- Hi, I'm Abhishek Singh, and,
I don't know, I find it
hard to describe myself.
Hi, I'm Abhishek, and
I've recreated the iconic
first level of Super Mario Brothers
as a first-person, life-size,
augmented reality game.
(chill electronic music)
I'm kind of a cross between an engineer,
a developer, a designer, and an artist.
I grew up in India and
studied business in undergrad.
Which is very different
from what I'm doing today.
I did have a start-up back
in India, which was actually
my first introduction in
programming in general
because I've always had all these ideas
but no real way to
actually build them out.
So I was like, okay, let
me just quit everything
and just spend my entire
time learning how to program.
So I just happened to chance
upon in some forum online
about this program called
ITP which was at NYU.
So I immediately emailed them,
ended up getting accepted,
and then I found myself in New York,
and that's where I've been
for the last three and a half years.
This is the entrance of ITP.
It's kind of like a mix of
an art and a tech program.
It brings people from a
diverse set of backgrounds
and puts them into this
relatively small space.
I never started off intending
to build Super Mario AR,
I wanted to create a large, outdoor,
expansive kind of experience.
This is the location actually where
I shot and filmed the entire
Super Mario experience.
I arrived at 5:30 at the crack of dawn,
dressed and donned completely
in a Super Mario costume,
but I think more interesting for people
right here in Central Park you see a guy
dressed in this weird costume,
wearing a weird headset on his head,
jumping around seemingly to something
that they could not see either.
I definitely got a few weird stares,
but considering it's New York,
I think they've seen weirder things.
I actually started by building
out in virtual reality,
which of course is different
from augmented reality,
and soon realized that virtual
reality was kind of limiting,
something that I always
found interesting was
instead of stepping into
the world of the computer,
it's kind of, bring that virtual world
into our physical world.
I started off literally
just taking a cube,
and trying to place it
in the space around us.
In one of my experiments, I took that cube
and placed it slightly above my head,
and then I stepped under
that cube and looked up,
and for some reason, all these
memories from my childhood
kind of came flashing back and I was like,
this is Super Mario Brothers,
that cube above my head
is a brick that I should
be jumping to break.
So as someone who doesn't
have a technical background,
I have kind of a unique
perspective of how to get into
creating these kind of
experiences, these kind of games,
or just being able to
enter into tech field,
which might seem a little
difficult for people at first,
I myself have made several failed attempts
at learning how to program.
I think the main issue with that was that
I was learning without a purpose,
because knowledge that is not
applied or used is easily forgotten.
And once I started realizing that
I should instead lead with
what I wanted to build,
instead of learning the tech
and the tools behind it,
everything started falling in place.
So I think, build something
out of your passion
about something that
excites you personally,
and that'll ensure that you
get over all the frustration
that comes with learning something new.
But all those moments of frustration
are ultimately interspersed
with these moments of joy,
and that's the joy that
comes and leads to creation.
(light-hearted electronic music)
- Hey, Unsolved is on a new
channel, and now your part,
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- That was my part.
