But in Boston it's incredibly active.
And I'll point out one thing about this picture that I really like,
and so they've shown a picture there, in the museum is
actually Anakin's spaceship from the Star Wars prequel movies.
And I learned something that day that I still remember,
this is back in the 2000s when I went, Anakin's spaceship was made,
it occurred earlier in time than the original Star Wars movies.
So the producers of the movie had a challenge.
They said, we now are making this movie now with current technology, but
it occurred earlier in time than the original movie.
So their solution was to go ahead and use current technologies, but
the ship was inspired by 1950s sports cars.
So when you look at the curves, you look at the design,
it is supposed to trigger memories, but at the same time they were allowed to
use modern computer graphics technologies in the movie.
So going to a museum allows you to learn really interesting things like that, and
to think more about the world around you.
So when you look around this space,
you see a little stage down there in the middle.
You see the lower part is an x-ray exhibit that shows you how x-ray works and
teaches you about the risks of radiation and so on.
So these are busy places.
And so I want to tell you, in this talk I will show you a little bit of some of
the stuff I've done and I'm also going to talk about related work that's gone on.
One of my favorite projects I've ever worked on in my life.
This is work I did at the University of Southern California several years ago.
And instead of showing you the actual result of the project,
I wanted to first show you these children.
These are fourth grade students from a Boston school, and
the looks on their faces, their intrigue and their interest just says it all.
This moment was the payoff for all of our years of work to create this exhibit.
And we didn't just create it and hand it off.
We did this in close collaboration with educators,
staff and researchers at the Boston Museum.
So this was a really intriguing project both from a research point of view and
an impact point of view, where we can actually go and see it working on kids.
So what it is is we built virtual humans, and that was one of the main research
thrusts at the Institute for Creative Technologies, where I used to work.
And the characters interact with visitors and
talk to them about a variety of things.
And what made them different is they weren't just teachers, they weren't just
straight up pedagogical agents that helped you learn, they were actually fun.
And so I'll say more about them later, but just as a hint, they could answer
questions ranging from what is the absence of light versus do you have boyfriends.
They could tell you about a wide range of things and they enjoyed it.
Just because you're probably wondering what they did look like,
this is what they look like.
And so you might notice they look very similar.
They're actually twins named after Ada Lovelace and
Grace Hopper, two famous computer scientists.
That was one of our first goals was to communicate the very interesting fact that
two of the most important computer scientists of all time were female.
And so we chose our role models, Ada and
Grace very carefully, and the twins were inspired by them.
And the other thing to note is that, as twins, we only had to scan,
so this is a scan of a human model that was chosen very carefully,
working with visitors to the Boston Museum of Science.
We only had to scan one person to get two characters.
So it reminds me of the Ray Romano joke, he said he had twins,
it saves money on photographs.