Projects

Every project in the archive, newest first. See them on the workbenches for the full tour.

• Latinada Lampshades 2026Lampshades from Latinada, my design studio for home decor and artisanal work.
• Häuserchronik Mattersburg 2026Mattersburg’s main square around 1930 as a tactile model — put a house on the plate and it tells its story.
• Telephone Detective 2026An AI murder mystery played through a 1940s rotary telephone — every case generated fresh, no two alike.
• Psycholudic Zoo 2026Three autonomous rovers share one charger — a robotic installation where care, not competition, is the game.
• Custom Tracking System – Vive VR 2026Tracking small robots with the lighthouses of an old HTC Vive and a few cheap photodiodes on a home-made PCB.
• Ludic Apparatus 2026Jugendstil brooches in copper, solder mask, and light — each a small autonomous player that senses its kin nearby.
• Parasitic Power: When Your Phone Charges Your Artwork 2026A 48-hour prototype where your charging phone quietly powers the artwork underneath it.
• Animatronic Crow Version 2 2026An animatronic crow head — three servos, a 3D-printed frame, and far too much super glue.
• The EGC Device 2025A classroom on a PCB: ESP32-C3, display, rainbow LEDs and a buzzer — students build a playable game in a day.
• Building a Custom Time Tracker 2025I needed a physical time tracker that could sync with a custom web system.
• LUDIC PSY AI ENGINE 2025A face reading becomes a Godot level — mechanics, creatures, and terrain, written live.
• Building a Custom Wooden Controller: CNC, ESP32 2025A controller in solid wood: CNC-milled body, a quality joystick, three buttons, an ESP32 inside.
• Psycholudic Shuffle × EEG Hyperscanning 2024Three players, three EEGs: gameplay and brain activity recorded in sync during a role-switching card game.
• Psycholudic Shuffleboard 2024An oak Schnapsen board with NFC under the cards — gameplay logged move by move for research.
• Crafting a Raven: An Animatronic Assistant 2024An animatronic raven assistant that talks via ChatGPT — the hard part was not looking like a chicken.
• Ludic Hardware Experiments 2023Ten-plus custom controllers and sensor boards on tailor-made PCBs, used by students in their projects.
• Game Design Club @ Experimental Game Cultures 2023A hands-on club at the Angewandte where students prototype, playtest, and iterate under playful constraints.
• [A]I Maze 2023A mirror labyrinth built around live face recognition, asking how it feels to be read by machines.
• Live Polling App 2022A live polling tool for presentations — browser fingerprints for votes, Chart.js for the results.
• Drones & Rabbits in Shannon’s Labyrinth 2022A situated game of drones and white rabbits that turns the Postsparkasse hall into Shannon’s labyrinth.
• “Narrenturm” Mindgame: Mindworm Blaster 2021Two mindworms, driven by 300,000 points of EEG data, eat away at a building in augmented reality and the browser.
• Dérive AI – Performing with GPT-2 2021A performative card game coupling GPT-2 poetry, AI ethics, and an interpassive mind-reading device.
• Grounded Birds 2021A multiplayer RPG about flightless birds hopping, gearing up, and making a last stand against extinction.
• A Leap Forward 2020A real-time strategy game played from the ground: give your rabbits tools and they work out the rest, while the foxes close in.
• Goal oriented AI 2020Unity prototypes of Goal Oriented Action Planning — agents that weigh costs and plan their own route to a goal.
• Ruben’s Puppets 2019Real-time strategy meets third-person action in a world of wooden puppets at war. My USC thesis game.
• VR Airplane 2018Building my own VR flight simulator, from the cockpit screens to scripted flight physics.
• Walden, a game 2018PlayStation 4 and Xbox One work on Tracy Fullerton’s Walden, a game, at the USC Game Innovation Lab.
• Goldrushers 2017A Goldrush themed local multiplayer brawler for PC and Mac.
• Petit oiseau 2017A quiet exploration game about changing a place through your choices, made in Tracy Fullerton’s class at USC.
• Coyote 2017A wooden board game about smuggling people across the border, and the hard choices it forces.
• Bluetooth Microcontroller to Google Cardboard 2016A Google Cardboard VR game played with a home-made Bluetooth controller: turn a knob to set the time of day.
• A Walk At Dusk 2016An ambient mobile piece made in 48 hours at the GettyJam, about looking longer at a Caspar David Friedrich painting. Second place.
• Websites 2015Websites for a migration conference, a dance school, a game agency, a lab supplier and more.
• Reflektion 2015A non-linear film with a real actress, steered through a rotary phone.
• Beyond The Door 2015Interactive installation with a large format projection and the Kinect – interface.
• Early Ruben prototypes 2014Gameplay from a 2014 from-scratch prototype: gathering, transport, travel and a shop.
• Frau im Mond 2012The formal elements of a silent film from 1929 are applied to a video game film from 2012.
• Transformation Gas 2011Edward Hopper’s Gas (1940) rebuilt as a melancholy virtual scene, performed live in a game engine.
• Krallenspiel 2011A speculation game for the METAmART art market: buy art spheres, chase the golden Porsche.