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!

This summer, Sifteo was fortunate enough to host weekly play sessions at the Zeum Children’s Museum in San Francisco, soon to be re-opened as the Children’s Creativity Museum.

Every Wednesday, Sifteo team members set up shop on Zeum’s ground floor, alongside other neat exhibits like the claymation space and green screen studio. It was a great opportunity for us to communicate with parents and children to help us understand more about what types of games they like. This residency gave us a unique chance to ‘play-test’ both existing and not-yet-released Sifteo games.

It’s extremely challenging for a game designer to predict how a player will interpret certain design decisions, such as visual art, audio cues, game logic, etc. Before any Sifteo game goes public, every aspect of it must be tested among players who are representative of its target audience.  What may feel natural to one player could feel nuanced and illogical to another. By previewing some of our upcoming games with Zeum attendees, we were able to note any problem areas so we can make necessary changes before we release the title.

Sarah, one of our game designers, used the Zeum sessions to test a new learning game for pre-readers called The Cogwell Twins and the Amazing Alpha-Matic (Alpha-Matic for short). Developing Alpha-Matic required real attention to detail to ensure that young players will feel confident and have fun while learning how to read. In the first act of Alpha-Matic, players use their cubes to connect parts of a pipe reminiscent of classic pneumatic mail-tubes. The connected pipe enables a letter of the alphabet to move from cube to cube, while the game repeats the letter’s pronunciation. Sarah found that even with a voiceover explaining why the letter needed to travel from the beginning to the end, not all children were understanding what to do with the pieces of the pipe. As a result, she added a mini-tutorial at the beginning of the game to teach children how to connect pipe segments by neighboring Sifteo cubes together. With this change, and others guided by Sarah’s observations at Zeum, children now understand how to assemble the pipe and play Alpha-Matic without any assistance from an adult!

We want to thank Ben Grossman-Kahn for facilitating the Sifteo at Zeum play sessions, and we look forward to holding workshops again at the Children’s Creativity Museum in the near future. In the meantime if you’re near Potrero Hill, you can check out our Sifteo play sessions on select Tuesdays at Recess between 4:30-5:30PM. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter to get the latest updates!

“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.

If computers aren’t teaching us to cooperate and collaborate in face to face settings, when do we learn this stuff? It happens early! Most family activities – from cooking together to reading books together to challenging each other during game night – require us to share responsibility and work together in order to accomplish a goal. Kids play physically-active games and activities, for instance clapping games and jump-rope, that rehearse intense real-time cooperation. Sports and dance reinforce these same skills throughout life. In a recent speech Sherry Turkle from MIT pointed out that our personal technology, particularly mobile phones, often distracts parents away from face-to-face activities and other quality time with their kids, saying ”..from the moment this generation of children met technology, it was the competition.”

We have watched Sifteo cubes support collaborative interaction in a way that no other technology platform can. The key difference is that the cubes are a multi-object interface, so multiple people can touch and move different cubes at the same time as part of a shared activity. I have seen this happen during play sessions where we test our games. A parent will reach in and adjust a cube to suggest a move in No Evil Monkeys or will nudge a letter to complete a word in Word Play. Rather than interrupting, this input is interleaved with the child’s ongoing play – this would be a different story if the game interface was a computer or a traditional handheld system.

It’s also magic to watch groups of children playing together with Sifteo cubes. Games that we didn’t even design for multi-player can become collaborative. For instance, I’ve seen Chroma Shuffle become multi-player-ized when each child takes a cube and negotiations begin to find the colors they need to clear the dots on their cube.

“I need yellow. do you have any yellow?”

“Here’s some. Do you have any blues?”

“Nope, but I have green. Do you need that?”

Other games, like Smörgåsbord, are designed to be played in groups. The basic play dynamic of Sifteo cubes – sitting face to face togehter, moving objects on the table – draws on a heritage of classic games and makes our platform a great way to teach and reinforce cooperation and collaboration. These skills will be valuable for an entire lifetime.

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.

It’s fascinating to experience the speed at which a physicist or mathematician looks at an equation and understands it meaning, or does back-of-the-envelope numerical calculations to make a rough estimate about a quantity — through practice these professionals have built pattern-matching capabilities that make these calculations automatic. In an earlier post, Jeevan wrote about “perceptual learning” – a related approach to concept-learning that suggests that the pattern-matching parts of our brains can be harnessed to make more high-level, “forebrain” activities like mathematics more efficient.

In business, we look for patterns to help us estimate and forecast. Legal professionals use precedent and behavioral patterns to help establish motive. City planners take police response times, socioeconomic data and other variables to plan crime reduction efforts and counter blight. Recognizing patterns plays an integral part in understanding the world, and helps us establish a base of growing and validated assumptions from sorted inputs and correlated data. Venture capitalists talk about “pattern matching” as one of their key skills. Having been involved with many businesses during their career, they can quickly recognize connections between a new startup and examples from the past in order to spot a business model with growth potential or problems ahead.

Recognizing patterns is useful in our modern world in all kinds of ways, yet pattern recognition is one of the things that engineers struggle to get computers to do well. After we “teach” our e-mail clients by marking a few fraudulent emails as spam, they become more successful spotting and deleting future spam based on patterns in the e-mails we identified. Speech and face-recognizers are getting better all the time, but they’re still no match for a person experiencing the same input. (Take the recent example of Linne Ha, who was profiled earlier this week in a piece on Google’s attempts to master voice-based search).

Ed Adelson's famous Checkershadow Illusion -

Illusions are an example of the pattern-matching parts of our brains being activated by stimuli in a way that triggers an incorrect or surprising response. Some of my favorite optical illusions are patterns that appear to be in motion everywhere except where you’re actually looking, or phantom dark spots that appear at the intersections of lines in a grid. An interesting audio illusion is the Shepard Tone, which seems to continually rise in pitch, forever. The tone isn’t actually rising continuously, because if it was, it would quickly rise above the frequency that our ears can hear. One reason these illusions are fun is that they allow us to understand ourselves better, by exposing the workings (and vulnerabilities) of our perceptual and pattern-recognition capabilities. Illusions are like mini-games which challenge the observer to derive some pattern from the carefully constructed stimulus.

Some games help children recognize and understand patterns. Tangram is an ancient example – the goal is to build a particular shape by arranging smaller individual shape fragments made of wood or plastic. My approach to Tangram is to keep forming different compound shapes quickly by moving the pieces with my hands, then visualize how those intermediate shapes would combine into larger ones. Arranging the fragments and looking at the results helps me think about possible solutions.

Set Cards

This is explained by a principle known as distributed cognition – the theory of how objects help us think (more about this in a future post). A more modern example of a pattern-oriented game is Set, a card game where players look for patterns of sameness or different-ness in shapes with the goal of making sets of three. Games like Odd Man Out prompt players to break down objects into “features” and discover similarities and differences between them. Even poker players look for patterns in other players’ behavioral tics, or tells, to help them determine bluffs and whether to raise or fold. The reason these games are fun is that they exercise the pattern-matching “hardware” in our brains – we enjoy being challenged!

The ‘distributed-ness’ of Sifteo cubes is key to developing games that help both kids and adults understand patterns and improve perception. By smearing data and information across three or more displays, Sifteo cubes challenge players to see disparate images, text and other data in their place within a gestalt, or whole. In No Evil Monkeys, players are presented with fragmented tiles across multiple cubes and must re-arrange the tile pieces back into their respective cubes to put together three whole images. Chroma Shuffle (probably our most addictive puzzle game across all ages) requires players to rotate and neighbor several cubes to eliminate dots based on shapes and colors. Playing with up to six cubes increases the possibilities for pattern-based games, with more data for the player to scrutinize and find relationships between.

The ability to understand patterns is a valuable professional and life skill. Without it, we’d have an impossible time establishing order from chaos and improving efficiency by creating groupings and routines. Our belief is that Sifteo games will refine pattern detection skills across all ages, in a fun and engaging way.

How about you? What are some games you play to hone your pattern-recognition and perception skills? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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.

Deck Swabber

Clean up the numbers that are integers, primes and different sets of multiples by neighboring your mop to the correct numbers.

Lock Picker

Pick the lock of the treasure chest by following order of operations.

Treasurer

Help pay the pirates by figuring out how many jewels each pirate should get to receive equal pay.

Captain

Steer the ship toward the right number for the equation and find more pirate treasure.

Flag Raiser

Place the flag at the correct position on the mast while learning number line placement.

Our game was well received both by students and educators. Students at The Country School in Los Angeles enjoyed the game so much that some stayed after math class to play longer. We also presented this project at Stanford’s Learning, Design and Technology EXPO where professors and Ed Tech professionals expressed their excitement for the learning potential of X Marks the Spot. We are hopeful that people will continue to enjoy it. To learn more about X Marks the Spot, visit our website.