make me earn it um it's wonderful to be here um what indira didn't
tell you is that this lecture series used to be called the last lecture if you had one last
lecture to give before you died what would it be i thought damn i finally nailed
the venue and they remained so you know in case there's anybody who wandered
in and doesn't know the backstory my dad always taught me when there's an elephant in the room
introduce them uh if you look at my cat scans there are approximately 10 tumors in my liver
and the doctors told me three to six months of good health left that was a month ago so you
can do the math um i have some of the best doctors in the world so that is what it is we
can't change it and we just have to decide how we're going to respond to that we cannot
change the cards we are dealt just how we play the hand if i don't seem as depressed or
morose as i should be sorry to disappoint you and i assure you i am not in denial it's not
like i'm not aware of what's going on my family my three kids my wife we just decamped we
bought a lovely house in chesapeake virginia near norfolk and we're doing that because
that's a better place for the family to be down the road and the other thing is
i am in phenomenally good health right now i mean is the greatest thing of
cognitive dissonance you will ever see is the fact that i am in really good shape
in fact i'm in better shape than most of you so anybody who wants to cry
or hitter me can come down and do a few of those and then you may pity me all right so what we're not talking
about today we're not talking about cancer because i spent a lot of time
talking about that i'm really not interested if you have any herbal supplements
or remedies please stay away from me and we're not going to talk about things that are
even more important than achieving your childhood dreams we're not going to talk about my wife or
not through my kids because i'm good but i'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing
up so we're just going to take that off the table that's much more important and we're not
going to talk about spirituality and religion although i will tell you that i have experienced
a deathbed conversion i just bought a macintosh now i knew i'd get nine percent
of the audience with that but all right so what is today's talk about
then it's about my childhood dreams and how i've achieved them i've
been very fortunate that way how i believe i've been able to enable the dreams
i've been able to enable the dreams of others and to some degree lessons learned i'm a professor
there should be some lessons learned and how you can use the stuff you hear today to achieve
your dreams or enable the dreams of others and as you get older you may find that enabling
the dreams of others thing is even more fun so what were my childhood dreams well you
know i had a really good childhood i mean no kidding around uh i was going back through the
family archives and what was really amazing was i couldn't find any pictures of
me as a kid where i wasn't smiling right and that was just a very gratifying thing um
uh you know there was our dog right oh thank you and and there i actually
have a picture of me dreaming and i did a lot of that you know
there's a lot of wake-ups you know and uh it was an easy time to dream i was born
in 1960 right when you're eight or nine years old and you look at the tv set and men are
landing on the moon anything is possible and that's something we should not lose sight of is
that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge so what were my childhood dreams you
may not agree with this list but i was there being in zero gravity playing
in the national football league uh authoring an article in the world book
encyclopedia i guess you can tell the nerds early um uh being captain kirk anybody here
have that childhood dream not at cmu no um i wanted to become one of the guys who won the
big stuffed animals in the amusement park and i wanted to be an imagineer with disney right these
are not sorted in any particular order although i think they do get harder except for maybe
the first one okay so being in zero gravity now it's important to have specific dreams i did
not dream of being an astronaut because when i was a little kid i wore glasses and they told me
oh astronauts can't have glasses and i was like i didn't really want the whole astronaut gig i
just wanted the floating so uh and as a child prototype 0.0 but that didn't work so
well and it turns out that nasa has something called the vomit comet that they
use to train the astronauts and this thing does parabolic arcs and at the top of each
arc you get about 25 seconds where you're ballistic and you get about you know a rough
equivalent of weightlessness for about 25 seconds and there is a program where college students can
submit proposals and if they win the competition they get to fly and i thought that was really cool
and we had a team and we put a team together and they won and they got to fly and i was all
excited because i was going to go with them and then i fit the first brick wall
because they made it very clear that under no circumstances were faculty
members allowed to fly with the teams i know i was heartbroken right
i was like but i worked so hard and so i read the literature very
carefully and it turns out that nasa it's part of their outreach and publicity
program and it turns out that these students were allowed to bring a local media
journalist from their hometown and uh randy polish web journalist uh it's really easy
to get a press pass so uh so i called up the guys at nasa and i said um i need to know where to fax
some documents and they said what documents are you gonna fax i said my resignation is the faculty
advisor and my application is the journalist and he said that's a little
transparent don't you think and i said yeah but our project is virtual
reality and we're going to bring down a whole bunch of vr headsets and all the
students from all the teams are going to experience it and all those other real
journalists are going to get to film it jim foley's going hi you bastard yes and the
guy said here's the fax number so and indeed we kept our end of the bargain uh and that's one
of the themes that you'll hear later on the talk is have something to bring to the table right
because that will make you more welcomed uh and if you're curious about what zero gravity looks
like hopefully the sound will be working here all right go get him this is fantastic it's just amazing it's nothing
like unexpected we are having a great here i am you you do pay the piper at the bottom so childhood dream number one check all right let's talk about football my dream
was to play in the national football league and most of you don't know that i actually no no i did not make it to the national football
league but i probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than i got
from any of the ones that i did accomplish i i had a coach i signed up when i was nine
years old i was the smallest kid in the league by far and i had a coach jim graham who was six
foot four he had played linebacker at penn state he was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school okay i mean really old school like
he thought the forward pass was a trick play and he showed up for practice
the first day and you know this big hulking guy we were all scared to
death of him and he hadn't brought any footballs how how are we going to have practice without
any footballs and one of the other kids said excuse me coach but there's no football
and coach graham said right how many men are on a football field at a time somebody
said 11 on a team 22 and coach graham said all right and how many people are
touching the football at any given time well one of them and he said right so we're going
to work on what those other 21 guys are doing and that's a really good story because it's all
about fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals you've got to get the fundamentals
down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn't going to work and the other jim graham story i have
is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice just you're doing this wrong you're
doing this wrong go back and do it again you owe me you're doing push-ups after practice and when
it was all over one of the other assistant coaches came over and said yeah coach graham wrote you
pretty hard didn't he i said yeah he said that's a good thing he said when you're screwing up
and nobody's saying anything to you anymore that means they gave up and that's a lesson that
stuck with me my whole life is that when you see when you see yourself doing something badly
and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore that's a very bad place to be your critics are
your ones telling you they still love you and care after coach grandma another coach coach setliff
and he taught me a lot about the power of enthusiasm he did this one thing where only for
one play at a time he would put people in at like the most horrifically wrong position for them
like all the short guys would become receivers right it was just it was just laughable
but we only went in for one play all right and boy the other team just never
knew what hit him because when when you're only doing it for one play and you're just not
where you're supposed to be and freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose boy are you
going to clean somebody's clock for that one plan and that kind of enthusiasm was great and to this
day i am most comfortable on a football field i mean it's it's just one of those things
where you know if i'm working a hard problem people will see me wandering the halls with
one of these things and that's just because you know when you do something young enough and
you train for it it just becomes a part of you and i'm very glad that football was a part
of my life and if i didn't get the dream of playing in the nfl that's okay i probably
got stuff more valuable because looking at what's going on in the nfl i'm not sure
those guys are doing so great right now okay and so one of the expressions i
learned in electronic arts which i love which pertains to this is experience is what
you get when you didn't get what you wanted and i think that's absolutely lovely and the
other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming
or whatever it is and it's the first example of what i'm going to call a head fake or indirect
learning we actually don't want our kids to learn football i mean yeah it's really nice that i have
a wonderful three-point stance and that i know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff but
we send our kids out to learn much more important things teamwork sportsmanship perseverance etc
etc and these kinds of head fake learnings are absolutely important and you should keep your
eye out for them because they're everywhere all right a simple one being an author in
the world book encyclopedia when i was a kid we had the world book encyclopedia on
the shelf for the freshmen this is paper we used to have these things called books and after i had become somewhat of an authority
on virtual reality but not like a really important one so i was at the level of people the world
book would badger uh they called me up and i wrote an article and this is caitlyn kelleher
and there's an article if you go to your local library where they still have copies of
the world book look under v for virtual reality and there it is and all i have to say
is that um having been selected to be an author in the world book encyclopedia i now believe
that wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information because i know what the quality
control is for real encyclopedias they let me in all right next one at a certain point you just realize
there's some things you're not going to do so maybe you just want to
stand close to the people and uh i mean my god what what a role model for young
people i mean just this is everything you want to be and what i what i learned that carried me
forward in leadership later is that you know he wasn't the smartest guy on the ship i mean spock
was pretty smart and mccoy was the doctor and scotty was the engineer and you sort of go and
what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it and you know clearly there's
this skill set called leadership and you know whether or not you like the series there's
no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people by watching this guy in
action so and he just had the coolest damn toys right i mean my god he uh you know i just thought
it was fascinating as a kid that he had this thing and he could you know talk to the
ship with it right you know i just thought that was just spectacular and
of course now i own one and it's smaller so that's kind of cool so i got to achieve
this dream uh james t kirk his alter egre um uh william shatner wrote a book which i think
was actually a pretty cool book uh it was with a chip walter who is a pittsburgh-based author who's
quite good and they wrote a book on basically the science of star trek you know what has come true
and they went around to top places around the country and looked at various things and they
came here to study our virtual reality setup and so we built a virtual reality
for him it looked something like that we put it in put it to red alert he was a very
good sport it's not like he saw that one coming and it's really cool to meet your boyhood idol but it's even cooler when he comes to you to
see what cool stuff you're doing in your lab that was that was just a great moment
all right winning stuffed animals uh this may seem mundane to you but when
you're a little kid you see the big buff guys walking around in amusement park
and they got all these big stuffed animals right and this is my lovely wife and uh i have
a lot of pictures of stuffed animals i've won that's my dad posing with one that i won uh i've won a lot of these in there's my
dad he did win that one to his credit um right and this was just a big part of my
life and my family's life but you know i can hear the cynics you know in this
age of digitally manipulated things maybe those bears really
aren't in the picture with me or maybe i paid somebody five bucks to take a
picture in the theme park next to the bear and i said how in this age of cynicism can i convince
people and i said i know i can show them the bears thanks honey uh so uh here are some here's some bears uh
we didn't have quite enough room in the moving truck down to chesapeake and uh you know anybody
who'd like a little piece of me at the end of this uh feel free to come up first come first serve
all right my next one being an imagineer this was the hard one believe me getting to zero
gravity is easier than becoming an imagineer when i was a kid i was eight years old
and our family took a trip cross country to see disneyland and if you've ever seen the
movie national lampoon's vacation it was a lot like that there's a quest and these are real
vintage photographs uh and there i am in front of the castle and there i am and for those of you
who are into foreshadowing this is the alice ride and and i just thought this was just the coolest
coolest environment i'd ever been in and instead of saying gee i want to experience this
i said i want to make stuff like this and so i i bided my time and then i graduated
with my phd from carnegie mellon thinking that meant me infinitely qualified to do anything and
i dashed off my letters of application to walt disney imagineering and they sent me some of the
damn nicest go to hell letters i've ever gotten i mean it was just uh we have carefully
reviewed your application and presently we do not have any positions available which
require your particular qualifications now think about the fact that you're getting this
from a place that's famous for guys who sweep the street right so that was a bit of a setback but
remember the brick walls are there for a reason all right the brick walls are not there
to keep us out the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want
something because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly
enough they're there to stop the other people all right fast forward to 1991. we did a system
back at the university of virginia called virtual reality on five dollars a day uh just one of
those unbelievable spectacular things i was so scared back in those days as a junior academic
jim foley's here and i just love to tell the story he knew my undergraduate advisor andy van dam and
i'm at my first conference and i'm just scared to death and this this icon in the user interface
community walks up to me and just out of nowhere just gives me this huge bear hug and he says
that was from andy and that was when i thought okay maybe i can make it all right you know maybe
maybe i do belong uh and a similar story is that this was just this unbelievable hit because
at the time everybody needed a half a million dollars to do virtual reality and everybody felt
frustrated and we literally hacked together a system for about five thousand dollars in parts
and made a working vr system and people were just like oh my god it's like you know the hewlett
packard garage thing this is so awesome and so i'm giving this talk and the room has just
gone wild and during the q a a guy named tom fernes who was one of the big names in virtual
reality at the time he goes to the microphone and he introduces himself i didn't know what
he looked like but i sure as hell knew the name and he asked a question and i was like i'm sorry
did you say you're tom ferness he said yes i said then i would love to answer your question
but first will you have lunch with me tomorrow and there's a lot in that little
moment right there's a lot of humility but also asking a person
where he can't possibly say no uh and so imagineering a couple of years later
was working on a virtual reality project this was top secret they were denying the existence
of a virtual reality attraction after the time that the publicity department was running the
tv commercials okay so imagineering really had nailed this one tight and it was the aladdin
attraction where you would fly a magic carpet and the head-mounted display sometimes known as
gator vision and so i had an in as soon as the the project had just you know they
started running the tv commercials and i had been asked to brief the secretary of
defense on the state of virtual reality okay fred brooks and i uh had been asked to brief the
secretary of defense and uh that gave me an excuse so i i called them up i called him imaginary
and i said look i'm briefing the secretary of defense i'd like some materials on what you have
because it's one of the best vr systems in the world and they kind of pushed back and i said look
is all this patriotism stuff in the parks of farce and they're like hmm okay they said but the
pr department doesn't this is so new the pr department doesn't have any footage for you so i'm
gonna have to connect you straight through to the team who did the work jackpot so i find myself
on the phone with a guy named john snotty who is one of the most impressive guys i have ever met
and he was a guy running this team and it's not surprising they had done impressive things and
so he sent me some stuff we talked briefly sent me some stuff and i said hey i'm going to be out
in the area for a conference shortly we'd like to get together to have lunch translation i'm going
to lie to you and say that i have an excuse to be in the area so i don't look too anxious but
i would go to neptune to have lunch with you uh and so john said sure and uh i spent something
like 80 hours talking with all the vr experts in the world saying if you had access to this
one unbelievable project what would you ask and then i compiled all of that and i had
to memorize it which anybody knows me and knows that i have no memory at all because i
couldn't go in looking like a dweeb with you know question 72 right so i went in and this
was like a two-hour lunch and john must have thought he was talking to you know
some phenomenal person because all i was do was doing was channeling fred brooks and ivan
sutherland and andy van damme and people like that and henry fuchs so it's pretty easy to be
smart when you're parroting smart people and at the end of the lunch with john i sort
of as we say in the business made the ask and i said you know i have a sabbatical
coming up and he said what's that the beginnings of the culture clash uh and so
i talked about the possibility of coming there and working with him and uh he uh he said well
that's really good except you know you're in the business of telling people stuff and we're in
the business of keeping secrets right and then what made john snotty john snotty was he said
but we'll work it out right which i really love the other thing that i learned from john snyder
i do easily an hour-long talk just on what have i learned from john snotty one of the things
he told me was that wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you he said when you're
pissed off at somebody and you're angry at them you just haven't given them enough time just
give them a little more time and they'll almost always impress you and that really stuck with
me i think he's absolutely right on that one so to make a long story short we negotiated
a legal contract it was going to be the first some people referred to it as the first and last
paper ever published by imagineering but the deal was i go i provide my own funding i go for six
months i work with a project we publish a paper and then we meet our villain i can't be all sweetness in light because i
have no credibility somebody's head's going to go on a stick turns out that the person
who gets his head on the stick is a dean back at the university of virginia his name
is not important let's call him dean wermer and dean wermer has a meeting with me where i
say i want to do the sabbatical thing and i've actually gotten the imagineering guys to let
an academic in which is insane i mean if john hadn't gone nuts this would never have been
a possible is a very secretive organization and dean wermer looks at the paperwork and
he says well it says they're going to own your intellectual property and i said yeah
we got the agreement to publish the paper there is no other ip i don't do patentable
stuff he says yeah but you might so deals off and just gonna get get him to change that
little clause there and then come back to me i'm like excuse me and then i said to him i want
you to understand how important this is if we can't work this out i'm going to take an unpaid
leave of absence and i'm just going to go there and i'm going to do this thing and he said hey you know i might not even let you do
that i mean you've got the ip in your head already and maybe they're going to suck it
out of you so that's not going to fly either it's very important to know when you're in
a pissing match and it's very important to get out of it as quickly as possible so i said
to him well let's back off on this do we think this is a good idea at all he said i have no idea
if this is a good idea i you know i was like okay well we've got common ground there uh then i said
well is this really your call isn't this the call of the dean of sponsored research if it's an ip
issue and he said yeah that's true i said so if he's happy you're happy yeah then i'd be fine
like wali coyote a little and i find myself in gene block's office who's the most fantastic man
in the world and i start talking to gene block and i say let's start at the high level since i don't
want to have to back out again so let's start at the high level do you think this is a good idea he
said well if you're asking me if it's a good idea i don't have very much information all i know is
that one of my star faculty members in my office and he's really excited so tell me more here's
a lesson for everybody in administration they both said the same thing but think about how they
said it right i don't know well i don't have much information but one of my star faculty members is
here and he's all excited so i want to learn more they're both ways of saying i don't know but
boy there's a good way in a bad way so anyway um we got it all worked out i went to imagineering
sweetness and light and all's well that ends well some brick walls are made of flesh so i worked on the aladdin project
it was absolutely spectacular i mean just unbelievable uh here's my nephew
christopher this was the apparatus you would sit on this sort of motorcycle type thing and you
would steer your magic carpet and you would put on the head mounted display the head mount
display was very interesting it had two parts and it was a very very clever design to get
throughput through the only part that touched the guest's head was this little cap and everything
else clicked onto it all the expensive hardware so you could replicate the caps because
they were basically free to manufacture and this is what i really did as i
was a cap cleaner during this event i loved imagineering it was just a spectacular
place just spectacular everything that i had dreamed i love the model shop people crawling
around on things the size of this room that are just big physical models it was just an
incredible place to walk around and be inspired i'm always reminded when i went there and people
said you think the expectations are too high i said you ever see the movie charlie in the
chocolate factory willy wonka the chocolate factory where gene wilder says to the little boy
charlie he's about to give him the chocolate fact and he says well charlie did anybody ever tell
you the story of the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted charlie's
eyes get like saucers and he says no what happened to him gene wilder
says he lived happily ever after okay so working on the aladdin vr i described it
as a once in every five years opportunity and i stand by that assessment it forever changed me
it wasn't just that it was good work and i got to be a part of it but it got me into the
place of working with real people and real hci user interface issues most hci people live
in this fantasy world of white-collar laborers with phds and master's degrees and you know until
you got ice cream spilled on you you're not doing field work right and more more than anything
else from john snotty i learned how to put artists and engineers together and that's
been the real legacy we published a paper just a nice academic cultural scandal when we
wrote the paper the guys at imagineering said well let's do a nice big picture like like
you would in a magazine and the sigograph committee which accepted the paper was like
this big scandal are they allowed to do that there was no rule so we published the paper
and amazingly since then there's a tradition of sigograph papers having color figures on the first
page so i've i've changed the world in a small way and then at the end of my six
months they came to me and they said you want to do it for real you can stay and i said no uh one of the only times in my
life i have surprised my father he was like you what he said since you were you know all you
wanted and now they got it and they're like huh there was a bottle of may locks in my desk drawer
be careful what you wish for it was a particularly stressful place imagineering in general is
actually not so malox laden but the lab i was in oh john left in the middle and it was a lot like
the soviet union it was a little dicey for a while uh but it worked out okay and if they had said
stay here or never walk in the building again i would have done it i would have walked
away from tenure i would have just done it but they made it easy on me they said you can
have your cake and eat it too and i basically become a day a week day a week consultant for
imagineering and i did that for about 10 years and that's one of the reasons
you should all become professors because you can have your cake and eat it too okay
uh i went on consulted on things like disney quest so there was the virtual jungle cruise and
the best interactive experience i think ever done and jessie shell gets the credit for this uh
pirates of the caribbean wonderful at disney quest um and so those are my childhood dreams and you
know that's pretty good i felt good about that so then the question becomes how can i
enable the childhood dreams of others and again boy am i glad i became a professor
what better place to enable childhood dreams i may be working at ea i don't know
that probably a good close second but and this started in a very concrete
realization that i could do this because a young man named tommy burnett when i
was at the university of virginia came to me was interested in joining my research group
and we talked about it he said oh and i have a childhood dream well it gets pretty
easy to recognize them when they tell you and i said yes tommy what is your childhood dream
he said i want to work on the next star wars film now you got to remember the timing on
this where is tommy tommy is here today what year would this have been your sophomore year are you are you breaking anything back
there young man okay all right so in 1993 and i said to tommy you know they're
probably not going to make those next movies and he said no they are and tommy worked with me for a number of years
as an undergraduate and as a staff member and then when i moved to carnegie
mellon every single member of my team came from virginia to carnegie
mellon except for tommy because he got a better offer and he did
indeed work on all three of those films and then i said well that's nice but you
know one at a time is kind of inefficient people who know me know that i'm an
efficiency freak so i said can i do this in mass can i get people turned in such a way that
they can be turned on to their childhood dreams and i created a course i came to carnegie mellon
and i created a course called building virtual worlds it's a very simple course how many
people have ever been to any of the shows okay so you have some of you have an idea for
those of you who don't the course is very simple there are 50 students drawn from all the different
departments of the university there are randomly chosen tree randomly chosen teams four people per
team and they change every project a project only lasts two weeks so you do something you make
something you show something then i shuffle the teams you get three new playmates and you do
it again and it's every two weeks and so you do five projects during the semester the first year
we taught this course it is impossible to describe how much of a tiger by the tail we had i was
just running the course because i wanted to see if we could do it we had just learned how
to do texture mapping on 3d graphics and we could make stuff that looked half decent but you
know we were running on really weak computers by current standards but i said i'll give it a try
and at my new university i made a couple of phone calls and i said i want to cross list this course
to get all these other people and within 24 hours it was cross-listed in five departments i love
this university i mean it's just it's the most amazing place and i said and the kids said well
what content do we make i said hell i don't know you make whatever you want uh two rules
no shooting violence and no pornography not because i'm opposed to those in particular
but you know that's been done with vr right and you'd be amazed how many 19 year old boys are
completely out of ideas when you take those off anyway so i i taught the course the first
assignment i gave it to them they came back in two weeks and they just blew me away i mean the work
was so beyond literally my imagination because i copied the process from imagineering's vr lab but
i had no idea what they could or couldn't do with it as undergraduates and how because their and
their tools were weaker and they came back in the first assignment and they did something that
was so spectacular that i literally did 10 years as a professor and i had no idea what to do next
so i called up my mentor i called up andy van dam and i said andy i just gave a two-week
assignment and they came back and did stuff that if i'd given them a whole semester i
would have given them all a's sensei what do i do and andy thought for a minute he said
go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say guys that was
pretty good but i know you can do better and that was exactly the right advice because
what he said was you obviously don't know where the bar should be and you're only going to
do them a disservice by putting it anywhere and boy was that good advice because they
just kept going and during that semester it became this underground thing i'd walk into
a class with 50 with 50 students in it and there were 95 people in the room because
it was the day we were showing work and people's roommates and friends and parents
i've never had parents come to class before it was flattering and somewhat scary and so it
snowballed and we had this bizarre thing of we got to share this if there's anything i've been raised
to do it's to share and i said we got to show this city in the semester we got to have a big show
and we booked this room economy i have a lot of good memories in this room and we booked it not
because we thought we could fill it but because it had the only av set up that would work because
this was a zoo right computers and everything and then we filled it and we more than
filled it we had people standing in the aisle i will never forget the dean at the time jim
morris was sitting on the stage right about there we had to kind of scoot him out of the
way and the energy in the room was like nothing i had ever experienced before and and
president cohen jerry cohen uh was there and he he sensed the same thing he later described
it as like an ohio state football pep rally except for academics and and he came over and he
asked exactly the right question he said before you start he said i got to know where are these
people from he said the audience what departments are they from and we polled them and it was all
the departments and i felt very good because i had just come to campus he had just come to campus
and my new boss had seen in a very corporal way that this is the university that puts everybody
together and and that made me feel just tremendous so we did this campus-wide exhibition people
perform down here they're in costume and we project just like this and you can see what's
going on uh you can see what they're seeing in the head mount there's a lot of big props so there's
a guy white water rafting uh this is a then an e.t um and yes i did tell them if they didn't
do the shot of the kids biking across the moon i would fail him that is a true
story uh and i thought i'd show you just uh so i thought i'd show you just one world and if
we get the lights down if that's at all possible um no okay that means no all right
all right we'll just do our best then oh hello there i'm lonely make me a world gave me some trees oh now they're going to turn
this on its head watch closely the world doesn't want to go on to the next thing
in the show so she's ready to move on and it's not but there are so many other worlds that
have to go but our world is the best world control delete oh ah we love you it was an unusual course with some of the most brilliant creative students
from all across the campus it just was a joy to be involved with and they took the whole stage
performance aspect of this way too seriously and it became this campus phenomenon every year
people would line up for it it was very flattering and it gave kids a chance of a sense of excitement
of putting on a show for people who were then excited about it i think that that's one of the
best things you can give somebody the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people
get excited and happy i mean that's a tremendous gift we always try to involve the audience whether
it was people with glow sticks or batting a beach ball around or driving this is really cool this
technology actually got used at the spider-man 3 premiere in la so the audience was controlling
something on the screen so that's kind of nice and i don't have a class fixture from every year but i dredged all the ones that i
do have and all i can say is that what a privilege and an honor it was to teach
that course for something like 10 years and all good things come to an end and i stopped
teaching that course about a year ago people always ask me what was my favorite moment
i don't know if you could have a favorite moment but boy there's one i'll never forget this was
a world with i believe a roller skating ninja and one of the rules was that we performed these
things live and they all had to really work and the moment it stopped working we
went to your backup videotape and this was very embarrassing so we have this ninja
on stage he's doing this roller skating thing and the world it did not crash gently and i come
out and i believe it was steve audio wasn't it was it where is he okay steve ah my man
steve audio and talk about quick on your feet right i say steve i'm sorry but your
world has crashed and we're going to go to videotape and he pulls out his ninja
sword and says i am dishonored it just drops and so i think it's very telling that my favorite
moment in 10 years of this high technology course was a brilliant ad-lib and then when
the videotape is done and the lights come up he's lying there lifeless and
his teammates drag him off it was really a fantastic moment um and the course
was all about bonding people used to say well you know what's going to make for a good world i said
i can't tell you beforehand but right before they present it i can tell you if the world's good
just by the body language if they're standing close to each other the world is good all
right and bbw was a pioneering course and uh i i won't bore you with all the details but it wasn't easy to do uh and i was given this uh
when i stepped down from the utc and i think it's it's emblematic if you're gonna do anything that's
pioneering you will get those arrows in the back and you just have to put up with it i mean
everything that could go wrong did go wrong but at the end of the day a whole
lot of people had a whole lot of fun when you've had something for 10 years that you
hold so precious it's the toughest thing in the world to hand it over and the only advice i
can give you is find somebody better than you to hand it to and that's what i did there was
this uh kid at the vr studio way back when and you didn't have to spend very long in jessie shell's
orbit to go the force is strong in this one and one of my greatest my two greatest
accomplishments i think for carnegie mellon were that i got jessica hodgins and jesse
schell to come here and join our faculty and i was thrilled when i could hand this over to
jesse and to no one's surprise he has really taken it up to the next notch and uh you know the course
is in more than good hands it's in better hands but it was just one course and then we really
took it up a notch and we uh we created what i would call the dream fulfillment factory uh
don marinelli and i got together and with the university's blessing and encouragement we made
this thing out of whole cloth that was absolutely insane should never have been tried all the sane
universities didn't go near this kind of stuff creating a tremendous opportunistic void
so the entertainment technology center was all about artists and technologists
working in small teams to make things it was a two-year professional master's degree
and don and i were two kindred spirits we're very different anybody who knows us
knows that we're very different people and we like to do things in a new way and
the truth of the matter is that we're both a little uncomfortable in academia i
used to say that i'm uncomfortable as an academic because i come from a long line of
people who actually worked for a living so uh i detect nervous laughter all right uh
and i want to stress carnegie mellon is the only place in the world that the etc
could have happened by far the only place so okay this picture was don's idea okay uh and we'd like to refer to this picture as don
marinelli on guitar and randy pouch on keyboards but we really did play up the left brain right
brain and it worked out really well that way don is an intense guy and don and i shared an office and at first it
was a small office we shared an office for six years right now those of you who know don know
he's an intense guy right and you know given my current condition somebody was asking me uh this
is a terrible joke but i'm gonna use it anyway uh because i know don will forgive
me uh somebody said given your current condition have you thought about
whether you're gonna go to heaven or hell and i said i don't know but if i'm going to
hell i'm do six years for time served but i can sharing an office with don was really
like sharing an office with a tornado right there was just so much energy and
you never knew which trailer was next right but you knew something
exciting was going to happen and and there was so much energy and i do believe
in giving credit where credit is due so in my typically visual way right if don and
i were to split the success for the etc he clearly gets the lion's share of it he did the
lion's share of the work okay he had the lion's share of the ideas it was a great teamwork i think
it was a great ying and yang but it was more like and he deserves that credit and i give it
to him because the utc is a wonderful place and uh you know he's now running it and he's
taking it global we'll talk about that in a second describing the etc is really hard
and i finally found a metaphor telling people about the etc is it like describing
cirque du soleil if they've never seen it sooner or later you're going to make the mistake
you're going to say well it's like a circus and then you're dragged into this conversation
about oh how many tigers how many lions right how many trapeze acts and that misses
the whole point so when we say we're a master's degree we're really not like any master's
degree you've ever seen here's the curriculum the curriculum ended up looking like this all
i want to do is visually communicate to you that you do five projects and building
virtual worlds then you do three more all of your time is spent in small teams making
stuff none of that book learning thing don and i have no patience for the book learning
thing it's a master's degree they already spent four years doing book learning right
by now they should have read all the books the key to the success were
that carnegie mellon gave us the reigns completely gave us the reins we had
no deans to report to reported directly to the provost which is great because the provost
is way too busy to watch you carefully uh we were given explicit license to break the
mold it was all project-based it was intense it was fun and we took field trips every
spring spring semester in january we take all 50 students in the first year class and we
take them out the shots at pixar we take them to pixar industrial light magic and of course when
you've got guys like tommy there acting as host right it's pretty easy to get entree to these
places so we did things very very differently the kind of project students would do we
did a lot of what we'd call edutainment we developed a bunch of things with the fire
department of new york a network simulator for training firefighters using video gamish type
technology to teach people useful things that's not bad companies did this strange thing they
put in writing we promised to hire your students uh i've got the ea and activision ones here i
think there are now how many five is said that drew knows i bet so there are five written
agreements i don't know of any other school that has this kind of written agreement with any
company and so that's a real statement and these are multiple year things so they're agreeing to
hire people for summer internships that we have not admitted yet that's a pretty strong statement
about the quality of the program uh and don as i said he's now he's he's crazy and i mean in a
wonderful complementary way he's doing these things where i'm like oh my god you know he's
he's not here tonight because he's in singapore because there's going to be an etc campus in
singapore there's already one in australia there's going to be one in korea so this is becoming a
global phenomenon so i think this really speaks volumes about all the other universities it's
really true that carnegie mellon is the only university can do this we just have to do it all
over the world now okay one of the big success about the etc is teaching people about focus
i hear the nervous laughter from the students i had forgotten the delayed shock
therapy effect of these bar charts um when you're taking building virtual worlds
every two weeks we get peer feedback we put that all into a big spreadsheet and at the end of
the semester you had three teammates per project five projects that's 15 data points that's
statistically valid and you get a bar chart telling you uh on a ranking of how easy you are
to work with where you stack up against your peers boy that's hard feedback to
ignore some still managed but but for the most part people looked at that
and went wow i i gotta i gotta pick it up a notch i better start thinking about what i'm
saying to people in these meetings and that is the best gift an educator can give is to
get somebody to become self-reflective so the etc was wonderful but even the etc and even
as don scales it around the globe it's still very labor intensive you know it's not tommy one at a
time it's not a research group 10 at a time it's 50 or 100 at a time per campus times four campuses
but i wanted something infinitely scalable right scalable to the point where millions or
tens of millions of people could chase their dreams with something and you know i guess that
kind of a goal really does make me the mad hatter so alice is a project that we've worked on for a
long long time it's a novel way to teach computer programming kids make movies and games the
head fake again we're back to the head fakes best way to teach somebody something is to
have them think they're learning something else i've done it my whole career and the head fake
here is that they're learning to program but they just think they're making movies and video
games this thing has already been downloaded well over a million times there are eight textbooks
i've written about it 10 of us colleges are using it now and it's not the good stuff yet
the good stuff is coming in the next version okay i like moses get to see the promised
land but i won't get to set foot in it and that's okay because i can see it and the
vision is clear millions of kids having fun while learning something hard that's pretty cool
i can deal with that as a legacy the next version is going to come out in 2008 it's going to be
teaching the java language if you want them to know they're learning java otherwise they'll
just think that they're writing movie scripts uh and we're getting the characters from the
the best-selling pc game in history the sims and this is all already working in the lab
so there's no real technological risk i don't have time to thank and mention everybody in the
alice team but i just want to say that dennis cosgrove is going to be building this has been
building this he is the designer it's his baby and for those of you who
are wondering well you know in some number of months who should i be
emailing about the alice project where's wandadan oh there you are stand up let them
all see you everybody say hi wanda send her the email and i'll talk a little bit more about caitlyn
kelleher but she's graduated with her phd and is at washington university and she's going
to be taking this up a notch and going to middle schools with it so grand vision and you know
to the extent that you can live on in something i will live on in alice all right so now
the third part of the talk lessons learned and we've talked about my dreams we've talked
about helping other people enable their dreams somewhere along the way there's got to be some
aspect of what lets you get to achieve your dreams first one is the role of parents mentors and
students i was blessed to have been born to two incredible people this is my mother on her 70th
birthday i am back here i have just been lapped this is my dad riding a roller coaster on
his 80th birthday um and he points out that you know he's not only brave he's talented
because he did win that big bear the same day my dad was so full of life anything with him was an adventure i don't
know what's in that bag but i know it's cool my dad dressed up as santa claus but he also did very very significant things to help lots
of people this is a dormitory in thailand that my mom and dad underwrote and every
year about 30 students get to go to school who wouldn't have otherwise i mean my wife
and i have also been involved in heavily and these are the kind of things that i think
everybody ought to be doing helping others but the best story i have about my dad is unfortunate
my dad passed away a little over a year ago and when we were going through his things he had
fought in world war ii in the battle of the bulge and when we were going through his things we found
out he had been awarded the bronze star for valor my mom didn't know it in 50 years of
marriage it had just never come up my mom mothers are people who love
you even when you pull their hair and i have two great mom stories when
i was here studying to get my phd and i was taking something called the theory qualifier which i can definitively say is the second
worst thing in my life after chemotherapy and i was complaining to my mother
about how hard this test was and how awful it was and she just leaned over
and she patted me on the arm and she said we know how you feel honey and remember when your
father was your age he was fighting the germans after i got my phd my mother
took great relish introducing me as this is my son he's a doctor
but not the kind who helps people these slides are a little bit dark but when i
was in high school i decided to paint my bedroom i'd always wanted a submarine and an
elevator and the great thing about this what can i say uh and the great
thing about this is they let me do it and they didn't get upset about it and it's
still there if you go to my parents house it's still there and anybody who is out there who is
a parent if your kids want to paint their bedroom is a favor to me let them do it okay it'll be
okay don't worry about resale value on the house other people who help us with our parents our
teachers our mentors our friends our colleagues um god what is there to say about andy van dam when i was a freshman at brown he was on leave
and all i heard about was this andy van dam he was like a mythical creature like a
centaur but like a really pissed off centaur and everybody was like really sad that
he was gone but kind of more relaxed and i found out why because i started
working for andy i was a teaching assistant for him as a sophomore and i was
quite an arrogant young man and i came in to some office hours and of course it was nine
o'clock at night and andy was there at office hours which is your first clue as to what
kind of professor he was and i come bounding in and you know i'm just i'm going to save the
world they're all these kids waiting for help and afterwards andy literally dutch
uncle he's dutch right he dijungled me and he put his arm around my shoulders we
went for a little walk and he said randy it's such a shame that people
perceive you as so arrogant because it's going to to limit what you're
going to be able to accomplish in life what a hell of a good way to word your being a
jerk man he doesn't say you're a jerk he says people are perceiving you this way and he says
the downside is it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish when i got to know
andy better the beatings became more direct but i could tell you andy stories for a month but
the one i will tell you is that when it came time to start thinking about what to do after
graduating from brown it had never occurred to me in a million years to go to graduate
school just out of my imagination wasn't the kind of thing people from my family did
who we got say what do you call them jobs so and andy said no don't go do that go get
a phd become a professor and i said why he said because you're such a good salesman
that any company who gets you is going to use you as a salesman and you might as well be
selling something worthwhile like education thanks andy was my first boss so to speak i was
lucky enough to have a lot of bosses that that red circle was way off al's over here um i
don't know what the hell happened there he he's probably watching this on the webcast going my
god he's targeting and he still can't aim right um uh i don't want to say much about the great
bosses i've had except that they were great and i i know a lot of people in the world
have had bad bosses and i haven't had to endure that experience and i'm very grateful to
all of the people that i ever had to report to they've just been incredible but it's not just
our bosses we learn from our students i think the best head fake of all time comes from caitlyn
keller excuse me doctor kaitlyn keller who just finished up here starting at washington university
and she looked at alice when it was an easier way to learn the program and she said yeah but why is
that fun i was like well because i'm a compulsive male like to make the little toy soldiers move
around by my command and that's fun she's was like and she was the one who said no we'll just
approach it all as a storytelling activity and she's done wonderful work showing
that particularly with middle school girls if you present it as a storytelling activity
they're perfectly willing to learn how to write computer software so all time best head fake
award goes to caitlyn keller his dissertation president cohen when i told him i was going to do
this talk he said please tell them about having fun because that's what i remember you for i said
i can do that but it's kind of like a fish talking about the importance of water i mean i don't know
how to not have fun right i'm dying and i'm having fun and i'm going to keep having fun every day i
have left because there's no other way to play it all right so my next piece of advice is you
just have to decide if you're a tigger or you're an eeyore i think i'm clear where
i stand on the great tigger your debate never lose the childlike wonder it's
just too important it's what drives us help others uh danny prophet knows
more about helping other people he's forgotten more than i'll ever know
he's taught me by example how to run a group how to care about people mk haley i have a theory
that people come from large families are better people because they just had to learn how to get
along mk haley comes from a family with 20 kids yeah um unbelievable and she she always says
it's kind of fun to do the impossible when i first got to imagineering she was
one of the people who dressed me down and uh and she said i understand you've
joined the aladdin project what can you do i said well i'm a tenured
professor of computer science and she said well that's a very nice professor boy
but that's not what i asked i said what can you do um and you know i mentioned sort
of my my working-class roots i uh we keep what is valuable to us what we cherish and
i've kept my letterman's jacket all these years i used to like wearing it in grad school and
one of my friends jessica hodgins would say why do you wear this letterman's
jacket and i looked around at all the non-athletic guys around me who were much
smarter than me and i said cause i can and uh so she thought that was a real
hoot so one year she made for me this little raggedy randy doll he's got a
little letterman's jacket too uh that's my all-time favorite it's the perfect
gift for the egomaniac in your life so i've met so many wonderful people
along the way loyalty is a two-way street there was a young man named dennis cosgrove at the
university of virginia and when he was a young man let's just say things happened and i found myself
talking to a dean and the dean no not that dean and anyway this dean really had it
in for dennis and i never forgot why because dennis was a fine fellow but for
some reason this dean really had it in for him and i ended up basically saying no i
vouched for dennis and the guy says you're not even tenured yet and you're telling me
you're gonna vouch for this sophomore or junior or whatever i think was a junior at the time
i said yeah i'm gonna vouch for him because i believe in him and the dean said and i'm gonna
remember this when your tenure case comes up i said deal i went back to talk to dennis
and i said i would really appreciate you that would be good but loyalty is a two-way street
i mean that was god knows how many years ago but that's the same dennis
cosgrove who's carrying alice ford he's been with me all these
years right and you know if we only had one person to send in a space
probe to meet an alien species i'm picking dennis you can't give a talk at carnegie
mellon without acknowledging one very special person and that would be sharon burks i joked with her i said well look if you're
retiring it's just not worth living anymore sharon is is so wonderful it's beyond description
and for all of us who've been helped by her it's just indescribable i love this picture
because it puts her together with sil and sill is great because sill gave the best piece of advice
pound for pound that i have ever heard and i think all young ladies should hear this still said it
took me a long time but i finally figured it out when it comes to men that are
romantically interested in you it's really simple just ignore everything they
say and only pay attention to what they do it's that simple it's that easy and i thought
back to my bachelor days and i said damn never give up i didn't get into brown university
i was on the wait list i called them up and they eventually decided that it was getting really
annoying to have me call every day so they let me in um at carnegie mellon i didn't get into
graduate school andy had mentored me he said go to graduate school you're going to carnegie
mellon all my good students go to carnegie mellon and uh yeah you know what's coming uh and so
he said you're gonna go to carnegie mellon no problem what he had kind of forgotten was
that the difficulty of getting into the top thd program in the country had really gone up and
he also didn't know i was going to tank my gres because he believed in me which based on
my board scores was a really stupid idea and so i didn't get into carnegie mellon no
one knows this until today i'm telling the story i was declined admission to carnegie
mellon and i i was a bit of an obnoxious little kid i went into andy's office and i
dropped the rejection letter on his desk and i said i just want you to know what your letter
of recommendation goes for at carnegie mellon and before the letter had hit his desk his hand
was on the phone and he said i will fix this and i said no no no i don't want to do it that
way that's not the way i was raised you know maybe some other graduate schools will see fit
to admit me and he said look carnegie mellon's where are you going to be i'll tell you what i'll
make you a deal go visit the other schools because i did get into all the other schools he said go
visit the other schools and if you really don't feel comfortable at any of them then we'll let you
will you let me call nico nico being nico haberman and i said okay deal i went to the other schools
without naming them by name berkeley cornell they managed to be so unwelcoming that
i found myself saying to andy you know i'm gonna go get a job and he said no you're not
and he picked up the phone and he talked in dutch and he hung up the phone and he
said nico says if you're serious be in his office tomorrow morning at 8 00 a.m and for those of you who know
nico this is really scary so i'm in nico haberman's office the next morning
at 8 a.m and he's talking with me and frankly i don't think he's that keen on this meeting dan i
don't think he's that keen at all and he says um randy uh why are we here and
i said because andy phoned you and i said well since you admitted me i have
won a fellowship the office of the office of naval research is a very prestigious fellowship
i've won this fellowship and that wasn't in my file when i applied and nico said a fellowship
money we have plenty of money that was back then and he said we have plenty of money
why do you think having a fellowship makes any difference to us and he looked at
me there are moments that change your life and 10 years later if you know in
retrospect it was one of those moments you're blessed but to know it at the
moment with nico staring through your soul and i said i didn't mean to imply anything
about the money it's just that it was an honor there were only 15 given nationwide
and i did think it was an honor that would be something that would be meritorious and
i apologize if that was presumptuous and he smiled and that was good so how do you
get people to help you you can't get there alone people have to help you and i do
believe in karma i believe in paybacks you get people to help you by telling the truth
being earnest i'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day because hip is short term
earnest is long term apologize when you screw up and focus on other people not on
yourself and i thought how do i possibly make a concrete example of that do we have
a concrete example of focusing on somebody else over there can we bring it out see yesterday
was my wife's birthday if there was ever a time i might be entitled to have the focus on me it might
be the last lecture but no i feel very badly that my wife didn't really get a proper birthday
and i thought it'd be very nice if 500 people happy birthday to you her name is jay
happy birthday to you happy birthday dear jay happy birthday to you gonna blow it up all right and now you all have an extra
reason to come to the reception remember brick walls let us
show our dedication they are there to separate us from the people who don't
really want to achieve their childhood dreams don't bail the best of the gold
is the bottom of barrels of crap what steve what steve didn't tell you was the big
sabbatical ea i'd been there for 48 hours and they they loved the etc we were
the best we were the favorites and then uh somebody else pulled me aside and said oh by
the way we're about to give 8 million dollars to usc to build a program just like yours we're
hoping you could help them get it off the ground and then steve came along and said they said
what oh god and and to quote a famous man i will fix this and he did steve has been an incredible
partner and we have a great relationship personal and professional uh and he has certainly been
point man on on getting a gaming asset to help teach millions of kids and you know that's
just incredible but uh you know it certainly would have been reasonable for me to leave 48
hours into that sabbatical but it wouldn't have been the right thing to do and when you do the
right thing good stuff has a way of happening get a feedback loop and listen to it your feedback
loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing i did or it can just be one great man who tells you
what you need to hear the hard part is the listening to it anybody can get chewed out right
it's the rare person who says oh my god you're right as opposed to no wait the real reason is
right we've all heard that when people give you feedback cherish it and use it show gratitude
when i got tenure i took all of my research team down to disney world for a week and one of the
other professors at virginia said how can you do that i said these people just busted their ass
and got me the best job in the world for life how could i not do that right uh don't complain
just work harder all right there's a picture of jackie robinson it was in his contract not to
complain even when the fans spit on him right be good at something it makes you valuable work
hard people i got tenure a year earlier steve mentioned junior faculty members used to say to
me wow you got tenure early what's your secret i said it's pretty simple call me any friday
night in my office at 10 o'clock and i'll tell you find the best in everybody one of the things
that john snotty as i said told me is that you might have to wait a long time sometimes years
but people will show you their good side just keep waiting no matter how long it takes no one is all
evil everybody has a good side just keep waiting it will come out and be prepared luck is truly
where preparation meets opportunity so today's talk was about my childhood dreams enabling
the dreams of others and some lessons learned but did you figure out the head fake it's not about how to achieve your
dreams it's about how to lead your life if you lead your life the right way
the karma will take care of itself the dreams will come to you have
you figured out the second head fake talk's not for you it's for my
kids thank you all good night so so you