we did a lot of the sensor suit work that you saw, the little suit to run the wolf, was actually during the project in the beginning, the suit drove every dinosaur that we had, and they did lightly-rendered systems and would do choreography.

The artists from Universal would come up and do choreography on the robot, and then it would go to Spielberg and his crew to see if they liked it and go back and forth because the hardest thing in the beginning was getting a consensus in the minds of two different kinds of minds, which were the technical people and engineers and the artists. The artists would say, I want a really big, mean robot. And that doesn't mean that the engineers knew what they were talking about. And I'll show you what we did to try to solve that.

The other thing that made the project tough were things like system complexity, the kind of movements and coverings and so on, many moving parts. We had this one thing-- when you see some of these inside, you'll see they have enormous steel parts. And it was because they had this arbitrary rule we could never pass was that we can only use steel, and we could only go to 5,000 PSI in any weldment.

And so things got big. There's a lot of surrounding structures and conduits, safety of guests and staff, the time and budget was short and thin. The sponsor-- we had 20 different management interfaces with the company in two years. And then, so again, it was this sort of deep fun.

So the way we started out was generating wireframe models of all of these systems into which we put skeletons with these little red actuators because we decided we were never going to get anywhere with the customer unless they could shop. Everybody likes to shop around. We'd say, this robot's going to cost a million dollars. They'd go, what? And you couldn't do anything but argue with them until you could say, OK, here's a tail, and this tail has one, two, three degrees of freedom. And so it goes like this.

And they'd say, well, we want a really slinky, serpentine tail. So you'd build a model with eight actuators, and it would go just like a snake. And then we'd tell them that that was 80% more. They'd say, oh, we don't want that. So we'd go back and forth and back and forth, and we could make all the changes in the virtual world. And what we were doing that was really interesting from an engineering standpoint was generating a database that everybody agreed with. We then took these databases apart, and the shapes went to the sculptors, and structures to structures people, and the actuators went to the actuator people for simulation, and so on.

These are all hydraulic, but that's what you need for the kinds of systems we do. We'd much rather have had them be done with electricity. So here's one of those pictures of Klaus with a lightly-rendered spitter. And it starts with foams, sculpts-- I thought I had a maquette. Well, it starts with little maquettes about this tall that everybody buys off on. They could be done virtually, but they're not.

And then you start sculpting foam. This was a guy named Clay Furches, which matches what he does. And this is the T-Rex being started out of urethane foam. We're trying to get to the point where we can digitally machine those, but we can't right now. And then, here he is. He's very committed to his work. He's doing the work in the mouth, but our joke I was telling Woody is that this is our lawyer.

[LAUGHTER]

But what nobody understands is he's attacking the dinosaur. He's got him by the epliglottis, right?

And here's our sculpting team. This was the group that was interesting to watch together with the engineers, and he wouldn't fit in our building. So we had to take his drumsticks off, and we did that and then started building real systems. And this is him-- pieces of fiberglass, silicone, and so on. And then he was shipped to go together with this whole system, which looks like this.

So you saw him come out of the waterfall. Well, this big structure holds him back under the waterfall, and then he swings out. This is the waterfall generator, and to give you a perspective about this, this is really more like construction equipment because there's what a person is like. And that's about where you are when you go over the falls.

I don't know if you noticed it, but right as he attacks you, then you tip over and you go eight stories down and come out the bottom, going lickety-split. And again, all of this was done with actually Pro Engineer. And you can see the actuation systems and so on that hold the dinosaur.

And just to show you one thing I think that's interesting about the size is you can design things on a screen like this and just think, well, it's just a part. And you see this little triangle right here. Well, that little part looks like this when they deliver it. And so you can see the little pins that are used to put it together and the little studs where some of the linkages hook on.

So we actually looked around, and we had to get the biggest crane that existed in California to put pieces of him up on the top of this 80-foot-- well, actually 120-foot tower. And we, of course, analyzed everything for our little guideline to not go above 5,000 PSI, and none of us ever liked that.

So let me just make a few other comments, some conclusions. We get a lot of technical people that come into the entertainment group, and they don't quite understand. So I told them what somebody told me-- you've got to remember that it's the story that counts, and people come in, and they just want to have a great story. And if you have somebody that doesn't know how to do it, run the robot that was there with Ford, it falls flat, just like any entertainment issue.

But if you have an entertainer like Tommy run it, then it does better probably than him alone. And it's interesting because the robot is less threatening. We found various people-- I'd go ask them in the audience at the Ford pavilion or the Ford booth at the auto show why they liked it, and it was surprising how many comments came up that there was-- you could trust it. I mean, somehow they trusted the robot.

[LAUGHTER]

And I'd keep digging into it, but there were feelings like that, and there's other funny things about dinosaurs. I've been trying to figure out for years-- why do children like dinosaurs? And I decided they like dinosaurs for the same reason I like a guy who's 6'6" and weighs 300 pounds with tattoos all over and pulls up on a Harley and says, who are you? And I want to make friends.

[LAUGHTER]

You want to make friends with things like that. But at any rate, technology can be the discriminator, and it can help you have a monopoly, expanded capability, and fun. But it's just not sufficient, and when people come to an engineering school, you've got to talk to them about that-- that it's actually true with the car, too. It's the story that counts. It's the car the person gets to drive, not the fact that it has better springs.

It's also a team sport. It requires a mixed set of broad capabilities, from artistic, creative engineering to business. And it's rough and tough, and you better believe it. I'm telling you-- I think if you look at the kind of people that run these industries, they're movie people, and they're gamblers. They go, seven, and they bet $200 million at a whack with a movie. And they run it with horrible schedules. I really feel bad for them. It's really a tough life.

Now, you put them together with a bunch of guys like our sculptors, who sit back and say, this is going to be the most beautiful piece in the world, and the clock starts going, and the money starts running, and pretty soon the sparks come. So it's a fairly tough environment.

Another little comment about technology since we're talking about technology and fun-- It's really confusing what matters. Flash in the technology may not mean true business value, and there's other things that dominate, too, like cost and safety. And so one thing I tell people that are going to go into this area, you've got to think about it-- there's some really better areas.