Eric Vezzoli: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Haptics Club Podcast. I’m Eric from Razer, and I’m joined by my haptics crew: Ashley from Titan Haptics, Manu from Unity, and Bryan from SenseGlove. The Haptics Club is a team of people that have a passion for haptics. Our goal is to raise awareness of the amazing tech and people in haptics and to foster interesting discussion on the subject.
Today, we have a very special guest, David Resnick. David is involved with the Walt Disney Company as a Senior Product Design Manager focusing on interactive and gaming for Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+. He is a multisensory creator involved in developing and creating immersive, interactive, and engaging products for a broad audience across Disney Streaming, plus he’s also a mentor, speaker, and a workshop leader specializing in h an-computer interaction, design thinking, and empathy through technology, including at various institutions including UC Irvine, UCLA, TEDx, and the National Stuttering Association.
Before we jump into today’s episode, we’d like to share today’s sponsor Gravius. Gravius develops a wide range of acoustic sensors and acoustics for all types of industries and applications. Make sure to check out [inaudible] and thanks again for sponsoring the episode.
Also, be sure to visit thehapticsclub.com and check out our latest blog posts featuring articles from your favorite hapticians and take a peek into our upcoming guests. You can also pick up some slick swag like the shirt or a mug on our store at thehapticsclub.com/shop
So, David, welcome to the Haptics Club. Welcome, and we are really happy to have you here. Can you introduce a little bit yourself and share how you started with haptics?
David Resnick: Yeah, hi Eric, and hi everybody.
I wanted to offer a few disclaimers first. The first is that I am a person who stutters, so as folks who are listening hear that, that is just how I talk. It’s not a glitch in the recording. The second thing is I work at Disney but I’m not here as a representative of the company. So everything that I’m talking about and expressing are my own opinions. And the third, which may be the most interesting and exciting, is that I am just really thrilled and honored to be here and talking. I joked around maybe a year ago, talking to a couple of colleagues, “hey if I ever make it on the Haptics Club podcast, I know I’m a success.” I’m not joking. I really said that. So, it really is cool that I’m here and talking with you.
Eric: You’re setting the bar really really high right now. So….it will be difficult…
David: And please feel free to jump in and ask me questions or change it as I talk about my history and past. I have not had a straight path in terms of my education and career and such. Ya know I’m gonna take you through a number of different areas.
And to me, it starts in the summer going into 9th grade. I was really into sports, I was kind of a jock. And I had to choose an arts elective class that I would take in 9th grade. I’d heard that the easiest class was the Survey of Music class. I said “ok, I’m going to take that.” I arrived in 9th grade and there was a new teacher, who came in from a conservatory background–really accomplished as a composer. I’m like “uh oh…” He played us a piece of music, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Some people may have heard it in the soundtrack to the movie, Platoon. It’s this really long slow string piece that is building and building and building in crescendo. And as I heard this piece of music I had a spiritual experience…of a euphoric experience in my body, in my mind.
I should mention as well that I do have synesthesia. So this music was just really firing all of my neurons in my brain. And at that instant I decided that I was going to recreate this experience for other people.
So I became a musician, I became a composer, I toured in bands, a producer / engineer. But I was not able to recreate that kind of a feeling for others because I had synesthesia and most people out there don’t. So that started a foray into a career as a VJ (with collaborator Eric Jakobs, and Gabriel Shalom), that’s someone who plays live visuals at concerts, at festivals, art museums.
And I toured all over as a VJ for Diplo and the Wu Tang Clan. I played all the major festivals, art museums in New York, installations at the Whitney. And really focusing on this combination of music and the visual, again to try and elicit that response in people of being totally immersed in a euphoric experience.
And again it didn’t quite hit how I wanted it to. People got really into it, they really enjoyed the experiences, they were entranced. But it didn’t hit that level of immersion that I was going for.
The next step was I started a grad school program at UC Irvine that was called Arts Computation Engineering. And it was there that I was exposed to vibrating motors, and I’m like “hey, this is turning on a part of my brain that music and visuals did not.” So I started experimenting. I took apart a foot massager, thinking I could hack it. Don’t do that! Do not take apart a foot massager. I got electrocuted horribly. I don’t recommend it.
But in that program I got deep into cognitive neuroscience, and aspects of embodied and embedded cognition. And it built up to inventing and building two multisensory instruments. I had this idea of being a vibrationist–to play the whole body and mind as an instrument.
Eric: And how many years back was this?
David: This was a while ago, this was like 2009 through 2011. And it was really cool. The second instrument I built, my advisors were like, “this is…it’s weird. It’s not going to do anything.” I built these acupressure fingers using solenoids, and I hacked a Kinect camera. And in those days they didn’t have a lot of tools to do that easily. There was a lot of parsing of raw data. I incorporated a biofeedback loop, and I wrote a generative music program. And all of it responded to the movements of a vibrationist. So essentially as they are gesturing in the air, they conducted a haptic, sound, and biofeedback experience.