It's a very simple course. How many people here have ever been to any of the shows? [Some people from audience raise hands] OK, so 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 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 get 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 the most amazing place. And the kids said, well what content do we make? I said, hell, I don't know. You make whatever 24 you want. 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? [laughter] And you'd be amazed how many 19-year-old boys are completely out of ideas when you take those off the table. [laughter and clapping]
Anyway, so 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 had 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 their tools were weaker, and they came back on the first assignment, and they did something that was so spectacular that I literally didn't, ten years as a professor and I had no idea what to do next. So I called up my mentor, and 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 had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As. Sensei, what do I do? [laughter]
And Andy thought for a minute and he said, you 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.” [laughter] 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 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'd never had parents come to class before! It was flattering and somewhat scary. And so it snowballed and we had this bizarre thing of, well we've got to share this. If there's anything I've been raised to do, it's to share, and I said, we've got to show this at the end of the semester. We've got to have a big show. And we booked this room, McConomy. 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 setup that would work, because this was a zoo. Computers and everything. And then we filled it. And we more than filled it. We had people standing in the aisle.
我走进课堂,一班50个学生中,却坐了95个人。因为那是我们的展示工作日。学生的室友、朋友和父母-我从来没见过家长来上课的!这个让我受宠若惊。这现象就像雪球般愈滚愈大,已至于我们有这样奇怪的念头,嗯,我们得分享这个。我从小到大就被教育要分享,所以我说,我们要在学期末做展示。我们得搞个大的。我们就订了这个麦可诺密礼堂。我在这礼堂里有很多美好的回忆。我们订这礼堂并不是因为我们觉得它会被坐满,而是因为它有唯一管用的影音系统,因为这就象是个动物园。电脑和其它东西。但后来真坐满了。坐满了还不够。有人要站在过道上。
I will never forget .......