Nick’s First Pitch

Context

The project I chose to write about is centered around Nick LeGrande, a young boy with aplastic anemia who loves baseball. This disease can cause fatigue, dizziness, heartbeat irregularities, frequent infections, and prolonged bleeding. Due to this rare and life-threatening condition, he is no longer able to play his favorite game. In response to this problem, Google Fiber teamed up with Deeplocal to create a kinetic system that would allow him to pitch across the nation.  The mechanism, pictured below, is fairly simple.

Mechanism

 

 

 

 

This project is basically a telecommunications platform with a creative twist. Instead of a conference room on the other end of Nick, there is a baseball stadium. From a technical perspective, it is a one degree-of-freedom arm that tosses a ball in response to Nick’s actions at a VR pitcher’s mound. By using high-speed internet to bring two physically separate locations together, this project obtains a perfect balance between the mechanical and the computational. But the main focus of this project is not the mechanism. It is the narrative associated with it.

Conclusion

This project was a roaring success, garnering 400 million media impressions. Because of this project, Nick LeGrande was able to pitch at a Kansas City Royals game. This is an opportunity he never would have had otherwise. Additionally, this project spurred a huge amount of awareness for his condition, leading to Nick finding a bone marrow donor. On its own, the mechanism for this project is not very impressive or useful. It is the human element, Nick LeGrande, that makes this project interesting and inspiring.

The key takeaway is that the most important part of any public-facing project is the narrative. The technical specifications of your project can be simple as long as the story it contributes to is impactful. This particular project fits into the human world by finding a niche, relatable problem and solving it in a spectacular way.

 

Source: http://deeplocal.com/projects/pitch.html

Pictures taken from the Youtube video linked above