Karl D.D. Willis.

Light x Sound is a follow on work from Light Tracer created in collaboration with Japanese sound designer/performance artist Taeji Sawai, and was first exhibited in March 2009 at the Axis Gallery in Tokyo. Light x Sound invites adults and children alike to interact, play, and create with light. As participants enter the installation space they are presented with a series of coloured light pens and invited to draw, write, and trace to produce imagery and sound in physical space.

TwelvePixels is a mobile phone interface which allows you to 'draw' using the twelve keys of the keypad. It was developed by Dr. Ivan Poupyrev and myself at the Sony CSL Interaction Laboratory and debuted at their Open House in June 2007. The principle is incredibly simple, mapping keys to pixels on screen which can be drawn at different sizes. It is immediately apparent how to use the interface, and as you use it more you can also improve dramatically. For more information check out our research paper from CHI 2008, Pervasive 2010 or visit the TwelvePixels website. This project was developed at Sony CSL and is patent pending. Copyright © 2007-2010 Sony CSL. ...

A paper presented at the Ubiprojection Workshop on Personal Projection at the Pervasive 2010 conference in Helsinki, Finland. Animation & Sequential Art Principles for Handheld Projector Interaction (PDF 563K). The abstract is as follows: We present a brief history of historic handheld projection devices and introduce design techniques for handheld projector interaction that draw from the principles of traditional animation and sequential art. Our approach is to utilize the movement of the handheld projector to express the motion and physicality of projected foreground objects. Users interact and control the projected image by moving and gesturing with the handheld projector itself. The overall interaction metaphor, MotionBeam, is applicable in a wide range of scenarios ranging from the behavior ...

A research paper detailing the release of the 12Pixels drawing system in the Japanese market. The paper was presented at Pervasive 2010 in Helsinki and was awarded the Best Presentation Award. 12Pixels: Exploring Social Drawing on Mobile Phones (PDF 1.2M). The abstract is as follows: In this paper we present the design and development of 12Pixels, a novel interface, application, and social web service that allows people to create and share drawings directly from a regular mobile phone. We detail the release of 12Pixels as a service in Japan and analyze trends that emerged from user data collected. Our analysis and insights provide useful ground-level experiences with social drawing and mobile content creation.

Shadow Follower is an experimental drawing robot designed to follow the shadow created by your hand or any other object. The original idea stems from Herbert Simon's metaphor of an ant walking on a beach. Although when looking at an ant from above their path seems very complex, Simon suggests it stems from simple local interactions such as 'see a rock, turn left'. If we imagine that the rock could be your foot or mine, and replace the ant with some device like a robot, then that is essentially 'interactivity'. My interest is in finding the richness, complexity, and creativity in such interactions.

BeatBox is a prototype toy that turns the surface of your desk into a beat making instrument. It uses contact microphones to detect different sounds from the desk surface, and a simple software patch to trigger audio samples. I often find myself tapping away on my desk, and this is a fun and simple way to experiment with those rhythms.

Alchemy is an open source drawing application developed by myself in collaboration with Jacob Hina from mid-2007. The project is aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways. Alchemy isn’t software for creating finished artwork, but rather a sketching environment that focuses on the absolute initial stage of the creation process. Shown above are some example concept art pieces created by Alchemy users, Chris Waller and Nicolas Francoeur, and a video of renowned concept artist Andrew Jones demoing Alchemy in Shanghai. The project received generous funding from the Exploratory Software Project here in Tokyo. For more information or to download it and give it a try, check out the ...

At the start of 2006 I worked with Takumi Endo and Nao Tokui on the Phonethica Project. In January 2007, Phonethica Desktop was released in beta for OSX and it includes a generative application icon which I coded and designed with Nao. As one of the key themes of Phonethica is diversity it seemed a fitting choice to create an identity which represented this. Above you can see the original logo I designed, a screenshot of one iteration of the icon, and a demo Xcode project; the source can be downloaded here. It uses the IconFamily class and is licensed with Creative Commons. If you find it useful please let me know.