Ri3D will be back in 2019 but… some things are changing.
We’ve had fun over the past 7 years but the concept of Ri3D has grown a bit too much for us to manage. For those of you who don’t know, the founders have assisted in organizing and helping other Ri3d teams get started, especially those in college. In the past we were able to help recruit sponsorship, provide guidance and aggregate the content for various Ri3D teams. The model had a few ups and downs (especially during elevator years) and it wasn’t flawless but we think we’ve done some good with it.
Ri3D has now grown to the point where we cannot dedicate the necessary time to manage/administer that process. Unfortunately, with the number of teams increasing and our available time decreasing we can’t offer that support any longer.
As of now Ri3D 1.0 still plans to build a robot (in some amount of time that’s not 6 weeks) but we are encouraging other Ri3D teams to pursue their own YouTube Channels / Streams, Sponsors etc…
We will continue to cross promote builds, streams, memes etc… and are more than willing to offer advice if you have any questions. It’s time for team’s to spread their wings and fly / leave the nest / enter the wild / (insert white fang reference here) and we’re excited to see where new teams take it!
Thanks for all your hard work over the past 6 years Dan and company! It was only a matter of time before Ri3D outgrew its origins. Having all the content in one place has helped to increase the utility of Ri3D for many teams over the years. My hope is that as Ri3D grows, new teams (and college teams in particular will heed some advice to make the program as useful as possible.
I’m excited as always to see what you guys come up with this year!
Dan, you guys have done a great service to the community. Hopefully, without you having to prop up others, the lesser quality Ri3D teams will instead put focus on other ways to help their communities, while the higher quality Ri3D teams can get their message out without noise from the other teams. I hope this will also decrease the burden on community sponsors to fund college students who just want to build a robot without the hassle of teaching kids.
Thanks for the contributions you, the Ri3D 1.0 members, and all Ri3D teams have made to the community. It is unfortunate but inevitable that the idea would grow to be unsustainable by just the original team.
I think if the Ri3D concept is going to continue to be useful as a place for FRC teams to find inspirational ideas, the videos and papers they produce must be visible and easily accessible. And that means they need to be collected in a centralized place, not a separate YouTube account for each team. IMO, trying to keep up with updates from tens of teams (when you might not even know of the existence of all of the teams) is not feasible during a busy build season.
It would be great if someone in the community could develop a place to centralize all of that information and all of the Ri3D teams agree to use it. Some possibilities are a website where each team gets a page they can post their videos/papers to, or a shared YouTube account with individual playlists for each team’s videos. Really anything that allows someone to easily find all of the results from all of the Ri3D teams, while also allowing them to “filter” and follow the path of one individual team.
One thing that would be really helpful is if you guys (or anyone, really) could provide a webpage or CD post with a list of ALL the streams/channels (the ones you know of, obviously). The biggest issue I have watching Ri3D content is actually finding all of the teams involved.
Having watched the concept grow and develop from the Cute Baby days, you and the gang have done tremendous things to give opportunity to a lot of teams on both sides of the camera (mine included). Thank you for everything, and I look forward to watching the Ri3D 1.0 crew in January.
Thanks to all of you guys for putting in the time and effort to make Ri3D what it is today. So many teams have benefited from your efforts, ours included. It’s hard to even remember a time when there weren’t tons of YouTube videos & streams to watch during the first week of build. I can’t wait to see what some of the other Ri3D teams do next to help step up and provide content to the community.
Countless teams and individuals have been positively impacted by the challenge the RI3D team created, and countless more will continue to be even without the incredible amount of time and effort you and the RI3D team have dedicated in the past. To think that a challenge grew so large that it is nearly unmanageable should provide massive sense of pride and accomplishment.
Thank you for everything you have done to raise the bar for everyone, and good luck to you and the RI3D teams that will need to find support elsewhere in the following years.
Agreed, and I think it doesn’t need to be a high-effort elaborate thing. Even a simple Google Sheet in which all RI3D teams agree to add links to their stuff would serve. I recall someone created a Sheet like that on their own and shared on CD last year because there was no single clearinghouse to find links to RI3D. I am sure many teams used that. If that person is still around & willing to do the same thing this year, RI3D teams could just send him/her links.
Thank you for the awesome years of hosting and inspiring. People have differing opinions of Ri3D but there’s no doubt that it is popular and many people have interest in watching.
Should any teams wish to post any created videos or hosted archives, FUN would be more than delighted to do so on our YouTube page and will help promote these teams. Please reach out if interested.
Let me add my thanks to your efforts in Ri3D, when I first watched it I was going “He messed that up, must be Robot in 3 WEEKS” But there it was 3 days after kickoff, a robot that could play in an amazing short amount of time.
Thanks to all of the Ri3D teams that have taken on this challenge, you all have been inspirations to lots of teams out there.
It’s also spawned a small subculture on the VEX side, after our game reveal, there have been a number of VRi3D posts.
I think it would be really cool if a group like FUN or TCA could host a curated set of RI3D content with additional resources describing how best to use the hosted content. This seems like an opportunity to take a community resource and make it significantly better by sorting out the best/most useful content from the rest. TCA’s Ri3D reviews last year would serve as a great format to build on.
My 2012 season was the absolute low point of robotics for me and my team. I was an arrogant jerk about what I thought I knew about coaching and robots. The robot we designed and built was incapable of playing the game. The next year, we decided to humble ourselves and get back to basics. When that first Ri3D came out, we were so inspired by it. The ideas you illustrated put us back on the path to success. It’s not an overstatement to say that you guys were responsible for turning our entire program around through your inspiration. Thank you so much.
Your efforts have been an inspiration to me, my former team, and the Ri3D team we’re starting at our university. Thanks for all the hard work you’ve put in.
To add to the discussion in this thread, I too think that a centralized resource would be very useful both for Ri3D teams getting their resources seen by teams, and for FRC teams to be able to go to one place to find these kinds of resources. The Ri3D channel has been an okay resource in past years for just clicking through videos, but it still takes a little too much searching to find some reveal videos and definitely team papers.
Thank you for all of the effort starting and growing Ri3D! It’s been a great help to my teams as a sanity check on design ideas and being able to see proof that an idea “could work” for teams that didn’t have the time or parts to prototype thoroughly.
Currently, there is 1 video that uses “#RI3D” on youtube, that being a vid from RI3D 1.0 in 2013. If the RI3D channels used this hashtag when uploading videos, then they can easily be centralized within youtube for our consumption. This can easily be done by putting the tag within the description, and will show the hashtag above the title, and when you click on it, any other video with said tag. (Example here.)
