Project Renaissance

One aspect of Project Renaissance that wasn't clear to me earlier, is that the reality TV monitoring that goes on doesn't have to be live. Reality TV owes its success in part to slick editing.

Contrast this with the live NASA feeds showing people hunched over monitors at mission control. We're looking for story lines here, plots, character development -- we're not trying to play security guard (unless that's what we're getting paid to do).

The recording teams need to be more intimate and up close with their subjects -- or the subjects themselves may be the ones operating the recording equipment (more likely in high risk situations, where only the most highly trained, or most foolhardy, dare to tread).

Forward-thinking companies already have quite a bit of usable reality TV in the can, having taped their own product development experiments. The Rutan group, for example, with these two private commercial forays into outer space, has lots of recorded gold.

What other prototyping might be going on, around the props we'll need to stage a next step in our slow rise to competence?