Just when they were ready to retire their cool Waterfall Swing, something happened.
If you’ve been to IngenuityFest over the past couple of years, you’ve seen this cool swingset. It’s 22 feet tall and has 273 independently actuated solenoid valves that are controlled by computer designed to drop water… except when people swing under it, so they stay dry. It’s also programmable to drop sheets of water that spell out words.
It was developed by Andrew Ratcliff (Hiram and CIA graduate), Mike O’Toole (CWRU Mechanical Engineering), Andrew Witte (CWRU Computer Engineering), and Ian Charnas (CWRU Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering).
As of today, the YouTube video of the Waterfall Swing has reached 2,663,595 views.
How did this thing blow up?
1) Ratcliff, Witte, O’Toole & Charnas build the Waterfall Swing , premiering at the 2011 World Makers Faire, and take it around to various Festivals and Makers Faires, such as IngenuityFest. (Cle’s own Mini Maker Faire is scheduled for 4/13/13).
2) Our boys posted their first video in January 2011, which got around 2000 views until a friend posted it to Reddit on 1/08/12. It got on their front page and in four days, the video received over 1 million views.
3) Yahoo news caught wind and wrote a front page story on 10/15 & 10/16/12.
Charnas explains, “Almost overnight our youtube video shot up to one million views… then two million! We were getting calls from festivals like Cochella and Bonnaroo, from places as far as Japan, Russia, and Dubai. Offers to buy the waterfall swing started coming in, as well as articles on the Waterfall Swing from sources like The Atlantic, Colossal, and the home page of Yahoo News. In short, the project was trending. Someone even made a meme-style animated gif of the “payoff” part of our YouTube video.
4) Honda’s American ad agency was working on a new campaign for the Civic at this time that featured innovators, so they licensed the clip to be used in their “Things Can Always Be Better” ad, which first aired 1/1/13 on the Rose Bowl.
5) Views shot up over 2M and are still going up. Whoops! Now they’re at 2,663,927.
Andrew Witte went on to create the $10M Kickstarter Record-Holder, the Pebble Bluetooth Wristwatch. Ian runs CWRU’s new $25M think[box] invention center. Ratcliff is in Brooklyn working on the Swing. Charnas & Ratcliff will be featured in a Honda Innovator’s Online Chat on February 20th at 3pm EST.