I spent five years building a room-scale robot.

Now I’m working to place that capability into more people’s hands.

Where it started

This began as a personal mission.

I have always wanted to build things.

Long before this project existed, I was drawn to inventing, creating, and trying to turn ideas into physical objects that could do something useful. I wanted to understand how things worked deeply enough that I could eventually make things of my own.

But I followed the traditional path.

I went to college, studied engineering, and entered the workforce. I had considered continuing my education, but there comes a point when the economic realities of building a life begin to make certain decisions for you. I needed to earn a living, become financially independent, and start moving forward in the ways adults are generally expected to move forward. So I left school, found a job, and began building a conventional engineering career.

There was nothing inherently wrong with that path. It gave me experience, stability, and a practical understanding of how products are developed in the real world.

But a few years into it, I began to realize that it might not be the right path for me.

What I had always wanted was not simply to work near people who created things. I wanted to be the person creating them. I wanted the freedom to follow an idea far enough to find out whether it could become something real.

I also felt that, although engineering had taught me how to approach problems, I had never gone deeply enough into any one field to feel genuinely capable within it. Engineering is broad by nature. It teaches you how to think, investigate, and solve problems, but that breadth can also leave you feeling as though you know a little about many things without truly mastering any of them.

I wanted to change that.

I decided to choose one difficult field and go deep enough that I could eventually call myself capable—not because a degree or job title said so, but because I had built something that required the knowledge to be real.

I chose robotics.

Robotics brought together nearly everything that interested me: mechanical design, electronics, fabrication, software, controls, motion, and the challenge of making all those systems work together. It was broad enough to keep me curious, but demanding enough that I could spend years developing real depth.

The next question was what to build.

I did not want to make a small demonstration whose only purpose was to prove that I could make a robot move. I wanted to build something ambitious enough to matter—something that could address a real gap between the sophisticated equipment available to major companies and the comparatively limited tools available to ordinary individuals.

Filmmaking and content creation made that gap especially visible.

At the professional end of the industry, extraordinarily capable robotic camera systems already existed, but they were expensive, specialized, and designed for studios with large budgets and experienced crews. At the accessible end, creators had sliders, tripods, gimbals, and smaller motion-control systems—useful tools, but tools fundamentally limited by their size, reach, and intended market.

There was very little in between.

I began asking whether one person could build a system that helped bridge that divide: a robotic camera platform with genuinely advanced movement and repeatability, but built from accessible components and designed around the needs of individuals, independent creators, and small studios.

Could a camera move anywhere in a room without filling the floor with equipment? Could it be repositioned naturally by hand, save and recall shots, follow subjects, and eventually do the work of several conventional camera systems? Could equipment that normally belonged only to large productions be made attainable, understandable, repairable, and adaptable enough for ordinary people to own?

And could one independently built system change what people believed was possible in filmmaking and content creation?

That question became Open Motion Studio.

What began as a personal effort to become genuinely capable in robotics gradually became something larger: an attempt to close the distance between hobbyist equipment and advanced industrial systems—and to prove that powerful creative tools do not have to remain exclusive to companies with enormous budgets.

Roughly five years later, the first working answer is hanging from my kitchen ceiling.