Spatial computing experimentalist Daniel Beauchamp took a year and a half off from posting non-stop viral videos under his cyperpunk alias Pushmatrix.
There were Beat Saber fingers, sign language tests, and some people will never forgive him for the cheese grater hand tracking video. Beauchamp is back, though, and his first video of 2024 immediately lit X on fire. As of this writing, the video is working its path to some 20 million views in its first 48 hours.
This time he’s given us a glimpse of… spatial vacuuming.
Spatial Vacuuming
Never miss a spot again! pic.twitter.com/VJlHaY9XIJ
— Daniel Beauchamp (@pushmatrix) January 23, 2024
“There’s this really interesting thing that happens with videos like my spatial vacuuming,” Beauchamp explained to me over direct message. “So many people are like “why would I buy a device to do this”?
The mistake, Beauchamp observes, is that “you don’t buy a device to do this.”
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“You have a device that you already use on the regular…and suddenly you can augment things around you,” he adds. “I didn’t buy a phone so I could set alarms. But now that I have this thing on me that can set alarms, why wouldn’t I use it.”
Remarkably, Beauchamp didn’t view the software example he built as being “gamified” — he simply intended to use a Quest controller strapped to a vacuum to track the area of the floor he’d already covered.
“To me it’s just showing what’s left, not a game haha,” he wrote.
You can follow Beauchamp as Pushmatrix on X. Unfortunately, he previewed some of his upcoming videos and they made my skin crawl so follow at your own risk.
Catch up on some of his previous experiments in the video embedded below:
