Featured Maker: Glenn Kauffman
1. Tell us about yourself.
My name is Glenn Kauffman and by trade I am a Creative Coder, working in interactive media, interactive installation, prototyping and R&D. While doing that I end up crossing over into many different disciplines such as PC and A/V hardware, networking, microcontollers, photography, music and fine art. Currently, I’m exploring VR and other physical computing technologies, how we interact with them and how we can use the for productivity and play.
2. What are you presenting at the Baton Rouge Mini Maker Faire?
As a follow up to my presentation last year, “Oculus Rift: A VR Primer”, I’ll be talking about all that has changed over the past year, the upcoming consumer release of the Oculus Rift and where we go from here. Afterwards, I will be giving hands on demos, so attendees can experience VR for themselves.
Everyone loves Oculus Rift demos!
3. Why is making important to you?
Making is a way of life. As makers, we create things we don’t have, fix things that are broken and modify things to make them better. We are in the perfect place and time to use our grandfathers spirit of ingenuity and do-it-yourself attitude with a vastly wider range of technology and materials along with a nearly infinitely deep library of information via the Internet. (As long as we don’t get sidetracked by the sheer number of cats)
4. What was the first thing you remember making?
I’ve had the joy of tinkering most of my life. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, heavily invested in Lego for me. Worth their weight in gold, they were (and still are) an endless source fun and education. When I would get a new set, I would always follow the directions the first time around and build what was on the front of the box. I’d learn a new technique along the way, but soon after I’d complete it the new kit would be ripped apart and the tinkering and remixes would begin. I particularly liked making fanciful Rube Goldberg contraptions that did complex, but unnecessary things, probably inspired by the opening scene of ‘Back to the Future’.
5. What have you made that you are most proud of?
While there are many projects that I’m proud of, including my two Oculus VR Jam submissions, there is one project that provided me with some of the greatest satisfaction; my x0xb0x. Before Adafruit had become as big as it has and before the Arduino was a household name in the maker world (and the term maker was a still in its nascent stage), Adafruit had created an obsessively sourced kit replica of the Roland TB-303 Sequencing Synthesizer. http://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/ I missed the first two runs of a hundred, but managed to get one from the third. Building it was immensely satisfying and it continues to be a part of my regularly used hardware, often showing up in the soundtracks for games, videos and other projects I work on.
6. Given an unlimited budget, what would you make?
While Second Life and others have brought to life the cyberspace visualizations of Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, none of them have managed to fully capture what was in my imagination after reading it. A digital world to build, meet, collaborate, and share within. If I had an unlimited budget, I think that would be an amazing project to bring to life. With technologies like Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens, Leap Motion, Microsoft Kinect and many others available to near future users in a ubiquitous manner, we are closer than ever to being able to bring that idea to everyone.