Tom Shannon's gravity-defying sculpture

745,419 views ・ 2009-05-06

TED


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This is a sculpture I made,
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which is a way of, kind of, freeing a form
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into an object that has different degrees of freedom.
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So, it can balance on a point.
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This is a bronze ball,
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an aluminum arm here,
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and then this wooden disk.
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And the wooden disk was really thought about
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as something that you'd want to hold on to,
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and that would glide easily through your hands.
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The aluminum is because it's very light.
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The bronze is nice hard, durable material
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that could roll on the ground.
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Inside of the bronze ball
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there's a lead weight
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that is free-swinging on an axle
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that's on two bearings
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that pass in between, across it,
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like this, that counterbalance this weight.
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So it allows it to roll.
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And the sphere has that balance property
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that it always sort of stays still
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and looks the same from every direction.
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But if you put something on top of it,
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it disbalances it. And so it would tip over.
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But in this case because
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the interior is free-swinging
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in relation to the sphere,
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it can stand up on one point.
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And then there was a second level to this object,
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which is that it --
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I wanted it to convey some proportions that I was interested in,
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which is the diameter of the Moon
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and the diameter of the Earth
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in proportion to each other.
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I was exploring, really early on,
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wanting to make things float in the air.
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And I thought up a lot of ideas.
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This is sculpture that I made that --
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it's magnetically levitated.
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The thing is, is that it's slightly dangerous.
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Normally it's sort of cordoned off when it's in a museum.
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But it's uh -- let's see if I can manipulate it a little bit
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without, um -- oops.
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So this is just floating,
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floating on a permanent magnetic field,
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which stabilizes it in all directions.
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Except there is a slight tether here,
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which keeps it from going over the top of its field.
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It's sort of surfing on a magnetic field
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at the crest of a wave.
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And that's what supports the object and keeps it stable.
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I think we could roll the tape, admin.
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I have a sort of a collection of videos
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that I took of different installations, which I could narrate.
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This is a sculpture of the Sun
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and the Earth, in proportion.
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Representing that eight and a half minutes
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that it takes light and gravity to connect the two.
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So here is the Earth. It's a little less than a millimeter
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that was turned of solid bronze.
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And here is a similar sculpture.
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That's the Sun at that end.
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And then in a series of 55 balls,
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it reduces, proportionately -- each ball
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and the spaces between them
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reduce proportionately,
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until they get down to this little Earth.
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This is in a sculpture park in Taejon.
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This one is about the Moon
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and then the distance to the Earth, in proportion also.
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This is a little stone ball, floating.
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As you can see the little tether,
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that it's also magnetically levitated.
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And then this is the first part of --
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this is 109 spheres,
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since the Sun is 109 times the diameter of the Earth.
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And so this is the size of the Sun.
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And then each of these little spheres
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is the size of the Earth in proportion to the Sun.
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It's made up of 16 concentric shells. Each one has 92 spheres.
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This is in the courtyard of a twelfth-century alchemist.
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I was thinking that the Sun is kind of the ultimate alchemist. (Laughter)
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So this, again, is on the subject --
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a slice from the equator of the Earth.
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And then the Moon in the center,
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and it's floating. And this is in France.
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This is in Sapporo.
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It's balancing on a shaft and a ball,
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right at the center of gravity, or just slightly above the center of gravity,
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which means that the lower half of the object
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is just a little bit more weighty.
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So you can see it rotating here.
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It weighs about a ton or over a ton.
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It's made of stainless steel, quite thick.
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But it's being balanced like that in equilibrium.
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It's susceptible to motion by the air currents.
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This is another species of work that I do.
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These are these arrays. These spheres are all suspended,
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but they have magnets horizontally in them
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that make them all like compasses.
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So all the red sides, for example, face one direction: south.
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And the blue side, the compliment, faces the other way.
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So as you turn around you're seeing different colors.
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This is based on the structure of a diamond.
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It was a diamond cell structure
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was the point of departure.
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And then there were kind of large spaces in the hollows
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between the atoms.
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And so I placed one more element of each one of them.
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These were white spheres.
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Then I had video projectors
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that were projecting intermittently onto the spheres.
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So they would catch parts of the images,
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and make sort of three-dimensional color volumes,
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as you walk through it, through the object.
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This is something I did
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of a tactile communication system.
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It was the idea of isolating the tactile component of sculpture,
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and then putting it into a communication system.
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This is an idea of moving a sculpture, a ball,
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that would be directed around the room
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by a computer.
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This is a clock I designed.
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It has Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map edited here.
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It turns once per day in synchrony with the Earth.
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And then, this is like
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projects that are harder to build.
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(Laughter)
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This has a diamond-bottomed lake.
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So it's a floating island
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with water, fresh water,
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that can fly from place to place.
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This would be grown, I suppose,
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with nanotechnology in the future sometime.
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In the course of doing my work
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I sort of have a broad range of interests.
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And some of it is just the idea of creating media --
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media as a sculpture,
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something that would keep the sculpture
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fresh and ever-changing,
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by just creating the media that the sculpture is made of.
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And I had a lot of --
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always interested in the concept of a crystal ball.
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And the idea that you could see things
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inside of a crystal ball and predict the future --
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or a television set, where it's sort of like a magic box
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where anything can appear.
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I had thought about, a long time ago,
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in the late '60s -- when I was just starting out,
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I was under the influence of thinking about Buckminster Fuller's
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grand project for an electric globe
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across from the United Nations --
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and other things that were happening,
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the space program at that time,
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and Whole Earth Catalog, things like that.
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I was thinking about mass produced spherical television sets
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that could be linked to orbiting camera satellites.
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So if we could roll the next film here.
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This has evolved over the years
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in a lot of different iterations.
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But this the current version of it,
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is a flying airship
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that is about 35 meters in diameter,
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about 110 feet in diameter.
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The whole surface of it is covered with 60 million diodes,
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red, blue, and green,
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that allow you to have a high-resolution picture, visible in daylight.
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I came with a plan.
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I brought it to Paul MacCready's company AeroVironment
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to do a feasibility study,
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and they analyzed it,
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and came up with a lot of innovative ideas about how to propel it.
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So we have a physical plan of how to make this actually happen.
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This is the control room inside of the ship.
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The idea of this air genie is,
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it's something that can just transform and become anything.
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It's like a traveling show.
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It has speakers on it. And it has cameras
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over the surface of it.
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So it can see its environment,
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and then it can mimic its environment and disappear.
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Here the legs are retracting.
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The cabin is open or closed, as you like.
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It weighs about 20 tons.
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It has on-board generators.
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It can generate about a million kilowatts,
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in order to be bright enough
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to be visible in daylight.
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The idea of it is to make a kind of a traveling show.
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It really would be dedicated to the arts and to interacting.
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There would be on board a crew of artists, musicians,
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that would allow the thing to become
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actually kind of a conscious object
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that would respond to the moment,
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and to interact as an entity
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that was aware, that could communicate.
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It's completely silent and nonpolluting.
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It has electric motors with a novel propulsion system.
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It could be interacted with large crowds in different ways.
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Primarily I would be interested in
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how it would interact with, say,
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going to a college campus,
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and then being used as a way of talking about the earth sciences,
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the world, the situation of the globe.
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The default image on the object
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would probably be a high-resolution Earth image.
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But then one could interact with that
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and show plate tectonics or global warming issues, or migrations --
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all of the things that we're concerned with today.
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And then at night the idea is that
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it would be used as kind of a rave situation,
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where the people could cut loose,
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and the music and the lights, and everything.
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So it could land in a park, for example.
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Or this could represent a college green.
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And then it would have a corresponding website
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that would show the itinerary of this.
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And so interacting with the same kind of imagery.
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It would also be able to be an open code,
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so people could interact with it.
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It would be forum for people's ideas about
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what they would like to see on a giant screen of this type.
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So that's pretty much it.
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Okay. Thank you.
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(Applause)
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