Posts · · Jerry Miao · History
Where it started: a sunset on the Terrace
A time-lapse of the sunset over Lake Mendota, filmed from the Memorial Union Terrace in May 2016. While it was recording, Jerry met Richard, and the conversation that followed eventually became COSE.
COSE began with a camera on a tripod. In the spring of 2016 Jerry, then an undergraduate at UW–Madison with a habit of photographing everything in time-lapse, set up on the Memorial Union Terrace to record the sun going down over Lake Mendota. This is the result.
While the camera was running, Richard stopped to ask about it. He was a postdoc in the Gilroy lab in the Department of Botany, studying how plants grow in spaceflight, and much of that work depended on photographing plants at regular intervals for days at a time. They kept talking about cameras, intervals and lighting well past sunset. Before they left, Richard invited Jerry to the lab: he had some LED strips he wanted to control and asked whether Jerry could work out how.
Two months later, over a single weekend, Jerry and two teammates built FlashLapse, a time-lapse imaging chamber for growing plants, and took first place with it at Startup Weekend EDU. The instruments COSE makes today, including the SciSpinner Max, still record experiments on the same basic principle: a camera, a fixed interval and controlled light.