I work at the intersection of design, science and engineering to invent new ways of interacting with computers. My primary interest is the application of sensors to the human interface -- how you bring the world into the computer and how you bring computing into the world.

My undergraduate education is in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario.

I did my Master's degree at Stanford and studied Music, Science & Technology (MS/T) at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). I studied music not to make music but from a fascination with the things people use to make music. There I studied Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and built prototype electronic musical instruments with software and electronics studying with Bill Verplank and Max Matthews; I studied Patent Law at the Stanford Law School with Margaret Jane Radin; studied signal processing (DSP), audio synthesis and analysis with Julius Smith, and wrote a computer program that wrote a piece for the Stanford Symphony Orchestra with Jonathan Berger.

I began, and have yet to finish, a PhD in Computer Science at Princeton working with Perry Cook. My focus there was HCI. My work there was in the application of sensor networks--wirelessly connected very small computers--to user interfaces. This work culminated in the Tangible Sequencer.

For a year, I worked at the Moto Development Group in San Francisco doing sensor and user interface design for clients like Apple, Microsoft, BMW and HP.

In 2007 I started working in research and development at Apple on multitouch hardware. There I spent my time inventing and patenting new touch technologies.

Now I lead the Human Interface Device Software Prototype group at Apple.

A large, round, transparent, multi-user, multitouch sensor made of ITO on PET with custom designed hardware, firmware and software. This work was at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in 2007. http://www.interactiveoracles.com/.

An implementation of mutual-capacitive multitouch using copper wires, an 8-bit microcontroller and a discrete analog front end. The videos show a realtime 3D height-map of my hand as it moves over the sensor. Based on a technique from Jun Rekimoto.

A musical instrument that represents sounds as physical objects you can pick up, move around and reorder; physical instantiation of timeline editing. Making music creation more accessible to people of all ages is a long term interest of mine.
http://www.tangiblesequencer.com

I work frequently with processing both for software work and as a display or user interface for hardware work. These are some videos of sketches. I'm interested in physical simulation-based user interfaces so I developed a basic physics simulation library that people have done some really great work with: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~traer/physics.