Richard Surroz: Tech and the death of missed connections

It does­n’t take much of a con­ver­sa­tion with Richard Sur­roz to real­ize that he’s basi­cal­ly made a hob­by of sur­pris­ing peo­ple.

After drop­ping out of high school at 17 to join the Army, Sur­roz lat­er went on to earn a bach­e­lor’s degree in soft­ware engi­neer­ing and a mas­ter’s degree in teach­ing, which he con­tin­ues to do for ITT Tech­ni­cal Insti­tutes, but it goes beyond that. Sur­roz man­u­fac­tures sur­pris­es, too. They come in the form of mod­ded com­put­ers that have tak­en the form of every­thing from wall art to a Star Wars clone troop­er to Autop­sy his pièce de résis­tance, a com­put­er mold­ed into the inner “organs” of a translu­cent man­nequin.

The last one graced was his first project to grace the cov­er of CPU Mag­a­zine.

“I can’t paint and I can’t sculpt, but I was able to look at the com­po­nents and make art­work out of them. When you think back to the old, big IDE cables, who says we can’t make origa­mi out of them?” Sur­roz said.

Sur­roz will be talk­ing about his pas­sion for com­put­ing in his TEDxSalem Talk, The Chang­ing Par­a­digms of Per­sonal Com­put­ing: Wear­ables and beyond. His talk is the result of his own evo­lu­tion with tech­nol­o­gy. Sur­roz’s eye for dis­man­tling com­put­ers and reassem­bling in new forms has earned him clients that span the globe. He’s also a reg­u­lar con­sul­tant for Nvidia, a San­ta Clara, Calif.-based graph­ics pro­cess­ing com­pa­ny.

“The inter­net has giv­en me reach across the globe. It’s not that I’m spe­cial, it’s the nature of the com­mon inter­ests. Because of that the polit­i­cal and phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers are tran­scend­ed. The inter­net makes it pos­si­ble to find each oth­er,” Sur­roz said.

As such, he’s enthu­si­as­tic about devel­op­ments in wear­able tech­nol­o­gy like Google Glass for its abil­i­ty to bring those con­nec­tions back down to the local lev­el.

“We could pass each oth­er in the street and nev­er know we had com­mon inter­ests, but wear­able tech makes those con­nec­tions pos­si­ble,” Sur­roz said. “Even more excit­ing is the way that tech­nol­o­gy might help us improve our own lives in terms of things like health.”

Eye con­tacts that also mon­i­tor blood sug­ar are a recent advance­ment in that area, but Sur­roz believes even greater heights are just around the cor­ner.

“We’re at the point where we have a pow­er­ful com­put­er in our pock­et, our band­width is capa­ble and our serv­er capa­bil­i­ty is where it needs to be. We’re reach­ing the point when we’ll be able to do high-end gam­ing or 3D ren­der­ing using the phone or tablet is an inter­face, but the work can done on a remote serv­er with much more pow­er,” he said.

To learn more about our poten­tial future, you’ll need a tick­et to TEDxSalem. Buy yours here.