His latest spin-off (from Rearden, a company that incubates his innumerable ideas) is Mova, a motion-capture technology that charts hundreds of thousands of points on the human face to create amazingly lifelike animation. (Rumor alert: You can see Mova at work altering Edward Norton’s face in The Incredible Hulk.) But what started Steve Perlman down his long and winding road to being a patent-obsessed serial inventor wasn’t the movies. It was Gumby. “He got me excited because he could walk into a book and become a cowboy or a racecar driver,” Perlman says. “I realized I wanted to develop something that would allow people to do the same thing.” In high school, while his friends were playing Pong, Perlman invented 64x64-pixel, black-and-white graphics displays, along with a game in which planes “flew.” He was one of the original Apple scientists who built the color Macintosh, and he cofounded Catapult Entertainment, the company that built the proprietary modems for Sega’s and Nintendo’s video-game systems. Then he cofounded WebTV. Today, Perlman’s work is featured in almost every tech gadget you see: iPhones, video iPods, Macs, most PCs, and many other elec­t­ronics. Will Perlman ever slow down? No, he insists. “I’m obsessed with creating technologies that allow anyone to create any kind of world they want.”

Perlman's obsessions

Disposable wheels: “I have a really cool carbon-fiber street bike. It’s super-light, but I can’t resist taking it up mountain trails. If it gets trashed, I just get another one.”

His muse: “I wanted someone who could think outside of the box, so I advertised on Craigslist for a muse who could embrace both art and technology. Kelly Tunstall turned out to be the one. She was a fine artist, but was also adept at creating computer-generated art. Her work just showed at 111 Minna.”

Patent no. 6,614,407: “It’s my patent for a system in which the video-game screen is literally on your eyeball in the form of a contact lens, which receives retinal scanning beams from a special personal pro­jector. So you could be walking around ancient Rome while standing in an empty room.”