I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what I want to work on next. There’s a lot of possibilities, and some are certainly easier or more practical than others. I realized this morning that telepresense is what I want to work on next.
There’s a lot of challenges in this space, and it’s more ambitious than doing something that I’m more familiar with (software development, etc.). It’s also riskier because it involves hardware, which has more up-front cost and risk of loss than writing code (failures are more expensive and less reversible). It’s also more challenging because it requires skills that are not as developed as my programming skills (although extensive programming is a part of it).
However what I came to realize is that solving telepresense reduces the friction and overhead of a lot of other areas I’d like to work in. It removes the geographical constraints and would allow me to work on anything, anywhere, anytime. This, in addition to many of the other problems that telepresense can solve make it seem like the right choice for the next thing.
Work on Sux0rz has taught me a lot about what it takes to build a good telepresense robot, especially the experience of taking it to Makerfaire . From this experience, I’ve already started to draw-up designs for a next-generation machine, and I’m excited to get started on that build.
Whether or not I can find a way to turn this work into something self- sustaining remains to be seen. I believe that there are many practical, high- value applications for affordable, high-quality telepresense machines (even at the consumer level), but before I can prove that I need to develop some machines that can be used to test these applications, as well as discover new ones.