I saw magic when I was 11. Through the rusty-barred window of my PE teacher’s little bedroom (you can picture it as a motel room in the 60s), I saw he was moving some tiny thing to change the color of a rose on some fine colorful glass.

More and more kids shoved their heads in to have a look until Mr Qian shooed us away. I later on learned that the magic glass was called a computer, an Intel 386 PC. That was the first time in my life I saw a computer.

I dreamed of having one, but there was no way to realize that dream. The highest household savings in our village at that time were no more than 50 dollars a year. But a computer cost 2000 dollars.

So I started to “innovate”: putting a few drops of canola oil and blue ink between two pieces of glass, pressing them together, then using cardboard paper to frame up the edges. I spent hours tapping and pressing my fingers on the “monitor” to make it show different patterns and colors and then imagining an ongoing battle between monsters and a hero.

Many years later, I went to high school and snuck out of the school yard to take a bus to get to a nearby town where I could find small net-bars. I was fascinated to chat with all those unknown people from all over the country on QQ (something like WhatsApp). People could talk nonsense and send emojis for a whole afternoon.

That was my first time touching a real computer, probably when I was 17 years old.

I was caught by the principal when I tried to sneak back. He said I was ruining my future and asked me never to do that again. Yes, at that time, we were not allowed to get out of the school yard without permission. Almost in the spirit of defying his authority, I graduated as the top student and got many options on the table for me. However, I did not apply for CS but literature and then got so obsessed with Greek philosophy. It’s probably because my mom and dad and grandparents passed away one after another through my teenage years. I needed to seek answers from philosophy. But natural science and computer science have always been my first love. And fortunately, in this AI era, the combination of philosophy and science means more than ever before. I feel I am becoming that kid again, the one who pressed his fingers against the glass and imagined it as a tablet (the iPad hadn’t been invented yet).

This morning in Adelaide, 25 years later, I just finished working out how to use Gaussian splattering to innovate an online teaching environment to a next-generation level. What has happened over these 25 years is yet to be told. And the second half of the story is still in the making. Anyways, here are the things I am building, and some of them will probably make their way into the story: