There’s a saying : “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
In the morning I got an invitation to visit the William Gates Computer Science building on the Stanford campus, by professor Kayvon Fatahalian, who I’d done a presentation for at the High Performance Graphics Group conference alongside SIGGRAPH a few years ago.
I’d actually applied to Stanford back when I was 16, but ended up going to Cambridge instead. There’s always been a part of me that wonders about the alternative life timeline track that Stanford represents, so it was great to be there as the two streams seemed to recombine.
Respecting privacy, I didn’t take any pictures inside the building, but my eyes were on stalks the entire time. I got invited to sit in on an amazing presentation made by Doug Lanman from Meta Reality Labs, about the state of the art in head-mounted display hardware, to a group of Stanford students.
I definitely wasn’t in the wrong room.
I’m the firestarter
Then arrived one Shelly Sabel from New York, raring for a bit of microclub adventure. Shelly and I last worked together in 2019, on an XR demonstration booth for the NAB trade show, that I directed and she produced (meaning: saved my inexperienced bacon). Shelly’s been a wise counsel, industry-gossip-relayer, antic co-conspirator, punkin’ instigator, and bringer of vibes for me as long as I’ve known her.
So it was only fitting that we repaired immediately to the nearest Hot Pot restaurant.
After lunch (which extended until well after the limit decreed by polite society) we hung out, toured University Avenue, window-shopped, and had coffee at Coupa, where I practiced my pitch for the magic handbag (more on this later, maybe) for the benefit of any earwigging coffee drinkers. We then decided to go for a scenic drive, at which point Ron Martin invited us round to his VR garage for pre-dinner Cosmopolitans. So we changed our plan!
and then there were three
There’s something truly joyful about a meeting of like minds - something I’ve experienced so many times now on this trip, but which I learn from every time. In this gathering (Laura Frank dialed in via video call for some of it), as in the others, I got this overriding sense of “chapter change” - I might be projecting, but it feels like everyone I’m meeting is ready for something new, and has strong ideas about what shape this new future should take…
… including Ruby.
