 Dwi'n cael i. So, rydw i'n cael ei bod yn gyrwch, rydw i'n cael ei wneud. Rydw i'n cael ei bod yn llwyllaeth yma, rydw i rydw i'r llwyllaeth. Rydw i'r llwyllaeth yn ôl, wir yn ein tynnu. Rydw i'n cerdd, rhywbodaeth a'r rhoblach, ac mae'n adegydd. Rydw i'n adegydd yn cyfnodol yn ychydig o'r emosiwnol, sy'n cyfnodol yn cyfnodol am adegydd yn cyfnodol i'n cyfnodol, ac yn dysgu ddych chi'n ddiogelio'n gwybod, sy'n gyhoedd yr hwn nebyddiadau. Dyna'r hyn yn fath o'r bynnagau cyfeirio cyflodau a'r hynny yw bwysig cyflodau. Bydd y cerdd o'r penderlion o fy modd mae'r oedd a hwn yn bwysig a o'r penderlion o'r oedd y ddiogelio'n oed o'i fyddech chi yw wahanol o fath neu oedd hynny. Mae'n tynnu o gydwydio'r ôl o ddych chi'n sahodraeth a'r gydwyrdwyd ac mae'n fath o fewn. mae'n oes i'w ni allu'n gweithio'r bywyd, i'n ymddangos i'r ddechrau i gael, a'r gweithio'n cael ei wneud a'i wneud i ddechrau i gael a'i gael yn cael ei gweld i'w ddweud o sut yn ei fwy o'r idea. Mae'n arddangos i'r cymdeithio, ymgylchedd ymlaen i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, i ddweud i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. ac ydy'n gilydd yn ysbod o'ch gwahanol am yw y gwaith. Mae'n gwybod a'r oedd yn farchfaldol. Mae'n fawr, cais mae'r ddafodol yn ysgolio'n gwybod ychydig nawr. Yn ystodol, rhai'n mynd o'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod yma, y gwelwch ar draws i'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod o'r cwestiynau yn ysgol cwmwyllydd a'i'r cyfnod o'r pethau. bobl, ac eich gwneud o'r gwaith ddweud, a cyfnodwch. Mae'r dweudio'r gwaith yw ddweud yn ymgyrch. A dyna i ddim yn hollwch. A dyna'r gweithio. Yr unig ffyrdd, y dweudio arnosad. Anton ac I gweithio y byddai yng Nghymru yn ymgyrchau'r eich dweud dynnu'n y gweithio ar gyfer y camp ddwy ddech chi. Mae'n dweud yn ei bobl. Mae'n ddwy robo'r bobl, mae'n ddweudio. ac we wanted to make a really big one and we thought about it. The problem with the really big robot is you need to keep a really big robot in your house and we realised that an inflatable one would actually be a smaller to put in your house and it lets you make a big thing easily. So this is just a big inflated fabric ball. There's a light bulb in the middle and a thing that moves around it to cast a shadow to be the pupil. It kind of worked. A year later with Antoine and Russ we made this thing. This is a picture of it at one of the Dutch Hacker Fests. It's a big musical thing. It rotates. It has one range finder, that's Sonya Sensor. It plays music based on the ranges of people around it with some trickery so it's always kind of music so it's a sort of collaborative musical play thing. Which taught me a lot about interaction design and making robots for people. The giant steering eye was interesting to make but quite boring to be with. I think it was actually quite fun. 2015 with Julia we made the world of Techno which you might have heard about the camp playing terrible Techno. Again it's not terribly technically very fancy. It's a Raspberry Pi and some software based on Sonic Pi and a GPS and some wires and things from eBay. I can hear it over there somewhere. It was another lesson in user experience in designing what you think people will do with it and then seeing if they do the thing, making a thing which they will want as opposed to just designing the thing. In 2016 my software work had slowed down a bit and I was already friends with a company called Rusty Squid who did very interesting and curious art robotic stuff in Bristol and I went to work with them for a while on making this strange little thing. It was like a sort of humanish puppet robot hybrid. It was very mobile. It was for a TV film about the making of the robot and then what we did with after. And this was where I met Emma which will later turn out to be a crucial plot point. This was us, there's the robot. It was chatting to those people. I was standing in the dark like 50 metres away wearing my fluffiest coat just sort of minding the robot. People really took to it. They would pick it up and carry it around and engage with it as though it were an alive thing even though it obviously wasn't which was super educational. 2017 I started playing with putting air in little things. This is heat-sealed fabric, two layers of fabric, layers of hot glue film which is used in the garment trade and then sealed with soldering iron and just experimenting with geometry and air to see what you could make a robot do with that kind of thing. 2017 went to Sham at Robert's. There, also a crucial plot point. I have no pictures of Robert from then but this is from his rope tying workshop. So this sounds like a disconnected story but all these bits are all the bits that came together to make the thing happen in the end. Hopefully the connections will be obvious in a bit. And it's quite a long timeline. You know, it's like 10 years in this. I made this with Robert in 2018. It's inflatable, it has little distance sensors, it plays games of catch and chase with people. People really saw this as a live thing. They would go along with its games, they would hug it, they would squeeze it, you know, they liked it. They just liked it. It was ridiculously complicated and we're never making anything like that again. But the interaction worked and the idea of these big moving squishy things was plainly exciting. 2018, EMF sponsored these. Thank you EMF, it was great. It was the triffid on the right there. Big wavy thing, a bit like the vines we have up there. About, that was nearly done and about a week before EMF, they sent me email saying, we've got a bit more sponsorship money, can you make another thing? So I should have said no, we're busy finishing this one but actually said yes and we made this other one. The anemone which like little things squeezed it and out. Totally not interactive but people found lots of things to do with it anyway because it's big and squishy and tactile and they would stick their heads in it and squeeze it and stuff. So Air Giants, in late 2019 there was a grant scheme called the Southwest Creativity Network which was a scheme set up to start new creative technology businesses in the Southwest which sounds hyper specific. It didn't run for very long. They funded like nine businesses I think in our branch of it. So with Emma and Robert, we applied for this thing, they gave us a grant, we had to go and have an interview and show them prototypes and stuff and then from February 2020 to October 2020, we were funded to do R&D and make one glorious prototype and do a bunch of business support stuff to try to be off the ground as a business it was great, we would not be here without them. And we were really focusing that pitch on things which are individual close-up interactions with things that feel kind of a bit alive. That's manifesto which I think it still is really. We all still had other jobs going on then because that's not enough money to live on. So there we were, we spent months doing this. This is in Emma's garage, we spent a lot of time sewing things together going, this shape's going to be great, it's going to do this thing and then we'd sew it together and then we'd inflate it and it didn't do the thing. Often it did a different thing but it's the kind of very free-ranging R&D that you have to do when you're in a new field. Just tinkering with stuff and experimenting with stuff and failing. We made a lot of things that look like this. This is the ball-o stick which can be long or long and cylindrical or short and round. Loads of things like that. It was no end of fun. This was in peak lockdown so this was a terrible time to launch a business focused on the events trade but we got super lucky with the timing because we were doing R&D while everybody was shut. If we'd been six months off either way I think it would have been a calamity. It was just lucky. So this is getting to the end of that grant. This is us starting to make our giant prototype. So this thing here was kind of a prototype for one of the actuators. And this is what we made. So this is Luma which is a kind of giant robot snail thing. Our plan was for this to be autonomous but we realised once we had it running that the interactions people want from it are very particular and focused. They want to go and do a thing with the head. They want to be greeted by Luma's head a lot and that's not something that's easy to automate. It's hard to sense where people are well enough. So Luma is still puppeted by hand. Somebody has a wireless controller and I think for this interaction it kind of always will be. April 21. We got a workshop. So it's as we sort of started to have some confidence in this in a business be like can we spend money on rent? Robert found this place and we were like well if we get some more deals maybe we can afford to have a workshop. So let's get it and see if it sticks. So there's this process over a year or I guess it's still going on of becoming increasingly more confident in this as a thing and turning away other work giving up other possibilities committing to this more and more. It's like the American startup model always seems to be living in the basement, eat toast, do your startup like 19 hours a day. We did not do that. I don't think that's a sensible idea. It's a gradual thing of working out if it's going to be a good thing and how much you can lean on it and whether you still need to lean on your other stuff. It was very slow and gradual. We had to do all the other company stuff. So this if you have done it and don't care what I think if you haven't done it there's a lot of boring things which you have to do which if you do them wrong there are terrible penalties but actually they're all quite easy and so we made a limited company and we registered with that got accounting software running we got an account and we got insurance we got all kinds of business support from organisations which exist to support businesses at no cost to us. They're like, there's a local kind of council scheme the creative technology network people also gave us business support and they just tell you how to do things because they get paid to help. It's great. A lot of the other paperwork, our accountant it turns out you can just say, can you do this for us? He just goes and does it because he does that all the time. So this is not something to be scared of this is something you've got to do otherwise disaster but it's really not trouble once you're spending that much effort on it. And then there's funding which I did not understand at all would be such a big thing I thought we would make things and then we would show them and get paid and that would be the story but actually it's not. It's a complicated landscape it's all a bit imponderable till you're actually trying to do it because it's all weird special purpose things and if you don't learn this landscape and understand how to live with it then you're knackers. So there's like not spending any more money than you have to. Weird grant schemes that you just find out about because somebody tweeted about them when it's two days to the submission date getting commissions from arts organisations who are interested in your kind of arts so just finding out who those organisations are is work. We've got loads of support from EDGE which is an Innovate UK thing that is paid to support businesses. Again, if you apply to them and they say yes they'll just help. We've had R&D grants from Innovate UK which you have to apply for business support grants we've done collaborations with academics for which we get paid and this is a big thing is getting paid to show work at arts events. Oh, we've got a grant from the Arts Council. So there's all this stuff and you sort of have to know how to work all this stuff. The things we're not doing are the conventional tech company stuff like selling shares in the business and taking it on debt. We hate both of those. In the first one it means it's not your business anymore and the second one it means you have to give the money back. And if you don't have a plan which will certainly make that money back then it's just not comfortable. So July 2021, here we are showing Luma outside, first time outside for us. Coral Avenue was a commission from Warwick Art Centre. They saw our prototype in the showcase and they more or less sent us mail going hello, that looks great. We'd like to commission a thing. What do you want to do? And then we made them a thing. And they commissioned it, but now we have it so we can show it. This was a big day, right? We sort of came to a point where we were clearly paying the rent and that was OK and we could spend money on the stuff. So we're like, we've got to put more stuff, Robert said, we've got to put more stuff in the workshop, in the workshop. We need racking in a stack of truck and actually we've got money in the bank and we can just buy a stack of truck. I mean a second-hand stack of truck. But it's not a thing that I saw coming and it's like this same thing about a gradually increasing confidence in what you're doing, meaning that you can start doing slightly more big business things like just spending a few thousand quid on a thing because you absolutely need it. But you know, it's kind of a big day. There was a day when Emma's laptop broke and we were like, oh, we could just buy another laptop. Oh, yeah, that was nice. Touring, so last autumn, it turns out there's a circuit of light festivals and they need things to show every single year and they will pay you to show your work and the amounts which they have are kind of fixed, but if you can work with the amounts they have, you can just show it a bunch of them. Again, you have to know the people and you have to be friends with them and they're all mates, so you have to do a good job with the first one so that the second one will like it, all that stuff. You know, it's learning that that starts to be the core of a business that you can sustain. We applied for Arts Council grant to do a soundscape which we'd never done before, so this is an installation with a bunch of these and a soundscape built in which is reactive to the audience. And yeah, they gave us money, we made it. We haven't shown it yet because COVID, but no, soon. Innovate UK grant, so Innovate UK exists to fund R&D that will lead to commercializable output soon. To get one, you have to fill in a giant form, so you have to find a call that suits you. They have calls that last for a few months for very particular purposes and you have to find a call that suits you and then you apply for it and you fill in a massive form, what you're going to do and how much it's going to cost and how long it's going to take and how it's going to make money and how big is the market for it. But if you get it, they do actually give you money to go into R&D and then at the end of it, you know a new thing and you've got a thing which you can hopefully commercialise to make a new bit of your business. I can talk more about their process afterwards if anybody is interested. So this was a grant to make little versions. These are little air giants like tabletop size for indoors, which we think we can see a market for. So we did that, made some, they were great. Quite a lot of work. When you change size, all the engineering changes in surprising ways. Softly Nol spoke under an academic collaboration with people from the Bristol Robot Lab and some people in assisted communication. So this is about whether it's possible to make soft robots which are communication aids for people who use communication aids. So communication aids are traditionally very aimed at conveying specific messages about, you know, I would like to now kind of things. And this is really asking a question about whether you can do things that are more like body language, more about conveying some feeling or inclination with a soft robot. It's extremely preliminary, but so far promising. And from a company point of view, not only do we learn things, but we get paid for doing it. You know, it's all just part of keeping the company going. Unfull, this was our big deal. We spent all winter sewing this. We showed it in Norwich a few weeks ago commissioned by Without Walls, who are a consortium of outdoor arts festivals. We're showing it at a couple more of their festivals later in the year. And half of that is here. It's quite a big bet, you know, it's sort of six months' work, maybe not six, but you know, months and months of work designing and making and coding and making circuit boards and wiring and... Yes, but we like it. Think it came out well. So what's next for us is touring unfull, still developing it into a stable touring business, finding out about other markets we can show in, fine art market, international stuff, all kinds of things. We just applied for another Innovate UK grant to do another piece of technical development. We need to look for the next commission. We need a bigger workshop. So, I mean, this is full and we want to make really big things, but that means we need more money. So that's the story, right? So I don't know if that made sense, but let me talk about it a bit more. It's like 10 years of tinkering with stuff and just going, this little thing is interesting, maybe I'll do some more of this. I'll work with these interesting people, they're doing stuff with robots and people and that seems interesting. And maybe these inflatable things could be part of this world of emotionally interesting robots. And then meeting people who are interested in the same things, meeting Emma and meeting Robert, who are interested in the same stuff and want to work on that stuff and are at places in their lives where they can and want to go, oh, I'd quite like to just go and do that. Maybe that could be a job. So it's this really long, slow story of lots of bits coming together to turn into the thing. It's not, I had this genius idea in my head. I went and got funding from a VC six months later. We're serving a million customers, delivering dog sausages to dogs all over the west of England or something. It's a sort of long, rambly thing. But in my mind, it's about following that initial interesting idea and just sort of poking at it, even every year or two, poking at it some more and moving it along and finding people are interested and building the connections around it. So it takes ages, right? Or for me it took ages to go from playing with inflatable eyeballs to, oh look, we're a company. And I don't have any recipe for how you would do that with some other thing, but I feel like that's the kind of thing that makes that kind of thing happen if that's what you want to do. It's precarious and it's unpredictable. It's much easier if you've got some other thing you can also do so that there never has to be a point where you go, I'm stopping farming sheep and now I'm making robots. You don't want that one day cut off between the thing and the other thing. You want to stop one as the next one is fading in because it takes time to start them up. No, you've got to learn all this stuff about making the thing and finding how you make money from the thing and finding workshops and it just takes you a while. So flexibility is great. I'm very fortunate that my other work has always been the kind of thing where I could do more or do less. It's a much less good fit to a regular nine to five job. There are ways to do it. People do it. Finding the right partners is vital and it takes forever. So treasure them when you find them because you need them. And it just takes a lot of learning. That's it. Yeah.