that lets you jump high about five to
six meters and land safely at its core
is the yet to be invented surge battery
which provides short bursts of
high-intensity current to drive those
high speed propellers this is one of
those ideas I had a design of mine I
mean it surely does look fascinating but
there are a lot of question marks around
it I think we’ll take about 10 years
before you can get one of these ideas
ideas ideas ideas worth spreading
that’s what reads below the Ted logo
which notifies that you know what some
ideas are not worth spreading some ideas
are just dumped and I’m not talking
about the Batman Snuggie and the pet
rock because those sold millions people
millions those are two brilliant ideas
right there I’m talking about legit
engineering or business ideas that will
never see the light of day we all have a
lot of them especially us engineers at
MIT have too many of them piles of ideas
that will be forgotten
coming from academia I can tell you that
only about 10% of the ideas will be
published in the form of a paper only 1%
will be patented and only about 0.1%
will actually become a business and
impact the world now these are rough
numbers but if you ask any academic or
innovator he or she will probably answer
the same this means that only one in a
thousand ideas can do actually some good
out there which is an insanely low yield
I mean it takes about 10 to 15 years to
come up with a thousand ideas or publish
a hundred papers even in top schools so
why is this happening why is it that 90%
of the ideas go nowhere well you may say
because some ideas are just dumb
remember the Batman Snuggie and the pet
rock which is a fair and
sir but in fact a very subjective one
these two examples actually show that an
idea that might be considered useless
and ridiculous from one’s perspective
can actually be interesting and
successful from other’s perspective
perspective plus even if half of these
ideas were not working and just plain
wrong you still have 45% of good ideas
that for some reason won’t make it out
there you want to know why because we
don’t put them out there they stay with
us we don’t communicate them the problem
is not just with the ideas but also with
us inventors we tend to abandon our
ideas because we don’t have enough
confidence or immediate interest in them
or we tend to possess them and lock them
up because we think they are too
precious and there’s no other options
really academic publications are too
time-consuming and extremely narrow for
these types of ideas and patenting is
too expensive so I turned to online
platforms and tried using dogs and
YouTube and TEDx talks but none of them
work as efficiently as I wanted them to
all of these platforms requires a lot of
production a lot of lights and cameras
and all these people behind the scene
editing to convey a single idea this
lengthy production puts a lot of
pressure on the ideator so I was losing
hope on this I have a busy job I mean I
have to do actual research and I
couldn’t afford to spend this much time
on each idea until one night as I was
going through my older ideas sketchbooks
I saw this design from 1999 it was an
apparatus that was supposed to let me
see my gameboy color screen in 3d
through stereo vision this was basically
my first version of virtual reality
headset at the age of 16
which by the way wouldn’t work because
there was no parallax in the scene but
the fact that I could look at this one
picture and understand an idea from 17
years ago just hit me I was like hmm a
picture is worth a thousand words what
if it could fit every idea
to one picture one beautiful
comprehensive sketch that says it all
sounded like a great idea I immediately
started to build up my sketching skills
over the weekends thanks to online
tutorials
I went from something like this to
something like this in about a year then
I started to get connected to other
concept artists online and discovered
this amazing platform called computer
graphics Society or CG Society this is
an online platforms that allows millions
of concept artists around the world to
share their illustrations with each
other in high resolutions this is a
great website for artistic studies it’s
full of cool pictures of aliens and
robots but there’s not much science
going on here really and that’s exactly
what I want to change together with CG
Society we basically want to bring the
brains of MIT to the hands of Marvel
studio artists how cool is that the
result is what we call The Imaginarium
of Technology a place where engineering
ideas can come to life and inspire this
platform allows you to match up with an
artist so you can either upload your
idea in the form of an illustration or
you can describe it an artist to have it
illustrated the ideas are tagged and
organized into this gallery of sketches
as you can see here so these are my
ideas for example and if you’re
interested in any of them you can just
click on it and learn more about it or
you can start a conversation with the
creator of the idea some of these ideas
are published online immediately the
others are cherry picked by a panel of
artists and scientists these selected
ideas are then showcased in events such
as this one or MIT members week where
there are a lot of companies present
this gives these poor ideas the chance
to reach the right people each idea has
a unique ID so whoever is interested can
directly contact the creator
and endorse the idea based on a mutual
agreement so far we have had three idea
exhibitions on topics such as autonomous
cars and virtual reality and these idea
exhibitions have been received amazingly
well because pictures are powerful and
they can go even beyond the language
barrier yes if you’re a company with IP
sensitive materials or if you have a
conflict of interest then this might not
be the right platform for you
but if you’re a creative individual
trying to impact the world by
resurrecting some of your ideas let me
assure you that this is the best place
to put those ideas into some use okay
I’ve been talking about 10 minutes now
to convey to you one idea of the
Imaginarium of technology in the Ted
format now I will take one minute to
give you two ideas in the form of two
pictures two pictures that can make an
impact and potentially save lives this
is to show you how powerful the art and
science can be hand-in-hand are you
ready for this this is the infinity
ladder
it’s a rollable ladder that is stretched
out but it’s by a set of drones so the
drones fly up to the wall and latch to
the top of the wall and then you can
climb up the stretched-out ladder the
tagline reads no walls can ever stop
humans again simple engineering people
here’s a centimeter sized robotic pill
that stays in your stomach and is
charged wirelessly some future is
predicted we will have micro bot
injected to our bloodstream but being an
engineer I think that’s far-fetched I
think this is more practical solution
for merging with machines or whatever
that is so these robots filter out the
excessive toxins and things like fat and
sugar that is in your diet so in the
future you can feel less guilty when
bite into your burger
the tagline reads every diet is perfect
I think someone somewhere should work on
these ideas but I cannot suddenly quit
my job and start following all of these
random ideas
I think you get the point now I want to
thank everyone who jumped onboard with
me and made this possible this is really
a call to my fellow scientists and
artists don’t let your ideas die don’t
just draw a random monsters and aliens
let us come together and communicate
something at the peak of intellectual
value something that is both beautiful
and functional let us take a second look at ideas not worth spreading thank you