Founded by Aaron Rasmussen & David Rogier. masterclass.com
Classes from Dustin Hoffman, Serena Williams, James Patterson, Annie Leibovitz, Usher, and more to come
Joe Sabia and Aaron Rasmussen made the Webby-Nominated The Office Stare Machine after the success of The Office Time Machine. Joe had collected every stare into the camera while editing together all of the references in the office in chronological order for The Office Time Machine. After a few weeks of thinking about what to do with all those 706 stares into the camera, Joe and Aaron decided they'd allow users to type in any emotion and get a sequence of stares displaying that emotion.
Partly inspired by an article about how facial expressions are not interpreted universally across cultures, they immediately began researching theories on how to categorize and group emotions. They decided to develop their own grouping system by manually watching every single stare and tagging it with a primary, secondary, and tertiary emotion. Then they chose the 31 most distinct emotions from the total set (think of it as a sort of principal component analysis for feelings!). Using a list of around 500 synonyms, they linked synonyms by similarity to each of these 31 emotional keys, and voila, you can type in any emotion and get a playlist of stares that feel correct. They also ran stats on the most popular emotions people typed and looked for high rates of keys that were not in their synonym list, and then added those keys (unless they thought the searched for word was stupid). Tada! Try it. It's fun.
Even The Office's official page liked it!
"Probably the best game I played at E3"
-Alex Wawro of TechHive
IndieCade asked Aaron and Michael T. Astolfi to create an Oculus Rift-based game for E3 2013. In 3 weeks, they produced "A Tree Screams in the Forest," a short, 5-minute horror game. The premise is that you are walking down a creepy forest path, and some of the trees are trying to kill you. Like the Boos in Super Mario 3 or the weeping angels in Dr.Who, the trees only move when you are not looking at them, making your survival entirely dependent on where you are looking with the Oculus Rift. Eventually, you find a clearing with a bonfire, and you must draw the trees through the bonfire and burn them to get to your car and escape the forest.
A Tree Screams was covered on a variety of blogs including Polygon, Kill Screen Daily, and Game Informer.
Mr.Ghost is an EMF Detector for iPhone. It uses the built in gyros to indicate the direction of powerful EMF sources. It received Kickstarter project of the day and coverage in the Huffington Post.
Mr.Ghost was sold on ThinkGeek.com and Amazon.com but Aaron discontinued it as he shifted his focus to MasterClass exclusively.
BlindSide is a survival/horror adventure game with no graphics at all. Navigate a 3D world using only your ears and what's between them. Using headphones and an iOS device, players rotate in the real world to rotate their character in the virtual world, interacting with a fully collidable world. Created by Aaron Rasmussen and Michael T. Astolfi. The Kickstarter project was covered by Wired.com and BoingBoing.net amongst others.
BlindSide was a finalist at IndieCade 2012 and double nominated for best sound and best narrative at the Brazilian International Games Festival in 2012. It won the "Most Innovative" award at the 2013 Games for Change festival.
Zombie Jerky is regular teriyaki beef jerky with a tasteless, odorless green coating. Surprising how just a color change can affect your appetite. Zombie Jerky was covered by many news outlets, and was only released after a protracted review process with the USDA which objected to the original copy that cited "Zombie Cows" and had a biohazard symbol logo.
Zombie Blood followed Blood in edible pop-culture. The website even had a fake Zombie Apocalypse News radio station. Well ahead of the Zombie culture curve, it later helped sponsor and promote the Zombie Walk in San Diego Comic-Con in 2011, which attracted over 1000 people dressed as zombies to shamble through the streets of San Diego.
Nuclear Energy Powder is caffeinated candy inspired by radiation test sources from the 40's and 50's, and titled with names like Uranium Yellowcake, and Radium Blue Raspberry.
Blood Energy Potion is an internationally distributed energy drink with the same nutritional content as real blood and packaged in an IV-style bag. Blood was created by Aaron Rasmussen and Elijah Szasz at Harcos Laboratories before they sold it. It is sold at Hot Topic amongst other outlets and received considerable press. Marketing included an automated telephone menu that allowed callers to take a self-administered "bloodlust test," if they passed, they would hear an operator pick up the phone then die at the hands of a vampire, finally ending in just a dead phone line. Hundreds called in to try it out.
We turned a robot into a catapult. Because why not?
Mana Energy Potion is the brand that launched Harcos Laboratories, the company Aaron Rasmussen co-founded in 2007 to produce real world versions of virtual world items, amongst other pop-culture relevant products. Mana Potion has appeared in every major gaming magazine, in the Wall Street Journal, on G4TV, and a number of video games. Jon Brence joined the team just before the Health Potion launch and continued to assist in product development and marketing for the rest of the products created by Harcos until its sale in 2011.
Wiibot was a fun Saturday project where we wrote some quick pattern recognition for the (then new) wiimote for Nintendo's Wii console. We attached a sword, amongst other things, to a Kuka industrial robot, and hacked away, using 1 of 5 pre-programmed cuts to mimic the patter of the wiimote slashes. The Wiibot video was a quick hit, garnering coverage in many tech blogs, and even a front page feature in the Wall Street Journal as part of an article on Wii hacking. The video was used in Nintendo's E3 intro video that year.
Aaron co-founded USM right out of college. There, the team developed the RoboCut stone cutting system. At it's core it had a KUKA 6-axis robot carrying a 55,000psi waterjet nozzle, and a 15hp diamond saw. It used augmented reality and photogrammetry to view robot paths before cutting 1000lb slabs of granite and marble into kitchen counters, floor designs, or arbitrary shapes and sizes. RoboCut sped up the entire granite cutting process, combining the speed of a saw and the intricate curving cuts of a waterjet. Before the acquisition, RoboCut machines were the largest consumers of Kuka robots in the US outside of the automotive industry.
