The Maker Faire has always been one of those things that have sounded cool and we've meant to go to, but hadn't got around to. This last weekend we went up and a had a very tiring, but interesting day out. We were a little hampered by the fact that we came in through the back (Caltrain) door, and didn't get a map. It turns out we missed two whole buildings, and didn't find the good food zone until after we had eaten some fairly lame sandwiches. Still, a good time was had by all.
The best part is talking with the individuals playing around with random hacks in their garage: "how does it work?" and "what is this?" always led to interesting conversations. There's really nothing so fun as listening to someone who is excited by what they are doing explaining it to you. Since we came in the back door, the first zone we entered was the musical hack zone, which immediately sold the boy child, who engaged in some in-depth discussions of types of pickups and digital effects on electric guitars. Our favourite here was the guy with the Wii controller in his head of his guitar and the flat-panel display in the body, wired up so that particular chords have particular imagery, flinging the guitar head down gave a wah-wah effect with a coordinated visual effect. Hitting a button gave a distorted sound, and a distorted image to match. Credit where credit is due: Ben Lewry, and he'll make one for you too, apparently.
Most interesting reward for lowest expectations: A small tent, looking for all the world like a something you'd expect to find a Tarot reader in, tucked away among the 3-D cameras and glasses. Even the label wasn't particularly enticing: "holomagistics" or something of that sort. Inside the small, darkened tent was a small oscilloscope screen showing simple looped figures. Nothing too exciting, except the figures figures are 3-D. No fancy glasses. No need to stand in exactly the right spot. Amazing. If I understood correctly, this is done by reprogramming the scanning so that vertical scan lines alternate between different (computed) perspective views, and your brain performs the object fusion to give the sense of depth. Someone, somewhere, get this guy to think beyond "coordinated music and image displays" and invest.
The kinetic sculptures were engaging and beautiful (I love the displays in science museums of old brass-and-crystal machines, my favourite by far is the Fourier analysis machine in the London science museum, all gleaming spheres and dials), but my favourite art was Bulatov's metal sculptures. Cuteness points to the people with the candy-fab machine, slowly churning our sintered sugar creations."Please don't eat the sculptures!" is not a sign you get to read every day.
We did appreciate the Exploratorium's little puzzles too, though. My favourite: hollow aluminum tube, about 4 or 5 feet long, and a magnet. Drop the magnet through the tube, and it takes a suspiciously long time to fall through. This is the Exploratorium, mind, so we set aside our initial suspicions of some kind of slight-of-hand.
Somewhere late in the afternoon, we decided that we were well and truly tired out, so we sought out the Tesla coils, had a nice chat with the fellows there about their plans to build 12-story tall Tesla coils in the Nevada desert, and watched the lightning show. Even the 12 foot scaled down versions, running well below capacity, were impressive enough, and a good way to sign off the day.
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