Tom and Ideas

[zvanut]

do u go through extensive designing and brainstorming for new products, or do u get them in dreams or they spark from somethin else?

[Prezents]

Tom probably wakes up in a cold sweat with hot ideas.

[nutz]

interesting idea zvanut... lol :D

[Vegeta]

I swear he got the Warp Feed idea from those Hot-Wheels tracks that you put teh car in and it slid by those spinning wheels and it shot the car around the track.. I always wanted one of those.

[Cha0tic]

if you look at the AGD supertour videos, he shows us a room where all the brainstorming takes place. its pretty cool.

[zvanut]

but maybe all of toms ideas he comes up w/ in his sleep, that room could become the AO Party Room :)

[Snooky]

Im not sure if this is true however i heard he came up with the idea for the warp feed in a dream and then woke up and sketched the idea on some paper. Hope tom responds so i know if this is true or not.

[AGD]

Ideas usually come to me through stress. If something is not working, or I need to create something that has never been done before I will spend hours, days, even weeks thinking about it every free minute. I works for me like jigsaw puzzle where you have a lot of pieces laying on a mental table. I try to put them together in my mind and see what fits. The difference is I get to make up all the pieces. Eventually, just like a puzzle, the parts go together and once you get the big picture it goes together faster. Many times there are a few parts that fit together but don't go anywhere so you set them aside and see if they make sense with something else later.

That was how I used to do it on my own but that has changed now. When it comes to paintball I can only use the pieces you say you want. The players no longer give me the freedom to go where I think it should go, they have very specific ideas (whether true or not) about what they want.

For example, they only want stuff lighter, ok then it's plastic, no but they want it anodized pretty colors, ok then it's aluminum, yea but that is too expensive. Right about there is where religious perception comes in to drive new products. "NEW IMPROVED ALUMINUM COATED POLYMER! STRONGER THAN STEEL LIGHTER THAN AIR!" And the people say "YES, that's exactly what I wanted!" If it has any basis in fact has nothing to do with it, they take it anyway.

When the customer base has a strong opinion of what they want it limits what they get to an even greater extent. Idea guys listening to the customers try and hit it right in the middle not at the extremes where the cool new stuff happens. All the manufacturers saw what happened to the Warp Feed when it first came out. Everyones negative comments insured that other companies idea guys would never go down that road. Hence you get the HALO, same style of product with better performance, half a pound heavier and they pre sell 25,000.

The idea guy that will replace me in the future will think like this. "They all think barrel diameter has something to do with accuracy so that is one piece. They think low pressure guns are more accurate even though it's actually higher pressure behind the ball but they can't measure it anyway. Digital gauges give the impression that it's digitally controlled so we can skip the hard stuff just throw a fancy e-gauge on there." And walla! you have a new and improved product from the leader in paintball technology!

Ok this has turned into a rant, I apologize. I hesitated to even answer this. To answer the question, I put together pieces in my mind over long periods of time until stuff works.

AGD

[Snooky]

Wow Tom stays up really late or wakes up really early!

[Butterfingers]

Originally posted by AGD
The idea guy that will replace me in the future will think like this. "They all think barrel diameter has something to do with accuracy so that is one piece. They think low pressure guns are more accurate even though it's actually higher pressure behind the ball but they can't measure it anyway. Digital gauges give the impression that it's digitally controlled so we can skip the hard stuff just throw a fancy e-gauge on there." And walla! you have a new and improved product from the leader in paintball technology!

AGD

You forgot the high capacity elf storage chamber in the front of the gun. More elves mean more distance and accuracy.

[zvanut]

WOW!
thats more than i expected but now i can see what you are doin up at AGD.

[Vegeta]

zvanut, you're a smart guy, I think... And when you think about it.. doesn't alot of this apply to your own mind?

I know it does to me. Everything I do, weather it's trying to design some new paintball gear, to modeling in 3DSM, to Football and other things.. its all a puzzle. And we all know you can't start a puzzle without the peices. So, in your mind, your peices are your ideas. If your designing a paintgun, you start with what you know, what you can do, and what people want. You might also start with some 'old' peices from a past projest that never fit. Then you start fittign them together. Some fit perfectly. Others need to be modifyed before they fit, and some just won't fit. You try to get as many pecies to fit as possible. Then, you start to see the big picture. It can be a beautiful Monet, Piccaso, Rimbrant, or... it can be a kindergarten refridgerator drawing. Scribbled and not- all fittign too tight, with things outside the lines. It's the fine-tuning that comes now. What won't work.

To get the picture as sharp and beautiful as possible, yuo can't think withing normal boundries. Tom knows this. Like htey say, you must think outside the box. Companies like AGD do think outside hte box. Companies like Kingman don't. They duplicate peices from their finished puzzles. To be perfectly creative, you can't do this. They aren't recycling old ideas that didn't fit, becuse those ideas did fit. They are merely copying their own puzzles and tweaking them. nothing is totally diffrent.

To think outside the box you must first get out of it. And some people don't have the intellegence to walk through that door.

[Vegeta]

up^

[Shaft]

That reminds me, anytime you want to get going with that NEW IMPROVED POLYMER, the happier I'll be.

[MantisMag]

yeah my mind works like that when i'm trying to solve a problem except some jerk picked up all the pieces and scattered them in the woods. stupid @$#%! i'm gonna get that guy. soon as i find the pieces. i think there's one in that rabbit hole over there...