OK, so working on the Aladdin VR, I described it as a once in every five years opportunity, and I stand by that assessment. And 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 Ph.D.s and masters degrees. And you know, until you got ice cream spilled on you, you're not doing field work. And more than anything else, from Jon Snoddy 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 you would in a magazine. And the SIGGRAPH committee, which accepted the paper, it was like this big scandal. Are they allowed to do that? [laughter] There was no rule! So we published the paper and amazingly since then there's a tradition of SIGGRAPH papers having color figures on the first page. So I've changed the world in a small way. [laughter] 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. One of the only times in my life I have surprised my father. He was like, you're what? He said, since you were, you know, all you wanted, and now that you got it, and you're… huh? There was a bottle of Maalox in my desk drawer. Be careful what you wish for. It was a particularly stressful place. Imagineering in general is actually not so Maalox-laden, but the lab I was in – oh, Jon left in the middle. And it was a lot like the Soviet Union. It was a little dicey for awhile. But it worked out OK. 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 consultant for Imagineering, and I did that for about ten years. And that's one of the reasons you should all become professors. Because you can have your cake and eat it too.
I went and consulted on things like DisneyQuest. So there was the Virtual Jungle Cruise. And the best interactive experience I think ever done, and Jesse Schell gets the credit for this, Pirates of the Caribbean. Wonderful at DisneyQuest.
And so those are my childhood dreams. And 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? Eh, maybe working at EA, I don't know. That'd probably be a good close second. 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, and he said, oh, and I have a childhood dream. 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.
Tommy (汤米):
It was around '93.
大约 93年
Randy Pausch:
Are you breaking anything back there young man? OK, all right, so in 1993. And I said to Tommy, you know they're probably not going to make those next movies. [laughter] And he said, no, THEY ARE. And Tommy worked with me for a number of years as an undergraduate and then as a staff member, and then 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. And 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 onto their childhood dreams? And I created a course, I came to Carnegie Mellon and I created a course called Building Virtual Worlds.