that’s whacked

cool ideas, and a little bit of irony

Wednesday, Mar 15. 2006  –  Category: Musings

i was at Stanford University yesterday watching tammy give her final project presentation for her HCI class (which was very cool, by the way – you should get her to show it to you sometime if you see her). her class had some really interesting projects; the three most impressive (after tammy’s of course) were the Nightcrawl project, the PALette project, and this tele-health project for remote acoustic listening.

Nightcrawl was an interesting project that basically enabled mobile-phone users to keep tabs of where their friends were, and what events were going on that night. it actually reminded me of the ActiveCampus project i worked on at UCSD. neat, and certainly something with a lot of application – and i can see big commercial potential behind it.

PALette was a really cool collaborative painting/drawing program for kids. by far the coolest thing was the sound effects and the ability to digitally mix virtual paint colours.

The tele-health project was really cool, and one that I can see having a lot of commercial and social impact. It basically enables a doctor to remotely listen to a body’s sounds (heartbeat, breathing, etc.). I can see this having a huge impact in third world countries or areas with a high patient/doctor ratio.

At the end of the presentations, I bumped into an old colleague. Actually I think he was the CTO when Jesse and I worked at Ricoh… a guy by the name of Kurt Piersol. It was nice to catch up for a few minutes and see what he was up to. Apparently he’s heading up a research group to figure out how to get people to stop using paper.

Which I find hilariously ironic given that he works for what is essentially a photocopier company.