Rapid prototyping Google Glass - Tom Chi

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Rapid prototyping is a method used to accelerate the innovation process. At TEDYouth 2012, Tom Chi explains how this method was used to create one of Google's newest inventions, Google Glass.

Talk by Tom Chi.

My name is Tom Chi.

I spent two years of my life

building the user experience team

for the Google X division of Google,

and it's a place I affectionately call

the Department of Science Fiction

because of the futuristic nature

of the types of projects we took on:

self-driving cars,

Google Glass,

and other things that you'll see soon enough.

So, for those who haven't heard of this project,

this is what Google Glass looks like.

It allows you to overlay digital things into your eye sight

while still maintaining being part of the world.

So, if I, you know, were to pull out my cell phone

and look into it, I'm basically out of this world now,

like, I'm in my own little cell phone-tablet world, what have you.

But, Google Glass has the vision of allowing us

to continue to be in the world

but also have access to the digital things that we need and love.

Now, I am going to ask you a real simple question about Google Glass:

how would you prototype this experience?

How long do you think it would take you

to make the first working version of the headset display?

Okay, a little bit on the long side.

The answer is one day.

And here's what it looked like.

So, basically the magic piece is the coat hanger.

The coat hanger, I bent it in a specific shape

and the top loop goes around your neck

and then the bottom loop rests against your chest

and it allows me to carry a piece of plexiglass

on with a little sheet protector.

So these are the things you put your book reports in

so they don't get wet,

I literally got at the drug store.

You know, have it out at the end of the plexiglass

and then it gets projected onto with the pico projector

that's connected to a Netbook.

And using this set-up, within one day

we're already able to start having the experience

of what it looks like to have digital things

overlaid on your physical world,

be able to move around with it,

and also use the Netbook to try out

tons and tons of different ideas around software.

Now, after you start getting something like that working,

you know, a really important problem comes up,

like you're wearing this thing on your head,

it's like a pair of glasses,

so you don't have a mouse or a keyboard or a touchscreen,

all the ways you are used to interacting with a machine.

So, we thought for a second,

well, maybe we could do something

like, you know, what was shown in Minority Report.

So, for folks who haven't seen that,

basically Tom Cruise is manipulating software

with his hands in front of his face

and photos are flying over here

and his email is over here

and so on and so forth.

So I'll ask the the same question again,

how long do you think it would take

to have the real experience of doing something like that?

Two years, OK.

Somebody said one day.

45 minutes.

So here's how it looks.

So you wear the thing that we saw that first time

because you need some way to go project things,

but what happens is we got two hairbands,

which I think was the hardest part we had to do,

ask people for their hairbands.

But you put one hand in each hairband

and attach that hairband,

we tied a fishing line.

And the fishing line goes over the top of a whiteboard

and then goes down to this little assembly

that's taped to the floor.

And what this means is

every time I move my hand in any direction,

it adds tension to the line

and it does the following with the assembly on the floor.

So, the other end of the fishing wire is attached to a chopstick

and it's not because I'm Asian,

there's just a cafeteria nearby,

I don't just carry chopsticks on me.

But, I tied it to the end of a chopstick,

I clipped it into a binder clip,

and then put it over a pen,

and basically what happens then

is when you move your arm

and it produces tension on the wire,

the chopstick comes down like a lever

and clicks a presentation clicker,

one hand moves the presentation forward,

the other hand moves the presentation backwards.

So this was built in 45 minutes

and that meant shortly afterwards,

we were having experiences

like looking at an image gallery

and saying, "next image,

next image,

previous image,"

or looking at our emails and saying,

"let me click into this email,

let me click reply now."

And this was exactly the experience of what it was like

to go control software with your hands.

And ultimately, what it taught us is

we probably shouldn't have this in the product.

We learned a lot of things

about the social awkwardness of it

and some of the ergonomic aspects of it

that you couldn't have figured out

ahead of just thinking about it.

And, ergo the second prototyping rule,

which is "doing is the best kind of thinking."

They teach you to think a lot in school,

but I think it is a little bit overrated.

Now last example, you know,

actually Google is not the first team

that's tried to go make something like this

and if you search for headset display,

you get tons of images of teams

that have built various systems like this,

but I can tell you at a glance

that none of these pieces of hardware

are comfortable to wear for more than 15 minutes

except for maybe the helmet over there,

but then you got to wear a helmet.

So, you know, how would you go figure out a way

to go wear something like this comfortably?

The answer is really basic materials:

modeling wire,

paper,

clay,

and using something like this

is able to make something look like a pair of glasses really quickly.

I cut out pieces of clay that weighed

exactly the same amount as the electronic components

that we were talking about putting on the device,

wrapped it in paper so you didn't get clay on your face,

and then taped it to the modeling wire in various places

to go experiment with how a pair of glasses could fit on you.

And, we discovered something really important then.

Like, if you look at this drawing on the bottom,

it turns out that the weight of a pair of glasses

is actually mostly perceived

through how much weight is on your nose.

And, it also turns out that your ears can carry

a lot more weight than your nose,

and that is a totally different experiment,

you can ask me about that.

But, because of that fact,

if you put weight behind your ears,

it allows your ear to go act like the fulcrum of a lever

and it then takes weight off of your nose on the front.

And, actually, you can try this now, anybody with glasses,

if you push very gently on the back of your glasses,

you'll find, actually your glasses feel tremendously lighter.

Now, this meant that we not only discovered

something interesting about how to go,

you know, that's useful for developing a device like this,

we actually discovered something pretty fundamental

that never been discovered about glasses, period.

So, if you have really heavy glasses,

you could do this and you would be more comfortable.

Now, the last point I want to make is

about two types of learning

because through the process of rapid prototyping,

you are able to learn very quickly.

It's a very specific type of learning.

The type of learning that you usually learn in school

I call book learning.

It comes from what humanity already knows

and it's a necessary foundation for you guys to go and explore the world.

But there is a totally different type of learning,

which I call expansive learning,

and this is the learning you do on behalf of humanity.

Right?

You are creating something new,

you are expanding into the possibilities,

and you're building the sphere of human knowledge in that process.

And, we think about these things and as soon as you hear

like, ok, the infinite realm of possibilities

beyond the sphere of human knowledge,

you might be thinking there's the scientists

at the Large Hadron Collider

who have these amazing instruments,

like that's their job, right?

But the truth is that this action is available to all of us,

you know,

it's not just for the scientists,

it's also for the poet or the songwriter

that expresses an emotion for the first time in a unique way.

It's also for the person that has an amazing business idea

that they're certain could help millions of lives.

And, it's the realm of using paper, clay, and tape

in order to go find a new insight

in an ancient technology.

So now that you know a lot about rapid prototyping,

I'm excited to see what you do with it.

Thank you.