With fewer startups, the exhibits at Xi'an's Maker Faire are no longer practical — but they're more imaginative

Parent-child activities, hand-painted driverless cars, robots you assemble yourself — there were plenty of hands-on projects that were "useless but fun."

"Three, two, one, fight!"

At the host's command, a fight began on stage — except the two combatants weren't human. They were robots.

The crowd around the stage had waited a long time for this opening act: the match, set for 9:30, had been pushed back half an hour for one reason or another. Outside the venue, plenty of visitors were still waiting to get in.

Mi Tang, the ticketing partner for Maker Faire Xi'an, told us that events like this are rare in Xi'an. Several thousand people had signed up through their registration link, the organizers had given away tens of thousands of tickets in advance, and anyone could also register on-site and walk in free.

Unlike the Maker Faires we'd been to in Shenzhen and Beijing, this one in Xi'an kept its distance from startups. Over two days, four maker forums invited more than 20 makers to talk about their projects. Not one of those talks was about a business model.

Here is what a QDaily reporter saw and heard on the ground: squeezing in among parents keen on early education to try a 3D printing pen, dropping two coins into a claw machine built out of Lego to grab a toy, locking eyes for ten seconds with a human-shaped camera to get a photo taken, watching a robot combat match and a drone race, and watching traditional craftsmen carve shadow puppets, make paper the ancient way, and even build wooden-wheeled carts.

Robot combat: the first challenge is getting it to stand up like a fighter

The robot combat competition, already staged more than 30 times in the United States and Japan, is one of Maker Faire's regular fixtures; the rules and the standards for competing robots are set by whoever hosts it.

This past weekend we watched a robot combat match at Maker Faire Xi'an. From the qualifiers through the semifinals to the final, robot combat ran on the main stage for two full days. Over those two days, almost no one in the 10,000-square-meter hall could tune out the noise from the main stage.

The matches were run by the Taiwan Robot Combat League, which capped competing robots at 3 kilograms and set out nearly 20 further rules covering body width, foot size, how weight is distributed between the upper and lower body, and more.

The competition ran over two days with 14 teams. Each match lasted 3 minutes, and whoever had more points when time ran out won. Competitors came mostly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan.

A 40-year-old competitor from Taiwan told QDaily that he has a full-time job in law and does robot combat as a hobby. "My work has nothing to do with robots at all — I just do it for fun. Back in Taiwan we have our own dedicated engineer."

If you came hoping for robot combat like the kind in Real Steel, though, the Maker Faire would disappoint you. This was less a fight than a wrestling match: the robots kept falling over, sometimes because of control problems, sometimes because of bugs in the software. Combat robots look cute and clumsy, but getting them to move at all is hard. Standing up, crouching, sitting down, throwing a punch — every motion has to be driven by an algorithm. Under the rules, a robot's motors have to sit at the joints of its limbs, not in its torso. A robot that loses power can only sit there.

Huang Zonghui, a 15-year-old from Hong Kong, and his teammate were this year's champions. After losing to a Taiwanese competitor in the first day's preliminaries, Huang carried his robot straight backstage to debug it. In the closing moments of that match his robot kept falling over, costing him any chance to fight back and catch up on points. "There was a bug in the robot's program," Huang said.

Combat robots cost a lot to build — most robots that meet this competition's standards run to more than 10,000 yuan. "The shell kits are all much the same, so we just buy those. The most expensive part is the motor — its power decides how hard the robot can punch and how fast it can move. I give the engineers and designers a body design, and they judge whether it can actually be built," the Taiwanese competitor said.

The event's emcee, Lu Congyong, founded the Taiwan Robot Combat League. He is also the general manager of an industrial computer manufacturer, where he works on robotics R&D.

Besides this event, he has run 10 seasons of competitions in Taiwan. Competing robots have gone from nearly half of them "not being able to walk" and the other half "not making it to the center of the ring" to robots that today can walk, jump, and even kick. "That's a rise in technical capability," Lu said.

Over the two days of the weekend, robot combat became a kind of background soundtrack to Maker Faire Xi'an — though the booths and the workshops with lines to get in kept people too busy to follow the fights.

A 3D movie like shadow puppetry

"The show's about to start!" Before our QDaily reporter could make out what the volunteer was saying about the show, the kids lined up behind us pushed us into the silvery-white domed tent.

Inside, the tent was pitch black, a bit like a planetarium's star hall. A volunteer used a flashlight to light up a small patch at the center of the tent. The performer was holding an A4-sized cue card with instructions for the show written in Chinese.

The performer, a maker from Japan, spoke almost no Chinese. Guided by the cue cards, the several dozen people inside the tent, most of them children, sat down on the ground in the marked-off area and passed around 3D glasses as they waited for the show to begin.

What followed took me by surprise. Using light and shadow, the performer threw 3D effects from handmade paper carvings onto the domed screen. The props looked crude, but the effect was startlingly convincing: through the 3D glasses, the silhouette of a Tyrannosaurus rex lunged forward, and more than a few in the audience shrieked.

As soon as the show ended, before we could say more to the performer, volunteers ushered us out of the tent. The crowd outside had already formed another long line, and the performer still had to reset the props for the next show, starting right away.

Installations like this 3D movie — "useless but fun" — were everywhere at Maker Faire Xi'an over the two days.

Cai Hou paper

At the center of the Cai Hou paper booth, a middle-aged woman was carefully laying flower petals and blades of grass onto a frame that had just been dipped to pick up a layer of pulp. Once dry, it would be a sheet of flower paper.

Over the two days, papermaker Master He and his colleagues did what they normally do at the Zhouzhi Cai Hou Paper Museum: beat tree bark into pulp, then turn the pulp into paper. To show what the ancient paper is good for, they also invited three Xi'an calligraphers and painters to work on site.

Museum director Liu Xiaodong told us he had walked around the other booths during the two days of the fair. The robots, the drones, the 3D printers — he filed them all under one label: "high tech."

"Ours is ancient high tech; theirs is modern high tech."

He walked QDaily through the papermaking process step by step, stressing that what sets it apart most is pulp made with no chemical additives. But watching the robots, he found himself wanting to team up with a robot maker to improve on the hand technique of dipping pulp.

"Though from what I saw, the little robots here still can't dip pulp." Director Liu had already lined up a factory in Beijing that, he said, would design something for them free of charge — "to protect our traditional craft."

"Want a photo? Look me in the eye for ten seconds first"

Put on that helmet-like camera, and Xiao Ziwen, an artist from Hong Kong, becomes Touchy, a living camera.

The Touchy camera is a pair of shutters that open and close on their own, a lens, and a touchscreen. Only another person's touch opens the shutter. "Come on, touch me, so I can see you." Getting people to touch him was the thing Touchy said most during the fair.

I took the conductive ball he handed me and touched his arm with my other hand. The current made the shutters over his eyes snap open, and his eyes appeared. He blinked, signaling for me to put my hand on his cheek.

When two people's touch lasts more than ten seconds, Touchy takes a photo by itself. It felt awkward at first — staring into a stranger's eyes for ten seconds just to get something like a selfie — but once we got into it, that stopped mattering. Because we stayed in contact the whole time, Touchy's shutter kept firing while we talked, until Xiao finally had to find the pause switch on the helmet so the shutter would stop interrupting the conversation.

"If it took a photo the instant you touched it, that would be too short — there might be no real eye contact at all. So I set it to fire only after ten seconds of contact," Xiao Ziwen told QDaily.

In his talk at the maker forum, he said Touchy had turned out to be a great icebreaker. Kids loved Touchy. Passing his booth over the two days, we often saw him bent half over, showing the children crowded around him the photo he'd just taken.

The idea behind the art project was that the internet and mobile phones have loosened the boundaries of social life while also making communication dehumanized, leaving people more prone to social anxiety. Xiao Ziwen is from Hong Kong and now lives in Tokyo; he developed the camera with the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. Since a photo can only be taken through touch and eye contact, every picture is made jointly by the photographer and the person photographed.

After the talk, he asked the whole audience to join a group photo, which meant every row had to hold hands to pass the "touch" along. He later told me it wasn't that anyone left untouched would be left out of the photo — he just wanted the ritual. He does this at the end of every public talk: because the camera isn't wide-angle, the photo has to be taken in several passes, and over those few minutes an audience of strangers who had been willing only to fist-bump the person next to them gradually ends up holding hands.

Xiao Ziwen also doesn't want people dwelling on the technical questions. When someone asked where all his photos were stored, he tapped his head and said, "They're all stored in here."

Xiao and his team also brought a circuit-picture-frame workshop to Maker Faire Xi'an. Five soldering irons sat on the table in the middle of the booth: if you wanted to take home a print of the photo Touchy took of you, you had to sit down and put a frame together yourself. Carrying on Touchy's interest in touch, the frame lights up at the lightest brush of a hand.

Touchy's booth was planned together with Maywa Denki, an up-and-coming band from Japan.

Maywa Denki is a regular at Maker Faires around the world. On the evening of the first day, they put on a show that was less a band performance than a product demo — one of the few parts of Maker Faire Xi'an you had to buy a ticket for.

Maywa Denki was once the name of a real factory, more than 40 years ago. The factory ran for only 10 years before going under in the oil crisis of the late 1970s. Fourteen years later, a pair of twin brothers picked the name "Maywa Denki" back up for their new band, because that was where they had spent their childhood: it was their father's factory.

The band's uniforms copy what the factory's workers wore, and on stage the members address each other by titles that mirror the factory's hierarchy — president, vice president, manager, and so on.

At the top of the show, "president" Nobumichi Tosa announced: "Next, I'm going to introduce some crazy, silly, completely useless instruments."

Every time a new instrument came out, the "president" would demonstrate what it did, then shout "Switch On!" as the cue to start playing.

The band invented all the instruments themselves, and they are steeped in the feel of Japanese consumer electronics from the second half of the last century. As they were revealed one by one on stage, a charm unlike an ordinary music performance filled the room: beyond the rhythm and the melody, you could feel the inventiveness of the instruments and how catching it was — mechanical flowers that opened and closed in time with the music, a mechanical doll dancing alongside the humans, custom-made tap shoes.

Steven Johnson and the Little Inventors

"Hold on, let me put my hearing aid in." The gray-haired, slightly anxious older man in front of us is the American surrealist cartoonist Steven Johnson, who likes to call himself a "whimsical thinker" and a "futurist."

He has been drawing cartoons since 1971, all of them straight-faced, faintly comic, absurd inventions: a toilet shared by several people, a bicycle with a trampoline built in, a car with its own treadmill. In 1991 he drew smart glasses with a camera and a screen; a dozen years later Google brought a similar design to market as Google Glass.

Johnson never studied industrial design. In his own words: "I just draw my ideas."

Johnson is a regular at maker events of every kind and has been to several in the San Francisco Bay Area, but this was his first trip to China. This past May he got an invitation from Liu Dezhi, the founder of Maker Faire Xi'an. In our interview, Johnson said: "I don't really think I'm the best fit for this kind of thing. Makers are all working hard to actually create something, but by temperament I just like using my head. I can predict the future, but if you asked me to turn an idea into a product, I'd get bored."

"Maybe they invited me precisely because I'm not like any of them," he told QDaily. "If you're asking about purpose, all these inventions I draw are useless."

Johnson's peak was the 1990s, when two Japanese magazines paid him $500 a week to draw two ideas. He often bolted together things that had nothing to do with each other, and the whole point of drawing them was to have fun.

"Back then, connecting different things came easily to me. Now I find predicting the future has gotten harder, because technology and the pace of life have both sped up too much," he said.

His booth had cartoon posters hanging up and several stacks of books, collections of his work over the years. Even with almost no shared language, the booth was surrounded by people all day — understanding Johnson's work takes no language, only a little imagination.

One father bought Johnson's collection Cars for his son and asked him to write the boy's name on the title page. "It's not that we like his drawings — it's that we value his ideas." This Mr. Liu works in the defense industry and had come to the fair with his wife and son. "He likes cars, and we saw this book was all ideas for vehicles," he told us. As he flipped through it, he explained Johnson's drawings to our reporter, now and then pointing out ideas that could already be manufactured.

Many of the ideas in the book were drawn decades ago. Not far from Johnson's booth, an exhibition put on by Little Inventors showed several dozen inventions made up by children.

Normally the project collects children's drawings of their ideas, brings in designers to pick out some of them, and turns the doodles into real objects.

"We hope this process helps spark children's creativity as they grow up, and gets parents to take that creativity seriously," staff member Pan Beibei told us.

In front of one exhibit — a machine that blows air on your face — Ms. Liu, who had brought her seven-year-old son, seemed more excited than he was. She pointed out each part of the device and explained to him what it did.

She teaches at a university and went to Shenzhen last year to look into electronics and maker education. Plenty of the parents around her are interested in these things too, but Xi'an doesn't hold many events like this.

Dominic Wilcox, who started the project, told QDaily that Little Inventors has been running for a year and a half and aims to spark children's creativity. "My high school teacher once encouraged me this same way. That's when I first realized I had some ability in drawing and design. Now I want to use drawing to get kids involved too," Wilcox said.

One design that stuck with him, he said, was a sleeping pill: take it and you could close your left eye to rest while keeping your right eye open to keep working; take the other pill and it would work the other way around. The child didn't know how the brain actually works, and the idea wouldn't function — but, as Wilcox put it: "Can you believe this was a five-year-old's idea? Getting the idea and the question out there, thinking about it a bit more — that's what matters most."

Every kid at the fair wanted a trinket folded out of tape: Tapigami

The Tapigami work area at the center of the venue was hung with folded-tape ornaments made by Danny Schieble and his colleagues. It was one of the most crowded spots at the fair.

"Tapigami" comes from joining "tape" and "origami."

Set against all the Lego and Lego-like brick constructions elsewhere at the fair, Schieble said tape is his Lego. "It can be made into separate modules, then stuck together to become buildings, figures, or all kinds of strange doodles."

Whether he was at his own workshop or wandering the hall, this artist from Sacramento always had a roll of 3M tape around his wrist. Every so often he tore off a strip and folded it into little flowers, horns, and ornaments with no real-world counterpart. When someone leaned in to look or to talk to him, Schieble would stick a folded piece onto them.

Dale Dougherty, who created Maker Faire, believes everyone has it in them to become a maker, but that people are sometimes very passive: some things you only understand once you try them.

Schieble sees it much the same way. He told QDaily that when people think of art they think of painting, playing an instrument, dancing — forms that demand real skill, which can scare people off trying. "Tape is different. It's like folding a paper airplane. Simple materials that are easy to get make people much more willing to try making something."

An idea made of a cardboard box: Big Face Box

This was the second time Yuji Hayashi of Japan and his team had come to a maker fair in China; the first was in Shenzhen. Both times he brought Big Face Box.

Hayashi usually buys a cardboard box wherever he's exhibiting, cuts off one face, and fits it with a magnifying lens. Inside the box is a power supply and lights to fill in the light. When a visitor puts the box over their head, a big-headed figure appears behind the lens.

"I'm an editor at Daily Portal Z, a design and startup website, and I usually design odd interactive ideas. Big Face Box is really an improved version of another project of mine," Hayashi explained to QDaily, pulling out his phone to show us some of his earlier work.

Before he got the "big head" effect with a cardboard box and light bent through a lens, Hayashi made a series of big-head paper models. He would print a portrait on paper, fold it into a helmet-like mask, and put it on to become a big-headed figure. But that meant printing, cutting, and gluing for every single person, "which was way too much trouble," Hayashi said. That's where the idea for Big Face Box came from.

A visitor asked Hayashi whether he had a sales agent in Xi'an or anywhere in China; he waved the question off. "My stuff looks kind of dumb. Would anyone really buy it as a product?" Hayashi said. "But even if it were wildly popular, I've never thought about turning these into merchandise. I started this project to make it easier for other people to take part. Big Face Box is open source — you can find the full assembly instructions online."

Before this, Hayashi had shown a "CNN breaking news board" at a Daily Portal Z event in Shanghai: a clear plastic board printed with "CNN Breaking" and various headlines. Hold it right up against the lens and take a photo, and it looks like a CNN news flash.

Drone racing

FPV drone racing was the other competition at Maker Faire Xi'an, and it was also its first time in China.

FPV stands for "first person view," and refers broadly to drones — usually small remote-controlled quadcopters — flown with footage shot from that perspective. Because they fly so fast, competitors wear goggles and race from the drone's point of view.

The organizers set up a small indoor course with 7 gate obstacles, one four-legged gate to fly through, and one circular pass-through zone. One lap was 150 meters, and competitors had to fly 4 laps per round.

X-Fly, a team with experience running drone races, told QDaily that these racing drones fly fast, turn nimbly, and climb quickly — which is what makes them worth watching.

"These drones have strong motor thrust and batteries that discharge efficiently in an instant, and the frame is carbon fiber, so it's light and takes a crash well," X-Fly's chief brand officer told QDaily. A member of STD, one of the competing teams, showed us their racing drone and said a competition-grade FPV drone usually costs more than 8,000 to 10,000 yuan.

But the organizers couldn't put the first-person flight view up on a big screen, which made it hard for the audience to feel the tension. Some parents and children complained that the drones flew too fast to see; others complained that the drones simply smashed into the obstacles and weren't much to watch.

During the race, one drone flew off the course. No one in the audience was hurt.

The pilots themselves clearly got a kick out of it. We found video online shot from the flight view — watching it might give you a sense of where the satisfaction of building your own racing drone comes from.

Hardware startups have cooled off, and making has gone back to what its founder first imagined

In China, people began talking about makers around 2012 and 2013, just as several smart-hardware projects on Kickstarter broke fundraising records.

Maker Faire first came to China in 2013, holding its first event in Shenzhen, then Beijing and Chengdu, and this year Xi'an.

In 2014 Dale Dougherty came to Shenzhen too, where Maker Faire Shenzhen was tied closely to startups at the time, and the biggest star of the event was Chris Anderson — more popular than anyone else there, including people who had actually done more, among them Dougherty, who coined the term "maker movement," and Arduino co-founder Tom Igoe.

Besides writing the bestseller Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, Anderson founded the drone company 3D Robotics, which Forbes called the most promising drone company in North America.

But hardware startups didn't stay in the maker movement.

Pebble, the smartwatch that raised $12 million on Kickstarter in 2012, sold off its assets in 2016. The hardware companies that made it to an IPO haven't fared much better: GoPro's stock has fallen steadily since it listed in 2014 and now sits at 27% of its offering price. Fitbit, which makes smart wristbands, now trades at under 20% of its IPO price.

Once several listed companies crashed, it became harder for the hardware companies behind them to go public, which cooled venture capital's enthusiasm directly.

By 2016, even CES, the biggest consumer electronics show, had gone back to being the home turf of the big traditional consumer-electronics and car companies, with the VR and 3D-printing booths looking bleak.

With Maker Faire in Xi'an, without the crowd of startups you'd get in Beijing or Shenzhen, the stars of the show were the projects that let you make something with your hands — decorating a driverless car, putting a robot together. Even looking through a microscope drew a long line.

Among the many booths we did spot a few startups: companies pitching shared parking-space locks, smart water-oil separators, even Internet of Things solutions. But next to the robot booths, the Lego displays, and the modified prop cars, these startup booths looked quiet. Even Tencent's makerspace, which had landed a prime spot, was drawing a crowd only thanks to an interactive photo screen.

Yangling Kongmiao, the company pitching the water-oil separator, simply put out 3D-printed keychains and trinkets instead, and that drew a few more questions.

The company booths that did draw crowds were all parent-child related. Directly across from Yangling Kongmiao's booth was Suanni Lebo, a Xi'an children's education company, whose booth was packed both days with parents asking questions.

A woman holding the hand of a child not yet three had just written down her contact details when the child started pulling her away. As she headed for the exit, she called back over her shoulder: "Add me on WeChat, book me a trial class."

"We signed our kid up for a Lego class, building with blocks on weekends — 4,000 yuan a year, to build up his hands-on ability," said one parent passing the Lego booth, whose thinking was common enough: "We'll keep coming to events like this."

At the same booth, children could use a 3D printing pen to draw a three-dimensional paper crane for free. A preschooler's first instinct on getting the pen was to scribble all over the board, while a parent coached from the side: "Trace the line... that's it... don't go crooked... do it again."

Even at the shadow-puppet display we met parents asking whether there were classes to go with it. This Ms. Wu told us she works in the parent-child education business herself, and had come partly to bring her seven-year-old son to look for something hands-on, partly to scout out business.

Compared with the several Maker Faires already held in Shenzhen, the event's founder, Dale Dougherty, said this one in Xi'an felt like people celebrating culture.

"We've met a lot of different people here, and it's still too early to say how this differs from other maker events. But I've seen a lot of parents bring their kids here, and it was the same in Shenzhen. In Japan, Singapore, and the US, though, you get more older kids — some of them in high school," he said.

Once hardware startups went quiet, Maker Faire became more "maker": most of what's shown here has no use at all, like the modified electric scooter from Makerbeta, the sculptures Tapigami makes out of 3M tape, or the paper sculptures by Tasko. Much of the time they don't make these things because they have a business plan in their heads. They make them because they can. That is what the word "maker" meant in the first place.

Asked whether creativity and invention have to end in something useful, Dougherty said that's a personal choice. "You can make something useful, or you can make something silly and completely useless. At a lot of maker events we see people making things to create a chance to talk. You see something strange and have no idea what it's for, so you ask, 'What is this?' Some people deliberately make useless things, but they're fun, and they pull you in," he said.

Marc Dusseiller, who promotes building simple computers out of coconuts in Indonesia, thinks along similar lines. He told us: "I'm not good at business, and I'm not good at finishing things. I just love starting something new — I'm completely hopeless at that last 5%."

As Clay Shirky, author of the bestseller Cognitive Surplus, told QDaily at a Maker Faire in Shenzhen two years ago: even with hardware companies rising fast in China, and the maker movement drawing the attention of government, the market, and investors — even with the word itself conflated with hardware entrepreneurs — it is the genuinely passionate people, often with no commercial purpose at all, who are the real core of a community like this.

Cover and in-text photos by Gong Fangyi