Nicolas Villar visiting

Nicolas, who was the first BSc student I worked with in Lancaster, is now after finishing his PhD with Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. He came on Friday to Essen to see the lab and he brought us a Voodoo I/O box [1] – we are really excited!

He stayed for the weekend and I learned a lot about interesting technologies and ideas. Looking at his iREX ebook and Vivien's new USB Microscope (30€ from Aldi ;-) we had to do some research into the screen quality of different devices. It is interesting to see that e-Ink moves closer to newspaper and that in comparison to it an iPhone screen is pretty coarse.

Some references to remember:

• Energy harvest module at Farnell (order No. 1439949, EH301A)
• DIY 3D Priniting - http://fabathome.org/
• Hi-End 3D Printing - http://www.objet.com/
• Interesting web shop - http://www.grand-illusions.com/

[1] Spiessl, W., Villar, N., Gellersen, H., and Schmidt, A. 2007. VoodooFlash: authoring across physical and digital form. In Proceedings of the 1st international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 15 - 17, 2007). TEI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 97-100. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1226969.1226989