Brent Bushnell ushers in our interactive future, one flame and robot at a time.
“Movies had a great run,” reflects Brent Bushnell, creator of the interactive steampunk Two Bit Circus. “A hundred years, thousands of locations, over a trillion dollars of box office. Any industry that hits that, you have to celebrate. But still, it’s passive. You read a book, you watch a movie – you’re just a passive observer.”
According to Bushnell, entertainment – and learning – is changing fast, and he’s at the forefront.
“I look at my kids. They already expect everything to be interactive. A screen that's not a touchscreen? They think, ‘What’s that?’ It’s a relic. We are entering the experience economy, a future that is immersive and interactive.”
Bushnell lights up when he talks about using immersive play and spectacle to inspire invention and creativity. “Entertainment is not just for weekends and it’s not one-directional.”
Watch Brent Bushnell at METAL
A founder of the STEAM Carnival, a traveling event to inspire kids about science, technology, engineering, art, and math, Bushnell’s wildly inventive interdisciplinary team is now building a network of micro-amusement parks featuring free-roaming VR, robot bartenders, an interactive supper club, and more.
“We use all the senses. We’re basically a bunch of nerds who cut our teeth on a 120,000 square-foot interactive traveling carnival. We had the traditional dunk tank but ours was made of fire instead of water! We literally immerse you in a fireball, but you don't die cause you're wearing a fire suit. We love big-spectacle stunts. It’s awesome for kids and super inspiring because we demonstrate the science of it all.”
Bushnell’s team is taking their new show on the road.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TRANSFORMATION
“Our focus with augmented reality now is being able to activate the glut of empty real estate space across the US cost-effectively. The Oculus [Meta] Quest 3 is magical, and video in color is an absolutely radical way to use AR. We can reconfigure movie theaters and empty commercial spaces – and what we can do is far beyond spectacle.”
The next phase, he says, is transformation.
Participants lay inside their coffins, waiting for the coffin to close. 출처:KBR(https://www.koreabiomed.com)
“Imagine all the ways where you can undergo a multi-sensory experience and come out better for it. For example, right now you can do a death experience in Korea as part of immersive theater. You experience being buried, being read your last rites and you come into contact with your own mortality in ways otherwise unavailable. It’s the venerable 'memento mori' lesson in modern form. You emerge from that a changed person.”
Safe, immersive, challenging, active experiences “give us hardship,” he points out, “and hardship is provocative. If you are just lulled into submission by a bunch of entertainment, you're not going to generate internal creative resources and grow.”
ART, STRUGGLE AND DISCOVERY
Bushnell gets his appreciation for both invention and the value of earned struggle from his father, the legendary creator of Atari, Nolan Bushnell.
“Dad was really good about making sure that we went out and did all our own stuff. He was very clear from the time that we were very little he was not going to give us money and that we had to go out and do it on our own. We had real potential to be a bunch of brats, and he really went out of his way to make sure that we worked our asses off and had a lot of humility.”
Two Bit Circus Game Circuit.
Like his father, Bushnell has been a rule-breaker. Whereas in some countries, the emphasis is rigorously on the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), Bushnell is an enthusiastic advocate for the creative arts.
“I really think that the STEM idea has been misguided,” he protests. “I mean, you think about Da Vinci – that guy was a scientist and an artist and a mathematician. He was a polymath and all his skills informed each other. He spent countless hours out in nature drawing and drafting and learning the structures of the world through his artist’s eyes and fingers.”
Bushnell says that engineering without the creativity and art loses something of the wonder of discovery, and the fun. “At Two Bit, we had teachers coming back to us saying that their kids got interested in engineering after having watched these weird, artistic things we created.”
What he discovered firsthand is that kids find their path into the harder disciplines through art, creativity, and play.
“Art is magical. It evokes emotion. And so I think of art as the critical component, the thing that can activate you into entirely new possibilities. We offer windows into new processes and creativity. And hopefully, this prompts the visitors to our experiences to go out and do something on their own.”
Written by Adam Gilad
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