The name make sense after looking at the tag line – “people doing strange things with electricity “. Dorks are usually perceived as strange, and bots, well they do things with electricity. Dorkbot is much like it sounds, a meeting of geeks, knob twiddles, NASA scientists, and artists talking about anything that’s even remotely related to electricity.

Artist rendering of a space elevator

Dorkbot began in New York City in 2000 and has since spread to 65 cities around the globe. Once a month, 3-5 presenters share their work and engage in dialog. Dorkbot even has a theme song.

Jeremy Fitzhardinge

Up first was Jeremy Fitzhardinge with a project originally intended for robotic vision. While exploring “feature tracking” logic from the output of a video stream, he noticed the clusters of “feature points” looked like star constellations. He then decided to shift his focus from robots to stars and create an interactive star engine, complete with birthing stars, constellation groupings, and super novas. The star patterns are based on features the video "sees", so user relationship becomes quite interesting.