The World's First Remote Robotic Tattoo with Noel Drew, Creative Technical Director at HyperSpace

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Noel Drew, Creative Technical Director at HyperSpace. And we discuss what went into pulling off the 5G-enabled Impossible Tattoo, the utility of staying true to what makes you happy, and HyperSpace's next-generation amusement parks. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) This is the Modern CTO podcast. The thing that caught my eye, what you were doing, you built some sort of tattoo machine that you can do remotely. Originally, it's for brain surgeries, and you adapted this type of idea for tattoos?

(Noel Drew at 00:00:53) Yeah. I mean, that was back in my advertising days. So traditionally, I worked for a company called The Mill who are very well known around the world for special effects, CGI, VFX. I think they made the Colosseum in Gladiator and stuff like that. But they had this whole emerging technology side of them as well. So they do weird and wonderful physical experiential interactive VR things. And I worked for that department. And so quite often, agencies would come to us and just be like, we've got this crazy idea. We don't even know if it's possible. A lot of the time, those projects would fall on my lap. And this was one of those projects. It was for T-Mobile, the mobile phone network. And the agency wanted to show how reliable and fast and low latency the connection was. The three classic buzzwords for 5G. And so, yeah, I think they originally probably wanted to do brain surgery or open heart surgery or something like that. And I don't know who it was who decided that was probably a little bit too much for a TV ad. But the decision was made to go for something a little bit low risk. So they landed on tattooing. And so it came to me. And I think when it first came to me, it was during lockdown. And I'm just on a video call like this, and it's like, yeah, we've had this crazy brief come in. And we've got to tell them yes or no in three days. So I have no background in tattooing. None whatsoever. I have a tattoo now. I felt like I had to as part of the project kind of thing. But at the time, I didn't know anything about it. And I had three days to just sit there. I couldn't leave. I couldn't go out and talk to people or whatever and try and do some research or go and watch someone being tattooed or anything like that. We're in lockdown. And I had three days to kind of be like, well, yeah, I suppose if you did this and then you did that, and that bit I know about, and that bit I don't know about, but I'm pretty certain I could work it out. And three days later, I was like, yep, let's do it. Let's go. And then reality hit, and it was just, yeah, it was way more complicated than I thought it was gonna be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) Did you get it done? Does it exist?

(Noel Drew at 00:03:07) It existed for the shoot. It doesn't exist anymore, and I don't advise anyone to give it a go. The 5G bit of it was just walk in the park easy. Yeah. It's like, yeah, cool. We could send data over 5G. Done. Turns out tattooing is quite a precise art. And the moment when I sort of pushed the button and the needle went in, and it's actually tattooing this girl's arm, I swear it took years off my life. I was so unbelievably—I can't even think of the word I was looking for. But when it was done, I was just ready for bed. Nothing left in me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) You actually did it. You remotely tattooed someone.

(Noel Drew at 00:03:53) Yeah. Yeah. No, it was all for real. All for real. I think a lot of people see the robot and they think the robot's the hard bit. But actually, the robot was the easy bit. You know, well, I'd say 5G was the easy bit. And then the robot was relatively easy because that's something I was familiar with. But I always knew the moment I sort of started thinking about it, I always knew that there was gonna be a subtlety to it. I didn't even really—I kind of thought I knew how a tattoo machine worked, you know? A tattoo machine, by the way, not a tattoo gun, which was a faux pas that I made numerous times at the beginning and got quickly corrected by various tattoo artists. So yeah, tattoo machine. I understood the basic principle of it, right? It's a needle that moves up and down really quickly and injects ink into the upper layer of the skin. But the accuracy, the subtle difference between tearing up the skin, getting it just right, or going too deep and getting that fatty layer underneath where all the ink blows out was just crazy. And, you know, when you're dealing with that kind of accuracy, suddenly all these other complexities came in. It was like, we decided—well, I kind of worked out a system where I would attach a tattoo machine. This is how the whole thing worked. I don't know whether it's really clear in the film. But the way the whole thing worked, we had this tattoo machine that the tattoo artist would hold. And they would tattoo this fake, this prosthetic arm specifically designed for tattoo artists to practice on. So it was—I mean, I wouldn't go as far as to say it's exactly like human skin, but it's better than nothing. And there's these systems that you can buy, a lot of CG artists and digital sculptors and stuff will use them. They're a little bit like a sort of a tablet, like a stylus on a flat screen, but they're 3D. So it's like a series of linkages and—it looks a little bit like a robot arm except that it doesn't move. You move it. And on the end of it is this pen. So it knows where you're moving this pen in the 3D space. And I was like, well, that's perfect because that's accurate. So I basically created this bracket that then mounted the tattoo machine to this stylus. And I knew that if the stylus thought that the pen was here and the tattoo machine's down here, then with a little bit of sort of angular offsets and, you know, basic geometry, we would know where the needle of the tattoo machine was. So that was that done. I knew where the needle was. Now I needed to know whether the needle was touching the arm. So that's when we had to take a 3D scan of the arm. And actually, the contact of the needle to the arm was never actually sensed in reality. We had this virtual model of the arm in software, and we had the position of the needle in software. So in actual fact, when the needle touched the skin, it was actually the software that said that the virtual needle had touched the virtual skin, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:45) Mm-hmm.

(Noel Drew at 00:06:46) Stop me if I'm rambling. Jojo Quinn. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So then we had that bit solved. We knew when the fake arm was being tattooed. And then we basically took that effectively sort of 3D position and angle of the needle, effectively sort of unwrapped it so it was flat, sent it over the 5G network to the robot that had also taken a scan of the girl's arm, and then it took that data effectively and rewrapped it around her arm so we knew where the needle had to be, at what angle, and everything to make connection with her arm. But yeah, no, it was terrifying. She genuinely was the first person. Yeah. It's not like we tested it on loads of people and then we just said she was the first for the film. I didn't test it on myself. It wasn't tested on anyone. She really was the first person to go underneath this thing, which made it even worse for me because I had this responsibility, especially seeing as what I'd seen what it had done to a whole bunch of vegetables previously. And anyway, I don't know if you're familiar with butternut squashes, if you cook with them much. But they are a tough vegetable. They are hard. I mean, you struggle to cut through it with a kitchen knife. And yet this—we were using a butternut squash because it had a similar curvature to a forearm. And this robot arm would just plow the needle right through it, just like it was butter. It was, yeah, it was terrifying. But she was so calm. Unbelievably calm. A lot of people who've seen the film think that it was fake because there's no way someone would be that calm whilst a robot is tattooing them remotely. But she totally was. It was amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:21) What was the tattoo of?

(Noel Drew at 00:08:23) It was kind of like—do you know what? It looked a little bit like the logo of a popular surf brand. It was sort of a single line sort of triangle, sort of a mountain that then turned into a breaking wave.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:36) Okay.

(Noel Drew at 00:08:37) She was all up, you know, into sort of the big outdoors. And I knew the limitations of this system. You know? So if anyone wanted a beautifully graded portrait of Elvis, that was never gonna happen. You know? But a single line that just went in, did its thing, and then came out, that was achievable. So yeah, that's what we went for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:56) So did you draw it?

(Noel Drew at 00:08:57) Did I draw it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) Yeah. Were you controlling the stylus that was tattooing her?

(Noel Drew at 00:09:02) Hell no. No. We had a tattoo artist. I mean, I had to work so—I had to—I mean, yeah, I mean, just just holding the tattoo, just understanding the kind of speed that the needle needs to go at and all sorts—I mean, there was no way I would be able to do that. And let alone the actual artistic requirement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:18) Right.

(Noel Drew at 00:09:18) I can't draw at all, so it would have been a horrible mess for a number of reasons.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) Well, it's clear that you're very creative, and you also have deep technical knowledge. How did that come about? How did that happen in your life?

(Noel Drew at 00:09:30) Well, my dad's an engineer, and my mom paints and is very musical and very artistic. And I think I'm just straight up a product of both of them. You know, I grew up—I know it sounds super geeky, but I remember, you know, as a kid, a lot of my friends would have movie posters and pictures of Ferraris and rock bands and stuff on that. Well, I had engineering schematics of the stuff that my dad was working on. You know? Those are my posters. So I was very musical from a young age, but I also grew up with a love of technology, a love of mechanics and physics and chemistry and, you know, things that go bang, whatever. You know? Yeah. And I kind of did—you know, stayed somewhere in the middle going through school. And I went off to uni and studied astrophysics for a bit and then took a break from that and decided I wanted to do music. So even at the university stage, I still didn't really know what I wanted to do. And then I kind of pursued a career in music production for a little while. I started off just, you know, as everyone does, just working out your room. And then I ended up doing music production at university and then I had my own proper music studio, which is fine. I worked that for quite a few years, you know, recording anyone who needed recording, whatever. But it's funny. I was out in the sticks at the time, and I realized that London is where I needed to be for the music industry. You know, if you're gonna do music in the UK, London's where it's at. It's the same with a lot of places. So I made the decision. I moved to London, and that was straight up the end of my music career. In that time, I decided I needed a website and I was asking around, asking people who could build me a website and everyone was quoting me money that I didn't have. And I'm just thinking, well, how hard can it be? You know, I did a bit of coding when I was a kid. And, you know, I used to build, you know, write little programs in BASIC. You know, when me and my mate built a den, I'd add this weird tech layer to it. So I knew when the aliens were coming in, I'd be able to communicate with him over these computers. And I did a bit of coding when I was at uni, and I just thought, well, just how hard can it be? So I taught myself web development, and then I kind of fell into Flash. Not everyone remembers Flash, but it holds a special place in my heart still. And became a Flash developer. And I think that's, looking back on it, that's when something clicked for me. Not just technology. It's when I realized that I had this love of interaction. You know, I was doing a bit of web development. That's fine. You've got basic buttons. You can load different pages, whatever. You know, this is before the days of HTML5 and video embeds and all sorts. It was still a bit boring and 16 color RGB. And then, yeah, I discovered Flash, and I was like, whoa, hold on. This is amazing. I've got these animations. I can click something, and there's cause and effect. You know, there's—I do something, something happens, and I have complete control over that. And then I discovered electronics. I discovered Arduinos and various, you know, sort of embedded hardware. And that was just like—I was down the rabbit hole. You know, see you later. I was like, wait, you mean I can press something on the screen and something happens in the real world? It's like, that was it. Yeah. And then I discovered robotics, and then I discovered all kinds of other things. And it's just been a constant little exploration into things that I don't know and things that look interesting. Since then, really, everything I've done has had an angle of human experience. There's been this underlying sort of bubbling interest in understanding how it is that our senses perceive the space around us. And that's really played out in quite a lot of what I do. Probably the tattooing one, probably not so much. You know, that is just straight up—not science. That's straight up technology and maths and, you know, problem solving. But a lot of the other experiences I work with where it's multisensory VR or it's just straight up weird theatrics, horror experiences, or it's artistic robots or whatever, you know—I think the thing that interests me, the thing that keeps me going is taking a space, taking an experience, taking a whole bunch of sensory inputs, and then sticking someone in the middle of it and really stopping to think how they're going to, you know, experience this, how we can play with those senses, how we can trick them into thinking they're hearing something else or tasting something else or they are somewhere else. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:53) Are any of those active right now that you've built out in the wild?

(Noel Drew at 00:13:56) Yeah. There's one experience that's kind of been touring the world for the last year or so. We built it just at the beginning of COVID. So it spent most of COVID just sat in a shipping container somewhere. But it was a project we did for the Barbican. And if people aren't familiar with the Barbican, it's this amazing building in London. It's part of the Barbican Centre, which is this very famous piece of brutalist concrete architecture. The Barbican, they put on a lot of exhibitions, a lot of the time really focusing on technology or how technology has affected society throughout the years or how it's influencing arts and media and all sorts. It's an amazing place and, you know, I always love all the exhibitions that they do. So they were doing—they partnered up with very famous games developer, Mizuguchi, to basically put together this exhibition that was all about exploring the sort of the intersection between games and art, basically, and sort of really exploring how, you know, more and more these days, games are really—you know, they're exploring some quite deep themes sometimes.

(Noel Drew at 00:15:10) There's a lot more sort of subtext and clever narrative and, you know, whatever. So what they did is they basically took a whole bunch of — they took six games developers and they teamed them up with six sort of media artists or technology production companies or whatever. So we were teamed up with Hideo Kojima, and it was just before Death Stranding was coming out. I don't know if — again, I don't know if you're a gamer and you're familiar with that game.

(Noel Drew at 00:15:34) The game itself was a little bit surreal, a little bit out there. You're basically like this post-apocalyptic FedEx delivery guy. You know, the whole game is about connection. It's about restoring connections between communities, but also sort of metaphorically building connections. There's a lot of references to time, energy, matter and antimatter.

(Noel Drew at 00:15:54) There's all kinds of sort of weird thematic dualities, should we say, that are going on through the game. And my job was to conceptualize a physical installation that would not necessarily reflect the game literally, but bring to life some of the more subtle nuances and qualities of the game, some of the more subtle themes. So, like I say, a lot of these sort of thematic dualities. So what I created was this — we call it The Wall. And it's this large — I think it's six, seven meters wide, three meters tall — glass wall.

(Noel Drew at 00:16:31) And it's these rear projections. And what we don't realize is that there's another one of these walls on the other side. And both of these walls are showing these weird sort of ethereal worlds. One of them is very much based on sort of — it's got this stellar theme. You know, you're looking at galaxies and stars and matter and antimatter exploding and particles or whatever.

(Noel Drew at 00:16:50) And on the other side, as a contrast to that, it's all sort of biology, and it's like you're looking at cells under a microscope and they're all dividing and subdividing and whatever. And these walls are interactive, so as you go up, you can play with them. You can drag these cells around and, you know, as you get closer to them, they subdivide. As you move away, they all coalesce. And what we don't realize is that the whole theme of connection is happening here because you see these kind of ghostly shapes on both sides. And what you don't realize is that is a silhouette kind of thing representing somebody on the other side.

(Noel Drew at 00:17:19) And when you both kind of interact with each other, then all these lovely, beautiful things happen. So that's — I believe it was in Australia last time I heard. I think it was going to be in Melbourne, but now, yeah, it's moving on to potentially Perth or — I'm not entirely sure. I lost track of it. It's been all over the place. It's been Singapore and yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) So how do you get these gigs? Like, you were going to school doing music and then you ended up, what, working at like a marketing agency, and that's how you got exposed to how you sort of commercialized your skills or what?

(Noel Drew at 00:17:57) Yeah, it's basically that. You know, I kind of — I started off freelancing and then decided, like, I was going into all these agencies and just being like, this is — I love this. This is great. This isn't a boring office. You've got these families. And so I just — I decided that that's what I wanted to do. But I think the important thing for me was I remained true to what made me happy. So, you know, right at the start, I had kind of applied for a couple of jobs — well, a load of jobs. There was two or three that I got offered. And, you know, the one I took was by far and away the lowest paid, but it was the one that I knew that's, you know, that's where I want to work. And I think just ever since then, I've constantly pursued the things that interest me and the things that I want to do. If I'm not doing something, you know, if I'm not currently on a project or whatever, I'm at home — I'll still be in my workshop playing and tinkering with things. I'm still making things for myself, you know.

(Noel Drew at 00:18:48) And it keeps me current from a tech point of view because tech's changing so much. It keeps me creatively turned on. And it gives me a nice — you know, they say in some creative industries, you're only as good as the last thing you did. It's like, well, I've got to make sure that I keep having something pretty current and last thing, even if I'm building it myself. And to be honest, I think a big part of it was just self-confidence. You know, a lot of what I do is, you know, it comes to me because other people have previously gone, "No, it can't be done." One day, it's going to shoot me in the foot, and I'm going to say yes to a project which actually can't be done. But so far, touch wood.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:26) No, if people came to me and they said, "Joel, we — project can't be done. Time machine. We want you to build it," I'd be like, "All right, let's start. Give me the money, and let's go." Because you know where to start. It's the scientific method. That's all you have to do is just run the scientific method. I don't know how much progress we're going to make. I don't know if we're going to be able to achieve the goal, but I know where to start.

(Noel Drew at 00:19:47) Yeah, yeah. True. Yeah. I've often said something not quite as extreme, but to people, I've often said, like, there's always going to be a solution. It's just, you might have to buy Google to do it. But, yeah, there's always a solution. The challenge is — especially working in advertising — the challenge is doing it under budget and getting sign-off from the brand. That's always a fun one as well. But yeah. No, I think I don't like doing a job that I know how to do. I embrace the challenge. And I'm very realistic with things, but I also — I think because I've spent years just being endlessly curious about a whole bunch of stuff, I'm not an expert at any one thing.

(Noel Drew at 00:20:28) I'm just endlessly curious about, "Oh yeah, I'll read something. I'll play around. I'll pull some parts out. I'll test something in the studio." And as soon as I'm just like, "Okay, cool. I understand that enough to know that if I needed to in the future, I could implement it," and then I move on. And I think what that's done is given me this weird, broad kind of — not skill set, but just enough knowledge that when a project comes in, I can — I could give it a pretty good gut check. I can kind of go, "I don't know how to do this, but I'm pretty sure that it can be done."

(Noel Drew at 00:21:03) And I think that's the key to a lot of the projects that I've been able to succeed in. For the most part, generally, when I sit there, stare into space for a couple of hours, and kind of come up with a solution in my head, for the most part, it's usually that solution that gets implemented. It's very rare that I have to go back to the drawing board and be like, "No, I've got to start again. That didn't work at all."

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24) Yeah. Well, when people get good at that, when you get good at figuring out how to do things that are hard to do, then sort of like in engineering, when you learn one language deeply, it helps you learn other languages. Like, you understand the concepts and the principles are similar, and you can apply it to different languages. Like, you solve several hard problems. You understand the principles of how to solve hard problems, how to get through things, how to figure out how to know what you don't know. And when you get those skills, then it's easy to deal with it because that's your specialty. Your specialty is dealing with hard problems.

(Noel Drew at 00:21:59) Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I want to be absolutely clear here that, you know, I realized up until now I've talked about all these projects like it was me, I did everything. And it's like, I absolutely —

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) It was. A hundred percent.

(Noel Drew at 00:22:13) Yeah. No. Like, we talk about skill set, you know. One skill set is knowing what I know and knowing what I don't know. And so, like, you know, what I was saying earlier about how it's — you know, I trust my instincts and I trust my gut a lot. A lot of that is by knowing — by working around such amazing people. You know, working at The Mill, I was surrounded by incredible 3D artists and technologists and, yeah, such a variety of people. And so when this project came in, I'd be like, "Well, I don't know this, but I know he does. And I know he does that. And if I could build this team around me and, you know, I could sort of point it in the right direction, then with the support of everyone else, we can bring this thing over the line."

(Noel Drew at 00:22:54) I'm trying to think of the last time I did a job where it was just me, and I can't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:02) What are you working on now?

(Noel Drew at 00:23:04) So right now, I am creative technical director for a company called HyperSpace. We're based out here in Dubai. And we're a company that — we build theme parks, basically. But not theme parks like roller coasters and water rides and stuff like that. It's kind of like immersive experiential tribute to hype culture and the metaverse and all things — all things that people queue up for, basically. You know? So there's a lot of references to streetwear and street fashion and music and art and design. Yeah, that's it. It's a large ticketed attraction. One of the first of many.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:45) So you go to it, like, physically?

(Noel Drew at 00:23:47) For sure, yeah. So it's kind of like, you know, one of our creative directors sort of refers to it as the front end of the metaverse. You know, you go there. It's a physical thing. You buy a ticket. You go in. You get a wristband, and you experience this space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) I've done something like that in Orlando, Florida right before COVID. My wife and I, we went up there, and we were at — I think it's called Disney Springs. So it's not exactly like inside. It's like this area outside of Disney. There was this thing that you could do, this immersive experience, and you would get like a gun. It's America. So, yeah, get a gun. And you put this headset on and this vest on, and then you walk — they walk you through, and then they sit you in this thing. It almost feels like a roller coaster. And you go through this experience, and then they're like — you're seeing one thing through your AR. Like, you've got these goggles on, so it's completely virtual. And they're walking you in these patterns, and then they'll like blow heat at you with, like, flames so you can actually — and they coordinated everything up with what you're experiencing digitally. It was this incredible experience, and I think there was like six or eight people on our team, and it probably lasted anywhere from like three to seven minutes. But it was so cool. When we got done with that, I told my wife, I was like, "That is awesome. Like, I want to do a one-hour one of those." You know?

(Noel Drew at 00:25:07) Yeah, yeah. So I actually did an experience — again, it was a real big one for my sort of career path. But this was back in 2017. It was for Corona, and it was just that. It was a multisensory VR experience. So you were — you weren't ushered. You were free to kind of walk through this jungle and, you know, and then when the god rays came down and hit you on the neck, you actually felt the heat on your neck, and you felt the sunrise and all of that. It's very effective. I don't think a lot of people realize just how complicated that is because there's an awful lot of alignment that if you get it wrong, the illusion's busted. You know, it's gone. But no, no. Like, the park I'm working on, there's no VR. It's a physical 100,000 square foot surreal, multisensory experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:52) So there's no headset?

(Noel Drew at 00:25:53) No headset. No. It's just a big, like, space that you can explore. There's loads of little experiences in there. Yeah.

(Noel Drew at 00:26:00) It's 100,000 square feet of weird trippy temples. Temples of hype culture. It's going to be in the center of Dubai.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:07) When is this happening?

(Noel Drew at 00:26:08) We're hoping to launch at the end of the year. So it is full steam — really, full steam ahead. Yeah. It's crazy times. So it's like taking every project that I've ever worked on individually and then doing them all at the same time, but five times as many. It's, yeah, it's full on. There's a lot going on. There's a lot going on. But it's, you know, there's lots of sort of parks and experiential immersive sort of places you can go, and, you know, there's a couple of brands, a couple of sort of studios, should we say, that are doing quite a lot of these now, especially in the States. Meow Wolf brings to mind. But there's a whole layer to what we're building here, which is — it's exciting. It's really — it's innovative. You know, there is an augmented reality layer to this physical park. There's a blockchain layer to this physical park. You know, we're really embracing, I think, not just the buzzy bits of blockchain, I should say, but, you know, there's a core underlying technology that isn't talked about so much, I don't think, these days.

(Noel Drew at 00:27:15) You know, everyone's very quick to talk about like NFTs and cryptocurrencies and, you know, buying land in the metaverse. That's the big thing that, you know, the last couple of days, isn't it? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:25) Oh, yeah. Yeah. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't get into NFTs, and I didn't get into that. And one of my friends did in a very big way.

(Noel Drew at 00:27:34) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:34) And made and lost a ton of money. So I got into it just a little bit. Now I want to know real quick, are there pictures of this 100,000 square feet, or is it all under wraps?

(Noel Drew at 00:27:45) It's pretty under wraps. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:47) Okay.

(Noel Drew at 00:27:47) It will be revealed to the world sooner rather than later. But, yeah, for the time being, we're keeping it pretty close to ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:53) Okay. How do you find all the creatives to actually physically build it?

(Noel Drew at 00:27:58) So a lot of us come from similar backgrounds. A lot of us worked together before this company was formed. It was actually founded by three people that I used to work with closely at The Mill many years ago. Yeah. They kind of, like, they started this amazing project. They had this vision. They've just been sort of cherry-picking people that they know they love working with and they know is going to sort of, not just get the job done, but have the same sort of vision, same sort of approach to work. And a lot of us have worked together. There's very few people that have come in that are complete strangers to everyone. And we all just sort of come together in the heat of the desert to build this sort of future take on traditional parks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:40) That is really, really cool. Yeah. Is there a mailing list? How can I get informed of when this thing happens?

(Noel Drew at 00:28:45) You know what? I think it's so under wraps we don't even have a website yet. That's how under wraps it is. We're launching at the end of the year. We've been building on this thing for years and years and years, and we don't even have a website yet. But, House of Hype, that's the name. Keep an eye out for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:58) Okay. Now is there anything else that we didn't cover that we want to make sure we touch on?

(Noel Drew at 00:29:03) Not really. I mean, like, I did a — I had a whole run of those robot jobs. Like, I did the tattooing one. After the tattooing one, I shaved someone with a straight razor on the top of a mountain. So, the mountain was in Wales and the barber was in London, just to clarify. So different countries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:18) Same machine?

(Noel Drew at 00:29:20) No, no. So we used optical motion track. You know when you see people doing motion capture for film sometimes, and they're wearing like a black onesie with lots of little white dots all over them? Yeah.

(Noel Drew at 00:29:30) We basically use that technology, except we put the dots on the straight razor. So the barber is holding this razor in London with a camera looking at him with these tracking dots, and then everything he does with that razor is being translated over 5G to a robot running on batteries on the top of a mountain in Wales with Tom Ellis, otherwise known as Lucifer, if you're familiar with that show. So he sat in a barber's chair on the top of a mountain getting a shave from a straight razor being held by a robot. The fun part about that was that we had to get everything to the top of the mountain.

(Noel Drew at 00:30:03) And then we had to take it down again because we couldn't leave it out there. And the next day, we had to get up the mountain again. So we had this team of porters just carrying this huge industrial robot and a full blown barber's chair up a mountain in Wales. It was the most ridiculous thing.

(Noel Drew at 00:30:18) So that was fun. And then after that, I did another robot job where the British and Irish rugby team was on tour in South Africa, and they wanted them to be able to sign the jerseys of fans. But, again, it was COVID restrictions. No one was traveling. So I did a similar thing so that the players were on a video chat over 5G with people in the UK, and then they'd sign a tablet and this robot would sign the jersey in real time.

(Noel Drew at 00:30:45) And that was it. I think I'd pretty much carved out a nice little niche of 5G robot jobs, and then I left it all behind and moved to Dubai to pursue my dreams in experiential entertainment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:59) That's amazing. I was at a fair or something, a small town thing in the Nashville area in Tennessee. And there was this robot on wheels that was maybe four feet tall. And it was driving around, and it had cameras on it. And there was a person remotely somewhere else, in an air conditioned room in another state or something, that was talking and interacting with the kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) And it could give them a high five, and it could turn around, and it could do all of this stuff. And I just was like, that is so cool. Because I can just imagine, fifty years in the future.

(Noel Drew at 00:31:39) Not even. Have you seen anything from Dubai Expo? Did you see any of that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) No.

(Noel Drew at 00:31:45) So they had legit little robots just driving around. In fact, they had lots of different sorts of robots. Some of them were kind of short, dumpy little things. They were only a few feet high, and the kids could go up and talk to them, and then you could press the buttons, get directions, they'd deliver food for you. And then you had these slightly taller, slightly angrier looking robots that would tell you off if you weren't wearing a face mask. They'd literally be like, honestly, they were like little robot police. They'd be like, you know, I am security. Please get out of my way, sort of thing, just trundling along with their things and telling you to wear your face mask. It was very weird. I felt sorry for them, actually. These robots got a lot of abuse, especially from the kids who were just punching them, hitting them, kicking them.

(Noel Drew at 00:32:25) They took it all. But, yeah, I mean, who knows? That could have been an army load of people all sitting in a back room remote controlling it. But I don't know. They felt pretty real to me, mainly because they didn't work very well, you know? I think if they had been a human controller, they would have been a little bit more responsive. It was the fact that they definitely had limited functionality made me believe that they were real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:49) I just imagined, I knew it wasn't AI because they were asking the kid's name, and they were saying, I'm sure you are. Hi, John. I thought, man, if you could make this thing a little more nimble, you could put an army of these or a fleet of these in elderly people's houses to help care for them and such. You know? Because they had all the basic movements that you would need. Obviously, it was not polished, and it was not something you would put in someone's house. But you can see how close it is. Every aspect of the problem chain, the solution exists. It just hasn't gotten small and congealed, and business hasn't happened around it enough for it to actually be something that's in everyone's house. But I think it's coming.

(Noel Drew at 00:33:31) It's out there. Take one look at the Boston Dynamics stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:34) Oh, yeah.

(Noel Drew at 00:33:35) The stuff that's coming out of that little think tank is just, it's getting to the point where it's a little bit freaky. You know, you see these tests, right, of the bipeds standing, and they're kicking them to try and knock them down. And the way they react, you start feeling really sorry for them. It's funny how quickly technology can take on a personality. I mean, there was this one time I was working on this robot arm, and it wasn't a complicated one at all. It was really quite simple, just a bunch of servos that would directly control, you know, attach the linkages. And I just had it kind of bolted to my bench next to me. You know, I've written some software, and every developer knows you write a little bit, then you test it, then you write a little bit, then you test it. Everyone knows that. Not everyone does it. I definitely don't do it. I go all in. If I'm on the fly, I'll just write it.

(Noel Drew at 00:34:24) And so I had this chunk of code, and I just uploaded it to the robot thinking I knew exactly what it was gonna do. And I didn't think of standing back or getting to a clear space or anything. And this thing just suddenly comes alive, shoots up, shoots out, swings around, and gives me the biggest black eye. It slaps me right around the face. And it's just, you know, massive metal linkages and everything. And it's my own fault. It's my code. This is an inanimate object. And yet, I stood up, and I was like, screw you, and I'm gonna go make a cup of tea. When I come back, I'm gonna reprogram you. You're not gonna know what's hit you.

(Noel Drew at 00:34:58) And even now, I have this robot arm amongst all my other various bits of robotics and stuff. I've got this thing sat in my studio. And whenever I need a robot arm, I look at it, and I'm like, no. Not using you. You're gonna beat me up again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:16) Dude, that is great. Man, I gotta check out, you said it was called what? Dubai Expo?

(Noel Drew at 00:35:21) Yeah. The Dubai Expo. So, you know, you have the international expos. Every few years, a country will put on this big show, and it's like a big, extravagant kind of celebration of where all countries are at in terms of technology and arts and culture and whatever. So the one that's just been was supposed to be the Dubai Expo 2020, I think it was. But COVID pushed it back. But, yeah, I mean, they just built this incredible space in the middle of the desert. And when I say space, if you imagine a triangle, an equilateral triangle, and each of the sides is something like two kilometers long, that's the footprint of this venue space that they built. And it's all these pavilions and amazing experiences.

(Noel Drew at 00:36:04) So every country goes in and they get their little plot. You know, it's a little bit like the Wild West where you got that main street and everyone's got their plot and they build whatever they want kind of thing. And it's just an opportunity for countries to go in there and just sort of do a kind of trade show stand, but they take it to a whole other level. It's crazy some of the buildings that were made and some of the experiences that were made. And it kind of just ran for, I think, six months or nine months. Millions of people flocked to Dubai to see it. It was incredible. It was an amazing show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:32) That is really, really cool. Well, here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to put you on as our resident creative techno. I've done over 500 of these interviews, 524, 529. I have never met anybody like you, and I like that because you're really great creatively. You're really great technically. So you have both of those attributes, but you have a third attribute where you did the right thing professionally and you followed your interest. And so you can get people that are creative and technical, but you've managed to keep this thing going, and I like having those people around me. So we'll put you down as somebody that we reach out to once a year and catch up with, if that's okay with you.

(Noel Drew at 00:37:14) That'd be amazing. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) I look forward to it, man. Dude, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Noel Drew at 00:37:21) Pretty good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:22) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.