A few weekends back, SaatchiNY sent some of our local creatives, accounts people and planners out to the NY Hall of Science in Queens to visit Maker Faire 2012. One of those attendees, Tani Yee, was kind enough to put together some thoughts on the sights and sounds of the festival, as well as to share some video and photographic highlights. Enjoy! #WeLoveRobots

“So what is the Maker Faire,” you might be asking.

Basically, the answer goes something like: “it’s a giant science fair for grown-ups filled with forward-thinking DIYers (or “makers”) who are exploring new forms and new technologies.” You might also go for: “a lot of nerds doing innovative things, much of which you’ve never seen before but is really, really cool.”

ROBOTS, ROBOTS, ROBOTS!
To start, there were a lot of robots of all kinds. PancakeBot was making silver dollar pancakes, Gus-14 was throwing three pointers, Hubo could perform tai chi with super human-like movements and Romo was an iPhone powered robot.

3D GROWS UP
Notably, a large section of the faire was dedicated to the still-emerging trend of 3D printing (of which we touched on briefly after last year’s faire). There’s certainly lots of interest (and money) in the field – a friend of mine recently received $250,000 of Kickstarter funding in a single day to create an affordable 3D printer. Here’s a 3D printer making a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower in just a few hours:

MY FAVES
Here are a couple videos of some of my favorite gizmos: Flipbookit and Dug North’s mechanical wooden sculptures:

01 HORSEINMOTION from Wendy Marvel on Vimeo.

And to cap things off, I (along with a group of friends) ended the day watching a life-size game of Mouse Trap that took a dude 15 years to make. The end of it involved a 2 ton safe crashing onto a car. Pretty spectacular stuff.