My journey started sometime four years ago
when I was an art student in the National University of Singapore,
not exactly where you expect to find a tech start-up guy.
As part of the graduation requirement,
I had to take modules outside of the arts,
so I took one called “Sky and Telescopes,”
a practical introduction to the skies and optical equipment.
It took me on a journey two hours north of Singapore
into a small town called Mersing.
You don’t even see Mersing on most maps of Malaysia
because it’s a small place
and most people don’t go there for traveling.
That’s where it is – on the eastern coast of Malaysia.
The reason we had to go two hours up north
was because of light pollution.
Singapore has a very concentrated population,
we are the most light-polluted country in the world.
Sadly, this is not something unique to Singapore.
Over 60% and 80% of Americans and Europeans
can no longer see the night skies from where they are staying.
In fact, it’s gotten so bad
that, in the 1990s, in San Francisco, there was a blackout;
people called the police to notify them
that there are weird clouds hanging out in the skies.
(Laughter)
What they had just seen was the Milky Way.
(Laughter)
Nature has gotten so distant from us
that what’s natural is now becoming alien to us.
When I saw the Milky Way for the first time in Mersing,
it spanned from horizon to horizon, and I captured this image.
What you see here is the Milky Way,
and at the core of it,
there’s a supermassive black hole holding it all together.
There are millions of stars within the Milky Way,
then there are millions of galaxies out there
like the Milky Way itself.
This was not an easy image to take.
I had years of experience as a photographer,
and I had the help of the people below the tree line,
tending to the telescope, helping me.
My professor taught me a lot of stories in this course.
When you look up at the sky, and you look at a star,
it’s not just something that’s glowing.
What it’s doing, is it’s forging lighter elements into heavier elements
through a process called nuclear fusion.
That’s how hydrogen becomes helium, becomes oxygen, carbon,
and so on and so forth
until you reach the element iron, where nuclear fusion does not work at all.
When a star tries to fuse iron,
it explodes in a dramatic fashion called a supernova.
It spreads out all those particles
it has been forging over millions of years,
only for it to be pulled back together again
to form new stars and planets like our Earth.
That’s why we are called stardust.
We are literally made out of stars’ particles
that exploded millions of years ago.
His stories fascinated me,
but I can’t help but wonder
why most of my classmates were not there with me on that night?
After speaking to them I realized the problem:
the existing traditional astronomy equipment
is just too heavy, expensive and complex.
And even though it was all on loan from the university,
they did not want to be responsible for carrying it out
and doing astronomy imaging.
After searching for an answer,
we realized that it can all be solved through automation,
and all we require is computing power.
And computing power is one thing we do not have a lack of.
In 2009 NASA says
that your cell phone has more computing power
than what they had available to them on Apollo missions.
And those missions put men on the Moon.
Imagine how much computing power we have in our phones right now.
And we are even more lucky today.
We have hardware development kits
like the Raspberry Pi, Mars Board and Arduino
that allow us to come up with new product ideas,
allow us to test all these concepts without the help from governments or MNCs,
which is where you really see such innovations coming from.
And that’s exactly what we did.
The first prototype for TinyMOS
is nothing more than a scientific camera,
plastered in front of one such development board.
Over the years we’ve tested many of these
with the sole purpose of bringing astronomy imaging to everyone.
There are three key areas [where] we try to make astronomy easier.
The first one is astronomy itself.
When you look at the night skies,
there’s so many stars
you don’t really know what you’re looking at.
We’re building an augmented reality star map
to tell you exactly what stars and what constellations you’re looking at.
If you look at the animation, you’re searching for Mars,
[then] it points you exactly to where you should be looking at.
Because we’re building this technology,
we can know exactly what you’re pointing at,
[and] give you the correct capture settings
to capture it like the professionals do.
We put in a noise reduction library,
which is an automated noise reduction algorithm
similar to the ones that professional astronomers use,
and in one fell swoop all three difficulties are solved,
and you can capture night skies with one click of your hand.
After three years of R&D,
I finally have with me the world’s smallest astronomy camera.
(Applause) (Cheering)
This is one of eight prototypes that we have right now.
This is the noise reduction technology that we put in.
On the left is an image captured by this guy,
and that is very noisy.
After our noise reduction technology
it cleans it up.
And that’s how we are able to shrink down the form factor.
You no longer have to use the best equipment of the line.
You can use something much smaller and still get very good results.
We brought this out on a road trip to Melbourne,
and we managed to capture the Milky Way.
What surprised us was
we managed to catch the Southern Lights.
So keep a lookout on the lower left corner of the screen:
when you see green flashes that’s actually the Southern Lights.
(Video)
(Applause)
We wanted to put the power of capturing the night skies in your hands,
and that’s why we chose to take a more comprehensive route.
We decided to go for crowdfunding, and we did it on Indiegogo.
We spread a message to the crowdfunding community
that we wanted to bring astronomy imaging, the power of astronomy imaging,
and put it in your hands.
This is the video we showed them to convince them of what we are doing.
(Video)
Narrator: “We are all curious.
Each child peeking through a gap in the fence.
Every scientist hunting for an answer.
And all the lovers staring up at the sky.
While dreaming or while searching, we have always turned to the night sky.
Filled with the wonder of a billion stars and the infinite space around us,
all of us look up,
but how many of us can capture it, frame it, bring it home and share it?”
The crowdfunding community we met responded tremendously,
and we managed to raise our goal of 100,000 US dollars
within the first four hours of our launch.
To date, we managed to –
Thank you.
(Applause)
To date, we have raised over 500,000 US dollars in pre-orders,
and I’m glad to say that this thousand units
is going to start shipping 30 days from now.
(Cheering) (Applause)
Along the way of my journey, many people have asked me,
“You are an art student, you should be doing arts.
(Laughter)
How is it possible that you are building a technology start-up,
is this a scam?”
(Laughter)
My short answer to that question is
I work with a very talented and very dedicated team of people.
On the left, I have my CTO Lih Wei, he’s the best engineer I know of.
He actually joined the NUS overseas college program,
and he became a CTO
of a multimillion dollar start-up over there,
even though he was there for only a year.
Beside him, there’s Ashprit.
I met him in business school.
He’s a mechanical engineer by training,
but he’s fantastic at operations and advertising.
And beside me there is Raphael,
one of the best content creators that I know of.
He has touched almost all the videos on our YouTube channel.
And that’s how we leverage on each other strengths
to cover for our blind spots,
and that’s what makes TinyMOS possible.
The long answer is I fail, and I fail a lot.
My first tremendous failure happened about a decade plus ago.
I was a student.
I was 14 years old in my secondary school.
There was a period of time before smartphones were very prevalent,
so I’m kind of a little ancient.
This is an FM radio transmitter kit.
I wanted to pass messages
to my friends across the classroom without the teacher noticing.
(Laughter)
The problem was this guy works only in one direction,
and I wanted to have a second one to communicate effectively.
I can’t always be the one doing the talking.
So I tried to build a second one
because each of these development kits costs ten times my daily allowance.
I went and bought all the components and tried to put them together,
and it looked something like that.
And of course I fail.
I was not trained in electronic engineering.
That led me to go and find the smartest guy in school to help me out.
And that’s when I found my CTO, my childhood friend, Lih Wei.
We tried again and we still failed.
Of course, we were children back then! What are you thinking?
(Laughter)
My second failure happened
when I was serving in the national service.
I was one of those lucky few people who has chosen to be a pilot trainee.
It was my dream job since I was young.
Most people passed the pilot training course
after 15 flights,
or they failed it after the eighth flight.
I failed it on my sixth flight,
which means I failed it on my fifth flight,
and I failed a second review.
When that happens,
the Armed Forces put you on compulsory leave.
I was put on 10 days of leave,
and I was quite upset, having just lost my dream job.
My cousin noticed that,
and she signed me up for a photography course.
And that’s when I put my all
into understanding photography from the ground up,
and I became top of the class.
Throughout all these three years,
one thought stuck in my head.
It was the idea shared by Steve Jobs during a convocation.
He was saying,
“You cannot connect the dots looking forward.
You can only connect the dots looking backwards.”
If I wasn’t such a failure and trying to build my FM transmitter radio,
I wouldn’t have found my CTO.
If I had not been such a failure in trying to fly
and failed on my sixth flight,
I would not have devoted myself to learning photography.
The second thing I want to share with you guys
is something very quite personal.
The idea is:
Don’t let society’s label limit what you can do.
I’m an art student doing a tech start-up,
and you may be a science person doing arts,
but so long as you believe in what you’re doing,
you eventually find the resources to do it,
whether through friends or whether through self-learning.
This is an image I captured two weeks ago.
That’s the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, and that’s the moon in the background.
This was a photo that I conceived of five years ago,
but I couldn’t capture it until I had a Tiny1.
The reason is because the rental of telescopic equipment was so expensive
that a rental alone would cost more than the whole TinyMOS system.
So while I was capturing this image,
I actually captured a whole series of time lapses.
Let me show you that time lapse now.
(Video)
(Applause)
As you can see,
you can use TinyMOS not just for astrophotography
but for cityscapes as well.
It’s my personal goal for TinyMOS,
not just to bring astrophotography to everyone,
and let you experience the night sky,
but to become a symbol or product
that allows you to capture what you see in your mind’s eye,
for you to convey your creative message to the rest of the world.
And before I end today’s speech,
I’ll let you guys take a look at the skies tonight
and realize that, as beautiful as the stars are,
what’s really special is right here for we’re all made of stardust.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering)
”
Be First to Comment