Expressive Objects is a series of experiments in data visualization in AR. The idea is to represent context-aware data and UI in a consumable format. I developed this project while acting as an academic fellow at IDEO CoLab, Cambridge during the summer of 2018.

You can find all my work on the GitHub.

Kindle Bookstack

Reading is a weirdly social activity. Sure, you do it by yourself but you are advertising your nature projected through the book you are reading. I’ve had quite a few interesting discussions that started from a book I noticed a stranger reading. This is an attempt to bring back that element of social reading to e-readers.

I put an AR marker on the cover of my Kindle e-reader so that looking at it from a HoloLens would show the top three reads. More info

Wireless Visualization

Expressive Objects – Wireless visualization Demo from tinkrmind on Vimeo.

A demo of how wireless connections might work in the future. Here wireless connections are visualized as 3D models. You can switch the speaker connection between your phone or laptop, and control the music right from the AR app. More info

Printer Monster

Expressive Objects – Priner Monster from tinkrmind on Vimeo.

Ah, the dreaded office printer. The monster that gobbles up paper and throws a paper jam error when there’s obviously no paper in it. Won’t it be nice to just look at the bank of printers and monitor their health at a glance? Make sure they all have enough ink, see the IP address, see the last printed pages… won’t it be nice to not have to go through the settings menu on that tiny printer screen to see these details? Well, that’s what I did in this demo. More info

Lamp

Smart bulbs are here to stay. But I sure hope the apps to control them are not. I don’t want to take my phone out to switch off the lights. The logical place to look when I want to change the lights is to look at the light itself. In this project, I add the controls for the light in an AR app on the light itself. More info

Water meter

It is kinda crazy to think that we wash our dishes with potable water. Coming from India, it was quite a shock for me to realize and internalize this. I think people don’t actually understand deep down that when they leave the tap running they are wasting drinking water. This is an attempt to show the data of water wastage in a form that makes you feel it. More info