For the 70er Haus der Geschichten I built a tactile model of Mattersburg’s Hauptplatz around 1930: twelve houses, 3D-printed at 1:100, on a base plate after the old cadastral map.
Pick a house up and put it on the reading plate, and the display tells its story — historical photos, the house chronicle, who lived and worked there, in German and English. Or scan its QR code with your phone.
It is a prototype; grant applications for the rest of the town are under way. The model and the building stories are at mattersburg.haus.
Walden, a game is the USC Game Innovation Lab’s first-person year at Walden Pond, under Tracy Fullerton. You keep the cabin, walk the woods, and let the season do the rest.
I was a research assistant on it during the MFA, from 2016 to 2018. The job was the PlayStation 4: port the build and ship it, get the older code to run, add a localization system, and work on the UI. Unity and C#.
The custom Vive-lighthouse tracker returns its first usable data: X, Y, and a bit of rotation, captured with two BPW-34 photodiodes on a home-made PCB. Floppy-disk film works surprisingly well as a cheap IR bandpass filter.
Two diodes is barely enough, but the target — indoor tracking for small robots at ten to fifteen euros a unit — still looks reachable. The next board gets at least three sensors.
Built over a weekend: a Qi receiver feeding an ESP32, so a phone laid down to charge quietly powers the LEDs underneath it. No batteries, no wall plug — the visitor brings the power source.
For installations this solves a real maintenance problem, and there is something pleasing about the phone being both guest and generator. Laser-cut case, charging status in light.
Version 2 of the animatronic crow is alive on the bench — just head and neck this time, three servos for tilt, rotate, and extension. Testing the whole assembly in Fusion360 before printing saved several motor-holder reprints.
The feathers remain the hard part: super glue, fur, and feather hands for days. A small controller pad steers it for now; voice control can wait.
The time tracker finally lives in a case that fits. The first prints tried to be one perfect piece — misaligned buttons, a display that never sat right. Switching to a modular design broke the streak; buttons, OLED, and buzzer each get their own tolerances now.
ESP32 inside, syncing to the tracking system in the cloud. It looks a little Star Trek, which was the point.
