How a photo of Big Ben became an enchanted object

This is another update on my journey creating a calm connect clock, a cinematic clock that creates a calm connection with the world. This week I talk about connection, namely the idea of enchanted objects that connect us to things we care about.

London is one of my favorite cities in the world. Starting in 2009, I would take two week-long trips to London to do business development for my market research startup Revelation. London being one of the biggest centers for the market research industry, I would do 5–6 meetings a day for a week, then jet back home to Portlandia. In the course of visiting market research companies to preach the gospel of Revelation, I would see different parts of London and its suburbs and really came to love the place.

While I would buy souvenirs for my family, I was never much into them. But in 2015, as Revelation had been acquired by FocusVision and my need to visit London was winding down (we had a global sales team), I wanted to have something that would reflect my connection to the city that I had grown so fond of.

I couldn’t find any souvenirs that really resonated with me, so I decided to make my own. I had some pictures of Big Ben, so I gave myself a challenge: could I make the picture of Big Ben change with the time of day and the weather in London?

In other words, could I create an enchanted object?

The idea of an enchanted object has been around for a while, but it was crystalized by David Rose (@davidrose) of MIT Media Lab in his book, aptly entitled, “Enchanted Objects.” Rose writes:

“Enchanted objects start as ordinary things. Then the ordinary thing is augmented and enhanced through the use of merging technologies…The enchanted object then gains some remarkable power or ability that makes it more useful, more delightful, more informative, more sensate, more connected, more engaging than it’s ordinary self.”

It took a few months of fiddling and scaling some learning curves but in the end I came up with this:

This was a successful experiment on a number of levels. First of all, the amount of learning required to pull this off was pretty heavy (but a lot of fun in spite of bouts of hair pulling!). I learned Unity, Photoshop, object oriented programming in C# (Unity’s scripting language of choice), lighting, animation and how to connect an app to an public API. So on that level, a total success. But beyond that as you can see from the video, it came out quite nicely, like something out of Harry Potter.

To me it is a great example of an object that creates calm connection to the world.

But after finishing this picture, it quickly became apparent there wasn’t a device that made sense to play my enchanted Big Ben picture on. A tablet or a phone isn’t something you would just put up in your room solely to play this. Photo picture frames aren’t designed to run software like this and have generally poor quality screens. It wouldn’t make sense as a screen saver or wall paper because the photo realistic rendering requires a lot of CPU cycles which slows down computers and drains batteries.

And that’s how my journey began. I wanted to have a way to play these magic pictures and I didn’t see any good options. This is how most entrepreneurial ventures begin. There’s a gap in the world that needs to be filled.

That’s it for this update. More coming soon.

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