Sifteo cubes were gifts for VIPs - including Nobel prizewinner Mario Capecchi - at the opening of the Leonardo, a new Sci+Tech+Art museum in Salt Lake City, UT. Talk about Intelligent Play!

Earlier this month I was asked to speak at the opening gala of The Leonardo, a really cool new Science + Technology + Art museum in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. The museum is in the building that housed the city’s main public library, and the large open spaces work well for the big installations that have been curated. The exhibits are great: from a visualizer of your Facebook footprint, to a DNA lab that can test your genetic propensity for multi-tasking, to a full-body motion capture room and interactive multi-touch art table. Installations by Jeff Lieberman, Irina Werning, Philip Beesley and others were captivating. The whole experience feels like a delightful mashup of The Tech Museum in San Jose, the Children’s Creativity Museum, and the Exploratorium. Really inspiring – I can’t wait to go back and spend more time there in the future. Kudos to the founding team of The Leonardo for such an impressive collection that’s off to a great start!

I was invited to give a presentation at Los Altos High School as the opening speaker for Science and Tech Week. It was fun to speak to a group of students who still have so many of the really important decisions ahead of them that will shape the course of their lives!

Along with the motivations for – and history of – Sifteo, I spent a little time talking about my background and how it led me to do what I do today, and what it’s like to start a company (hint: the best ones start in a dark basement). I got some good questions at the end of my talk about developing with our SDK, how many cubes the system can work with, and the inevitable: how much does it cost and where can I get it?

Thanks to the organizers for the opportunity to speak to this group of bright young minds.

Dave speaks as part of a panel discussion for the Lean Launchpad class at Stanford. Photo credit: Amy Sheng.

Last Monday I spoke on a panel at Stanford that should have been called “How much more do you know NOW about who your customers are and what they want compared to when you first started your company? A crazy amount, right?!” It wasn’t actually called that, but that was the gist. The panel was for the inaugural class of Innovation Corps entrepreneurs, who traveled to Stanford from all over the country for a class called The Lean LaunchPad. The participants are researchers and engineers in academia that have been selected to learn about the customer development process and running a lean startup. These ideas basically boil down to one key piece of advice: avoid premature scaling. In other words, companies must make sure they really understand who wants their product, and what the product needs to be, before scaling their operations up and spending a lot of money.

Led by a star-studded cast of entrepreneurship instructors that include Steve Blank, Tina Seelig, Jon Feiber and John Burke, the curriculum guides students through Blank’s Customer Development process. They’ll have to “get out of the building” to find out who REALLY wants their products and how best to market them and make their companies succeed. I was asked to participate on the panel because Sifteo was the recipient of Phase 1 and Phase 2 SBIR grants from the National Science Foundation. These grants are designed to promote innovation by enabling companies to take on ambitious R&D projects that could produce really valuable results – projects that might not otherwise happen without the extra support. SBIR was great for Sifteo, allowing us to push forward on important investigations into the design and architecture of our product at critical times. NSF grant officer Errol Arkilic is now the program director for I-Corps, and he wanted his students to hear from SBIR recipient companies that are doing well.

I was excited to lend my morning to an initiative like Innovation Corps that aims to empower scientists and engineers to build companies to commercialize their ideas. Silicon Valley is what it is because technical founders – not MBAs – poured their energy into commercializing their innovations. I-Corps aims to keep that model vital through the next generations of startups and beyond.

Emily explains Sifteo cubes to an interested attendee at the Mini Maker Faire at the Android Open conference in San Francisco

Sifteo had a demo table at the Mini Maker Faire at the Android Open conference in San Francisco today. I gave a plenary talk during the morning session, alongside a bunch of other cool people and projects. Some of my favorites were Will Marshall from USRA/NASA who makes satellites out of cellphones, and Massimo Banzi who is one of the creators of Arduino.

Lots of conference  attendees wanted to check out the cubes in person — there’s something really special about holding them in your hands, that even a good video can’t quite duplicate. It’s great to see more DIY/Maker presence at tech industry (and especially developer-oriented) events! I was proud to have a Sifteo presence at the conference, and directed a lot of people towards our free SDK.

Update: O’Reilly posted a picture of me on stage, here!

That's me, with Sifteo cubes in the MoMA's Talk to Me exhibit in New York!

Last week when I was in New York I went to visit some friends from California.

One day between the Maker Faire and the New York Games Conference, I spent an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I wanted to check out a new exhibit that includes – along with a lot of other really cool work – Sifteo cubes!

The exhibit is called “Talk to Me”, and its focus is the modern relationship between people and technology, particularly how our technological artifacts communicate with us. It features “..a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale.”

Walking around the exhibition I was excited to see inspiring work by friends and colleagues including Golan Levin, David Rose, Aaron Koblin, Eric Schweikardt and Ayah Bdeir, as well as other artists like Zach Lieberman and Toshio Iwai whose work I admire but that I haven’t yet had the chance to meet. I felt like I was walking through the workshop of a tribe of playful, inventive technologists who all want to change the world for the better. My people!

The Sifteo installation includes three cubes in a charging dock and a video screen. The cubes run a special app (written by intern extraordinaire Max Meyers) that cycles through scenes from a variety of Sifteo games, and the video screen shows an overview to illustrate what real play looks like.

There are some quirky aspects to how the works are described in an art exhibition like Talk to Me. The one I noticed first is that a label next to every piece identifies the materials that it’s made of. I don’t know how this tradition started, but art exhibitions seem to require these little lists. The Sifteo list contains “ABS, polycarbonate, LCDs, electronics, motion and proximity sensors, and C code software.” I think these materials lists kinda miss the point for interactive systems, especially consumer electronics that are all made of pretty much the same physical stuff. The interactive behavior is where the real magic is found. But when in Rome… The other thing I reflected on is that while Jeevan and I are listed as the designers of the piece, what you see beneath the glass was a team effort that involved lots of other talented folks at Sifteo who contributed game design, programming, art, hardware design, and manufacturing expertise.

It made me really proud to see Sifteo cubes in the MoMA. They were designed for everyday use rather than as works of art, but I appreciate the recognition that our product pushes people’s interactions with technology in a new direction, bringing it to a “comfortable, understandable human scale.”

At the "Talk to Me" Exhibit at the MoMA in New York

Ned Sherman from Digital Media Wire kicked off the NY Games Conference

I had a blast last Thursday as a speaker the New York Games Conference. The organizers invited me to give a special presentation about Sifteo at this annual videogame industry get-together, for a different perspective on the present and future of interactive play. Other speakers included Philip Rosenberg (SVP of Business Development in the game division of Sony), who gave a great historical retrospective on Sony and the game industry, and Dan Porter (CEO of OMGPOP) who – before jumping into social games – was one of the founders of Teach for America (!). Who knew? Both guys are talented and their talks were entertaining.

I love being asked to speak at conferences like this. It’s like being the waiter who gets to serve dessert, bringing a unique and very tasty dish to the audience. The title of my talk was Classic games, meet videogames, and the theme was that the future of play will look a lot more like its (classic) past than you may think. I started by showing the pair of antique Mahjong tiles that I’ve been carrying around in my pocket lately – I absolutely love the feeling of the bakelite, their size and the weight in my hands, and how they click against each other. Game pieces like these are a real inspiration for our work at Sifteo.

I continued with an abbreviated history of video game interfaces, pointing out at how soundly the current wave of game systems with new interfaces (gesture, multi-touch) have supplanted traditional consoles. Then I pitched the importance of designing technology for the “human spec-sheet” (the way our brains and bodies work), and how Sifteo cubes combine two great play traditions. From there I showed some pictures of our earliest MIT prototypes, and finished by imploring the audience to spend their creative energy developing experiences for systems that are a good match to how our brains and bodies work – like Sifteo!

The attendees really resonated with the Sifteo story and Intelligent Play direction! Here are a few of my favorite tweets:

• kadleygosselin (Kadley Gosselin) Very excited to hear David Merrill of Sifteo at #nygc
• devilherdue (Nicole Leffel) Favorite quote of the day, from @sifteo co-founder David Merrill: “Bad interface design violates the human spec-sheet.” #nygc
• darrenshield (Darren Shield) I need those sifteo cubes yesterday… It’s for my nephew i swear #nygc
• dmwnews (Digital Media Wire) David Merrill presenting for @sifteo: User interface advances, especially in hardware, drive innovation. #nygc
• jenwag57 (Jennifer Wagner): Cubes demoed at NY Games Conf. Look really cool. Parents will be buying them like crazy #nygc

It was great to hear this feedback, and to meet a bunch of new people. After my talk I had the unexpected pleasure of joining a panel discussion called From Gesture Recognition to 3D – Top Technologies Affecting the Future of Gaming, where topics ranged from battery technology and Moore’s law to augmented reality to brain implants! This was great fun – my thanks to the organizers for getting me involved, and I look forward to next year!

“Team player. Works well with others.” These phrases are used so often that they sound cliche. If you encountered them in a recommendation letter for a job applicant, would they make any impact on your assessment? They should! Companies embark on more and more ambitious projects every year, and a well-functioning team – one that cooperates and collaborates – is a must-have ingredient for success.

But does technology help us learn to cooperate and collaborate? A lot of the “social” stuff we do with computers (posting content and communicating using social media, playing social games, reading and commenting on articles) doesn’t bring us together face to face and is actually pretty solitary. Even digital activities that are expressly about collaboration, like editing Wikipedia articles or team questing in World of Warcraft, keep participants behind their computers looking at the screen rather than getting together to interact in person. Continued »

Photo credit: Justin Swett

The world is a sea of chaos, yet our brains somehow make sense of it all. Sights! Sounds! Textures! Scents! A jumble of stimuli relentlessly barrages our sensory systems in a continuous manner, day in and day out. Somehow, we categorize it all with ease. More often than not, we take it for granted. How many times have you walked down the street and perked up when your nose detected a nearby café or laundromat just by the scent of coffee or fabric softener?

It wouldn’t be crazy to say that pattern recognition is the primary function of our brain, and the one that continues to help with cognitive development. Researchers have found that both humans and animals have critical periods in their development for acquiring certain pattern-recognition skills, for instance sight or language understanding. Young birds that are deprived of hearing other birds singing are unable to learn normal birdsong later in life. Similarly, cortical blindness (blindness due to damage to the visual area in the brain’s occipital cortex) can cause a person with healthy eyes to be functionally blind. Simply put, our brain constantly takes raw sensory input and turns it into recognizable things we can reason about, and under normal conditions we develop special-purpose brain “hardware” for these abilities.

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Today’s post is brought to you by two of our interns, Jenny Moryan and Nicole Roach, who – just like our resident teacher Megan – are using Sifteo cubes and our forthcoming SDK to build some great games, including ‘X Marks The Spot,’ which they detail below. Enjoy.

Hi Sifteo fans! We’re Jenny Moryan and Nicole Roach, interns at Sifteo and graduate students at Stanford’s Learning, Design and Technology Program. We were fortunate to work with Sifteo to develop our master’s project, X Marks the Spot, a pirate journey toward pre-algebra skills.  We chose to create a number sense game because of its importance to creating adaptive expertise in math. In the 21st century when calculators and computers are ubiquitous, students must learn more than just procedures. They need to understand relationships between numbers to effectively problem solve. By developing these pre-algebra skills, students are more likely to thrive in algebra, the gateway subject to higher mathematics.

To help students develop number sense, we created X Marks the Spot.  As the pirate, the player walks around the ship doing different tasks, working his/her way up to captain. These six mini-games represent the tasks:

Parrot Feeder

Feed the captain’s parrot by feeding him numbers from least to greatest.

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