syrinx

Randy Pausch died Friday, 25 July 2008.

He had pancreatic cancer, a difficult to diagnose and highly aggressive disease, which he was able to survive for two years before it finally won out. That it was apparently inoperable (otherwise you would just remove the pancreas and inject insulin for the rest of your life) when diagnosed is a testimony to the advances in diagnosis and treatment since 1994, when my mother was diagnosed in July and died in October.

I saw Pausch at SIGGRAPH '95 in LA, where he was presenting various intuitive input devices for computer interfaces. The one that remains in memory is a doll's head and a meat cleaver (or other blade device) used to input the angle and section of the head and brain for a CAT scan or MRI scan - much simpler than trying to keyboard in the coordinates. Other types of sphere, cone, plane, stick, etc. devices and combinations were being experimented with.

A few years later, we visited Epcot Center and the Imagineering exhibit where Pausch was conducting usability and alpha/beta/prototype development studies with random subjects pulled from the audiences, riding motorcycle looking devices while wearing virtual reality helmets, crashing their "flying carpets" into Alladdin's Baghdad markets and minarets. Nice work, having your test subjects pay you to be in your research study.

More recently, at a SIGCHI Conference, Pausch was talking about teaching teams of students to develop their own little virtual reality worlds or games, and showed some video of some of the projects. Although it certainly wasn't apparently at the time, this may have been associated with a project at Carnegie Mellon which is available free, called Alice, (at http://Alice.org) and is a 3-D animation programming environment for middle school and high school students.

Finally, after the cancer diagnosis, his "Last Lecture" became a very popular video. His own website" is probably the best source for material, if you're interested.

Dr. Pausch puts the lie to Mark Antony's assertions about good and evil.

tags: randy pausch death 7252008