This is the first sci-fi vignette for this newsletter - Intersecting Planes. Consider each of these as inspiration to riff & expand on further in the comments if the spirit moves you.
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It all started simply enough. One day a group of precocious teenagers in Seattle decided to make an AI-driven, animatronic doorknob for Halloween. Their plan was to create an animatronic face and place it on top of their existing home lock so that when trick-or-treaters knocked on their door, the doorknob would open it’s eyes widely, and start speaking to them. They programmed the doorknob with a few jokes, a proper name and called it a day. “It’s just like Beauty and the Beast!” they remarked after working diligently for a few months connecting the plastic face to sensors and some face recognition/speech APIs.
Halloween night 2023 was a hit. The door handle they created went viral on TikTok… And that might have been the end of the story as the video faded into the internet void were it not for an enterprising engineer at Disney that decided to take the concept much further. Working with Imagineers across the company, this engineer put together a proposal for an entire line of products called “animate homes.” Instead of allegedly “Smart homes” that just turned on light bulbs in one’s home, “animate homes” were magical experiences giving everyone the real Disney experience.
The first product extensions were just copies from old movies: there was the exact animated doorknob from Alice in Wonderland, for example; there was also a dancing clock and animate candelabra from Beauty and the Beast.
Quite rapidly the extensions grew into other parts of the home. One of the most meaningful inflection points was actually the creation of gargoyles: for just a few hundred dollars you could buy an animatronic gargoyle that acted as an animated security camera and would walk on your roof. Families purchased groups of them that could interact across homes and fill the neighborhood’s evening sky with acrobatic displays. Gargoyles also served as security cameras at night in addition to chasing away raccoons from garbage cans and providing aerial home views. Kids loved them. Robbers hated them. People couldn’t get enough…
The years that followed were a flash. The Gargoyle line expanded exponentially as people started to demand more animatronics for their homes. After decades of neglect, this piece of technology flourished. Designs were copied and commoditized and a whole Noah’s Ark of fauna appeared in people’s homes: animatronic cats, birds, and cute baby bears roamed houses, nursing homes, and gardens around the world. People’s homes were filled with life.
So next time you have a conversation with your door handle, think about how odd it must have been to have such static and boring houses not that long ago…