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Surface Monster Nom Nom Nom
Someone on the Microsoft Surface team was nice enough to send me a project they were working on. Enjoy! This was a whimsical project that received some notice at CHI 2009 as a novel way to extend the interface space of the tabletop into the space above it. What I really like about this “augmented…
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Health Questions 2010
It occurred to me recently that I really like how , both in the natural and the technological . Questions like “What do stars do?” and “How do you mechanically control a robot?”. I’ve mostly avoided as a subject because it had a in school of being a subject for which you had to memorize,…
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2010 Post-Holiday Reading List
Thanks to the deluge of the holidays, I now have an enormous physical collection of items to read/watch/play. Here’s a picture (Click for full size):
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Research in Action 2009
Tommorow, Tuesday November 17th is my department’s Research in Action day. Think of it as a science-fair-like event, but without anu judging or prizes. Basically, its a chance for us computer science graduate students to show off what we have been working outside of regular conferences. The formal description of my project is: The consequences…
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Slampad
(with Julian Lepinski) A colleague and I submitted an entry to the UIST 2009 Student competition sponsored by Microsoft, which challenged entrants to come up with a use for a keyboard that could detect the pressure applied to each key. Here is the pitch from our entry: Mental distractions during text-entry tasks requiring intense concentration…
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Distributed Disc Tossing: The Value of Jerks
My department had a BBQ on Toronto Centre Island last Sunday. I am a frequent Ultimate Frisbee player, so I brought my disc to toss around. Some others did too, so we had an M tossers and N discs situation. I had just started the last course of my Master’s the week before, Distributed Computing,…
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People Suck at Computers.
Most people are afraid of computers. Even something as gloriously inviting as the Microsoft Surface, which I worked on during my internship at Microsoft Research, has people interacting with it cautiously. At least this is what I saw in my user studies. My participants were mostly professional adults (read: the people who actually make the…
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Improv tour diary
I went out checked out Jet City Improv in Seattle yesterday. I’ve been so obsessed with longform the past 2 years that I had pretty much forgotten that short form existed. My two favourite games currently are He Said She Said and Three Way Dub, mostly because they are split-control games. Here’s 3 games I…
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Diamond Touch Projects
While working on 3 courses last semester, I got a head-start on some research ideas. When I was starting out, I was simply interested in the idea of “Miming and Mimicry” as an inspiration. After many discussions, I’ve developed further ideas, but still with Miming and Mimicry as the seed. Here’s the most tangible of…
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Where I'm going, where I've been
Near the end of the first semester of my Master’s, my research topic was becoming clearer – along the lines of “teaching the use of gestural interfaces”. This was motivated by the proliferation of gestural interaction in devices of many form factors. Much of my thoughts on this were driven by my improv and theatre…