Fun toys or maybe the next big technology thing

Watching what my younger daughter gets up to in geekland is always interesting. She is one of the early adopters of digital technology. Thanks to her, I have been a Twitter member since January 2007, months after she had joined, of course, and had a page on Facebook before most other old-timers. An iPhone made its way into our UK house within three months of the US launch.

But even with this track record I was somewhat taken aback when she announced that she had signed up for a weekend course in electronics. Huh? Circuit boards and soldering irons? Yes, she was going to use her Flash AS skills to talk to circuit boards and make them do stuff together.

This particular course was run by two bright people. One, Dr Brock Craft, working at the London Knowledge Lab where the course was also being held, has a fascinating background. His focus is on information visualisation and physical computing. Read more about the latest fun stuff he “plays” around with on his blog.

The other co-presenting bright spark was Alias Cummins, a Flash developer par excellence. The course covered the beginnings of working with Arduino using Flash. The ultimate goal was to get to a spot where the students could get Flash to talk to an integrated circuit using Arduino. The primary development language would be ActionScript 3.

Daughter came back quite inspired and demonstrated how she could light up little bulbs on her circuit board using her Mac and Flash, and how to manipulate images on the computer screen with a light-sensitive bulb and lever attached to the board. Now I am waiting with bated breath to see what new stuff will come out of that.

The other somewhat “unusual” project she has been amusing herself with is as collaborator in a friend’s MA communication design degree project. It involves an interesting foray into a different perspective on user interface design. It further makes use of Flash programming with a view to making the software work on a multitouch table.

The three whizz kids converted our lounge/dining room into a studio recently, with umpteen computers, a data projector, Wii remote perched on funky legs and other gadgets scattered randomly around. It’s a truly international collaboration with Johannes the multitouch-table developer coming from Germany, Mel the MA student from Austria and Niqui from South Africa. If this is what makes young adults happy, then the world is in a good space.

It was fascinating to watch the first experiments. With a gadget-like pen, a Mac, the Wii controller and data projector they were able to manipulate the circle images that were projected on to the wall. In other words, they were twirling the circles on the wall with the pen gadget. As an aside, it was quite surprising that all three of them were on Macs. Wouldn’t have seen that a few years ago.

As with the weekend course on electronics, this particular project was fun to watch taking shape but didn’t really register on my mental screen as being anything else except a typical academic theory project. After all, touch-screen technology has been lurking in the wings for years, never truly coming into its own. Even Microsoft is playing around with tables.

That was until I spotted this video. For once a Digg friend actually sent me to something worthwhile. Light bulbs went off. I could have been Britney Spears stepping out of a taxi with the paparazzi attention she normally gets, that’s how many lights went off.

The video is of a TED talk by researcher Johnny Lee, who put together an interactive whiteboard with about $50-worth of gadgets, a computer and projector, saving about $3 000 in equipment costs. It was exactly what had happened in my lounge a few weeks ago.

Even as techno-illiterate as I am, I could see the possibilities a bit more clearly. After all, I should have more faith in my daughter. What she finds fascinating could be the next big thing. So if anybody feels inspired and wants to send her some shekels so she can have fun doing more research stuff rather than slogging away at Flash development, feel free!