Wow, what a bit of a learning experience this was. That chip is an Invernsense IDG300 gyroscope. $35 a pop. And its one of these “QFN” (quad, flat, no leads) style packages which basically makes it a pain to work with. I thought I could use this technique of dabbing a bit of solder on each of the pads on the printed…

Finally, something to show for this “Slow Messenger” project, a playful interface for instant messaging. I’ve gotten all the hardware bits cobbled together and most of the firmware. Now I’m working on learning how to tie in AOL Instant Messenger so that messages can be delivered to the device. Fortunately (I think)…

Many of you know about a collaborative project I worked on a few years back called PDPal. It’s had many iterations and several commissions and just sort of continues to continue, even to this day. Me and my collaborators — Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow — were commissioned by Creative Time to produce an editio…

Aaron Meyers deployed this turn of phrase “human joystick” during his final presentation for the course I taught this semester — “Design and Technology for Mobile Experiences.” He’s been working hard mostly on his thesis project, Torrent Raiders, but for my class he worked on programming a J2ME version of the MobZom…

I’ve been playing with a gyroscope lately as a game input control element for MobZombies. The challenge is to come up with a less cumbersome sensor rig, and less expensive. The sensor will need to communicate with a mobile phone because no one’s going to buy a $2000 tablet pc to play a game. The sensor should also b…

No, that isn’t an historical photo of children playing MobZombies..but it may as well be. MobZombies is being featured on the Processing.org web site..that’s pretty cool. I’ve started helping out on the project’s evolution, mostly in the area of lowering the cost of the device. This is important. I think it’s a very…

I’ve been fixated on a story my wandering mind told me many months ago about a little theory object that forced me to think about how the connected things in the era of IP networks always do their thing as fast as possible, approaching speeds that are imperceptible to normal humans. Almost without question, this is…

The work in mapping the connection between physical geography and virtual representations of that geography is a component of the work I have done that is relevant to the question as to what the basis of my tenure case is. In retrospect, I realize that I picked up the story in the middle, and that there is a precedi…

For the last 10 years, I have been working on ways to represent and visualize physical, geographic space using portable, mobile, networked digital technologies. (Cf. an Extended Research Statement.) This work makes use of the many mechanisms available to describe geographic space — including mobile devices, wirele…