Origin of the Name M1

“If I knew how much I didn’t know when I started, I probably never would have done it.” —Brian Dressel

We get asked often where the name M1 Interactive comes from. Back in 2005, when I formed the company, I had been involved with many different types of technologies, prototyping new tech, while working with manufacturer demo products, etc. My small team and I got really good at combining our multi-layered backgrounds into a cohesive problem-solving machine.

We were inventing new methods and new tech from months of R&D work in our lab (also referred to as my basement and/or garage). We created small interactive LED screens, interactive projection walls, fog and water screens for projection, motion tracking video interactive displays and more. Basically the same stuff we’re still doing, but building it all from scratch.

I fell in love with the idea of designing, engineering and building working prototypes and started naming the prototypes Mark I, Mark II, Mark III, etc. As I formed the company, we needed a name. I toyed around with various iterations relating to robotics, video and sci-fi type names and settled on the name M1, as in Mark I. The first prototype. It suited us perfectly and we moved forward with that name. We are all software developers and create interactive experiences for our clients, so I went with M1 Interactive, Inc. It is also pretty cool that the Crab Nebula is designated as M1.

From the moment I learned about Disney Imagineers as a child, I wanted to be one. My goal with M1 has always been to imagine and engineer new uses for existing tech to give people a fun and exciting experience. We do this hiding the technology as much as possible and creating magical moments. As much fun as it is to see the inner workings on our Labs pages, for public display we like to keep it invisible.

- Our First Project -

The very first project that we worked on under M1 Interactive was for Underwriters Laboratories, working with All Terrain in 2005. They asked for a learning-based gamified interactive for kids to teach them how to properly use a fire extinguisher. I worked with a local machinist/artist, Christopher Furman to take an off-the-shelf fire extinguisher and turn it into a game controller.

I pulled in some other like-minded friends to build a game using the Unity game engine. While we designed the game and learned Unity (which was very new at the time), we used an infrared laser embedded in the nozzle and added a button the handle to trigger the game effects. The guts of a wireless mouse was used to transmit the button trigger to the computer.

The laser projected a dot on the monitor in front of the player. An overhead camera tracked the dot and used that XY positioning to move the virtual fire extinguisher around on-screen. The Mark I version contained the laser, but was later modified to work with a mouse tracker (Mark II) Then a Wiimote that we embedded in the nozzle. We called this the Mark III version.

Overall it was an amazing project and taught me that there is never enough time for research and development on a project like this. To this day, 17 years later, we’re still going strong and still doing heavy R&D and building technology prototypes on a daily basis. Many of them may actually make it out of the lab and into the real world.

I am proud of my team and everything we have accomplished and will continue on into the future.

Author: Brian Dressel