September 2015 – Dave Erasmus

26 Sep, 2015

360 Video Experiments

Over the last few weeks I have been travelling round the US with my friend Louis Cole.

We made 4×360 youtube videos which have had over a million views in the last month, it is blowing up, check the comments 🙂

Here is the playlist : http://bit.ly/1KFBzMd

I helped Louis get a deal with Toyota for this road trip and as far as we know, this is the worlds first brand sponsored 360 video on youtube.

Our friend Barry helped make a 360 video in Zaatari Refugee Camp

You can watch it here : http://vrse.com/watch/index.html?id=21

This was immensely, immersively powerful and was the first 360 video I watched with an Occulus Rift headset. I was amazed at how powerful it was but also deeply concerned by the level of empathic distress I felt especially at around 5 minutes in when I desperately wanted to connect with the children.

The profoud sense of immersion mixed with the reality that I could not make one tiny bit of difference to these peoples lives despite my feeling so connected to them was troubling to say the least!

I believe these immersive technologies to be extremely powerful and potentially devastating for our well being unless we are able to connect to bring a sense of completion to our empathic unrest and allow our parasympathetic system to set in once action has been taken.

I want to conduct a social experiment to observe 2 things.

1. The extent to which 360 immersive viewing is more powerful that 2D viewing

2. The extent to which unrest is relieved when offered an opportunity to contribute $ at the peak of emotional affect.

I will require the following facilities along with a bunch of Stanford students who I will have to con with some free beer or something.

https://emotiv.com/ Electroencephalogram

https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/ Google Cardboard

Android Phones : http://bit.ly/1OzZIur

I believe it is crucial that we appreciate the power of these experiences and augment them to allow them to be a powerful force for good!

The tech is happening, the question is what do we do with it?! obviously the porn boys are going to be all over it like a bad rash but we need to model something better and more beautiful, thankfully the ingredients are all here, I just need to bake the cake! 🙂

I will check back in once I get this idea to the next phase!

Thanks for reading.

12 Sep, 2015

Solvey Time Zones

‘Different Timezones, Different Mindzones’

-Rachel Manchester

This, a phrase written by a dear friend is all too true for me at the moment as I am living on California time, 9 hours behind my girlfriend in London.

It is not that Kate and I can’t find any time to talk, In fact we speak most days on facetime and whats app, the challenge is the mindset, energy levels and intensity disparity that come with falling asleep versus downing the second flat white of the morning!

A couple of weeks ago I started writing my thoughts on how best to represent the worlds population in next years Solvey process given that we will be looking to find 7 finalists from around the world.

Yesterday I spent the morning putting the world to rights with a deeply clever man named George who is a historical african map specialist. This is one of the original maps of part of Africa, early 16th Century.

After learning about counting, imaginary numbers, mapping and hearing his views that there is no true learning other than self learning, I took the opportunity to share my thoughts above and he helped move the ideal along and think about longitude as an appropriate tool for grouping people.

We found a longitudinal map showing population here and then overlaid it with 7 potential zones. The latitudinal one was less interesting as it was grouped more heavily and sits more in alignment with current disproportionate wealth distribution trends.

This morning I am looking at all the 24 timezones and think that more or less I have group 3 hour timezones together to make 7 timezone groups

Time is the only true currency. No matter what your situation, age or education, if we are still breathing we all wake up under the same sun and have choices what to do with the day.

In the complex world we now live in I think that timezone grouping is much more natural than countries, continents or languages.

My brain is fried, next blog I will do the precise groupings and precede to give the zones names – Any ideas are very welcome.

10 Sep, 2015

Solvey – The Next Generation

We are currently having a great time working with OneWave the guys who grabbed the Solvey Spotlight this year but I have to say I am very excited about many of the Solvey applicants who have continued to move forwards with their ideas and I am loving that some of them are keeping me in the loop!

Take Mac Rithvik for example, a 15 year old lad from Bangalore who is working on a way of killing bacteria through a hardware plugin to a smartphone.

When he applied to Solvey with the experiment he had done he said that he could only kill around 75% of the bacteria and this solution is only interesting if equal to hand sanitizer solution of 99.9%

I asked him could you get it to 99.9%? He said yes

I asked ‘What would it take for you to get to 99.9%? He said a $10 part.

He sent me the link, I ordered him the part and he emailed me back!

I cannot wait to see what he does next, I have no idea where this journey will lead but working with genius people who appreciate the help is an absolute delight when I have spent so much of my time trying to work with charities who frankly don’t want it.

Solvey is not a competition it is a community.

A community of smart risk takers who dare to put themselves and their ideas out there for the sake of others, not because they are right or because it will work but because it is good work and its fun! 🙂

I think more than business, or charity, or social enterprise I am just getting excited about helping people with good ideas and good intent take one exponential meaningful step forwards in their project.

I look forward to sharing plenty more stories like Rithvik’s with you as they take a step 🙂