Thanks to Chuck for sending in this post from the TED Blog
“I make paper interactive,” says Kate Stone in today’s talk, given at TED2013.
Because this description of her work “really confuses most people,” the best way to understand it is to see it in action. So in this talk, Stone demonstrates some of her very cool creations — like a poster that can pick the perfect slice of cake for you, a newspaper that plays audio and video snippets attached to stories, and a poster that changes its imagery to show you your energy usage levels. In the grand finale of the talk, Stone plays two paper DJ decks and a kit of drums embedded on a poster. It’s the last item that’s perhaps most thrilling: as Stone touches a cymbal or kick drum on the poster, it resounds through the theater. Stone has taken to Kickstarter to raise money to produce this for consumers.
All of these things were created with an ordinary printing press, printing conductive ink onto the paper and letting thousands of electrons flow through it. From there, all it takes is a small circuit board and wireless software to make it work.
“It’s not even about the technology,” says Stone, wrapping it up. “I just want to create great experiences.”
Below, find five more talks from speakers who similarly want to make electronic design a lot more fun.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
