Embedded - 204: Abuse Electricity

Episode Date: June 14, 2017

Phoenix Perry (@phoenixperry) spoke with us about physical games. Phoenix is CTO of DoItKits (@DoItKits) and   More about Phoenix: Bot Party Her site: PhoenixPerry.com Goldsmith’s page She enjoyed Obelisk Gate by NK Jemisin    Physical games are sometimes called Alt Ctrl such as at the Alt Ctrl Game Jam.  Phoenix co-founded Code Liberation with Nina Freeman (http://ninasays.so/) and Jane Friedhoff (http://janefriedhoff.com/). “Code Liberation catalyzes the creation of digital games and creative technologies by women, nonbinary, femme, and girl-identifying people to diversify STEAM fields.” There is an 8-part workshop in London in Summer 2017 (more info). Some other interesting people: Catt Small Lynne Bruning (http://etextilelounge.com/) Helen Steer (http://doitkits.com/) Perla Maiolino Rebecca Febrink  How to Get What You Want wearables site Yoga Pants AutoDesk Fusion360 I know you only read the show notes because you wanted this link: Velastat LessEMF has the supplies for ghost hunting!

Hello, and welcome to Embedded. I'm Elysia White. My co-host is Christopher White. Our guest this week is Phoenix Perry, artist, musician, hacker, designer, engineer, and educator. Hi, Phoenix. It's very nice to talk to you today. Hello. Could you introduce yourself as though you were on a panel at some embedded conference, embedded systems conference-like thing? Sure. I am Phoenix Perry, and I run a nonprofit and make electronics and generally abuse electricity with healthy abandon all right uh we're going to ask you more about many of those things but let's start with lightning round where we try to ask you short questions with short answers and

if we are behaving ourselves we don't ask for great detailed explanations okay we'll see how this goes chris you want to start? Preferred voltage. Oh, 120. Favorite sensor. That's a question. You asked me. Favorite sensor. Oh, dear God. Well, I really love teaching people how to make sensors.

So can I say the ones I make? Yeah. And we can get back to what those are. Okay. Ideal college class size? 20. Favorite movie or book or any sort of fiction you have encountered for the first time in the last year? I am a really big fan of Obelisk Gate, which is a book that I just read. It's a Afro-punk writer. I don't even know if you call her Afro-punk. She's definitely in the science fiction realm.

At one point, I realized I was reading a commentary on race that was really profound, and it really hit me. And it's all set in this like future fantasy sci-fi world. It's incredible. Cool. Oh, oh, yes. The Jemson author. She's great. Yeah. Yeah, she's I cannot wait for her next book. It's like after a futurism is got to be some of the most interesting fiction out there right now. It's incredible. Weirdest animal you've ever touched. A yak.

All right. That's a good one. Yeah. Let's see. Favorite actuator. Oh, okay. This is a, I do hapt oh okay uh this is a i do haptics so this is uh almost like a trick question i don't it's like asking me to choose who my favorite friend is i really like precision micro drives uh they have a whole range of actuators i'm a really big fan of

right now i can't remember the exact model number because everything just has numbers, but they have this little three volt actuator that creates really great vibration patterns through like deep surfaces like wood. That's my favorite one right now. It's got a red casing. Wow. I know that they made good ones, but I will ask you for the number after the show. Yeah, definitely. I had them send me a bag. I called them and was like, hey, I make games. I want to test a bunch of your actuators. Do you have any like, you know, discarded ones that I can just, you know, they don't need to last more than five minutes,

but I just want to see how they sound. And they sent me like a bag. It was great. I paid them like they sent me like a bag it was great i paid them like 12 pounds for like a bag of junk that's like six million dollars yeah i mean it's it's kind of great because like none of them meet the performance ramps that they that are their caliber for selling them so they were off cast and it was wonderful it gave me a really good sense of size and like i was really after sound because my current game is about bees. So I wanted the actuators to sound bee-like through the wood.

I was going to ask about the whole London and having an American accent, but now I just want to ask about bees. What is this game? So right now I'm working with Heather Kelly and she's a really amazing game designer. And for a long time we've had a long distance game designer love affair because we are interested in all the same idiosyncratic things. is how our senses can be augmented and enhanced in video games and how we can unlock different forms of perception in play. She and I decided to do something that really was a long time coming, but this Christmas we locked ourselves in an Airbnb in Chicago where neither of us live and we know very few people. And we spent two weeks digging through all of our interests to try and design a game. We came up with a game called Thrum, which is a set of hexagons.

And inside each hexagon, right now there are four motors, but I think we're going to reduce it down to one. And we're attempting to create like a board of them. So there's seven right now. And we're attempting to vibrate them in directional ways so players can follow which food source we're trying to get them to collect. And it's based on bees and their waggle dance. So what they do when they find a bit of pollen is they come back and they do this little dance. And it kind of is all vibration based.

And it's in the dark because there's no light in their hive, right? And they kind of rub up against the other bees next to them. And they stomp around and then they make a little offering of what they've discovered. And they attempt to get all the bees. They tell them the direction of the honey, the amount of the food source. They convey quite a lot of information through wiggling so we're seeing if we can get humans to path find using vibration in a similar way so just to back up a second no there's just so many things to back up to but so sorry when people say video games or they hear games,

now they think PlayStation 4 and 3D graphics and shooting people. Virtual reality. And you're talking about physical artifacts, built things with actuators and sensors that aren't necessarily computer games. I mean, they have computers, but that's not the main thing. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm trying to get people to connect to each other and to play in groups in very social ways.

I often, my current game, Bot Party, is a game that rewards people holding hands in groups. So it reacts not to being touched. Like if you pick up one of the robots, they have accelerometers in them, so they kind of react. So people shake them, but they get really excited if you touch somebody. So that is really important to me, that human contact. And Thrum has everybody kind of playing. Eventually players, they start out on their feet, but very quickly they get on their hands and knees because they're trying to figure out what's going on. And I've seen them walk in a circle around it, and then I've seen them sit on

it and lay on it and do all kinds of fun things. And that's not something that's going to happen in front of an Xbox controller. And you really unlock a kind of potential for engagement that is beyond the game itself. Because you can engage with others. Exactly. Exactly. And so when you say you're a game developer, is that, actually, I'm not sure you said that. If someone were to say you were a game developer, this is the sort of game you mean, not a screen game.

Yeah. And a lot of people get really confused. Like my boss at work has struggled for a very long time because they asked me to teach like intro to games. And I just want to be like, these students don't deserve to have my hate. Because I just look at everything they make and I just want to be like, not a zombie survival game. I'm going to cry. Professor Perry, when are we going to talk about Unity?

About what? When are we going to talk about Unity, Professor Perry? I know. And I'm like, ah, let's talk about Bernie to Coven. And let's talk about like flow-based games. And they're like, no, we want to make zombie horror survival shooters. And I'm like, oh. So I feel really bad.

I try and let them make them anyway. But I do encourage students to really reach outside the box. And I've had some spectacular examples of them picking that challenge up and doing really cool things with it. However, there are some students I have who really, and they're going to go on to be like the best of the AAA developers. and doing really cool things with it. However, there are some students I have who really, and they're going to go on to be like the best of the AAA developers. I have one right now who he's super gifted, and I don't want to stop him.

He's going to make some other 15-year-old boy really happy one day. It's not me. Okay, so it's not virtual reality. It's not a screen game.'s not an ios game is there a name for this type of computer driven but not screen based game yes there is beginning to be a name, which is really exciting. Years back, years, years, years back, I did a game jam at NYU Poly called Alt Control and Make sponsored it, Native Fruit sponsored it, and I promoted it in the kind of places that hackers look. And I was really thrilled because the next year, I don't know if they, I don't think they saw it. Because I don't think I really crossed into games as much.

But it happened to NYU Games, NYU Game Innovation Lab, actually. Game Center wasn't open yet. And the next year, there was an alt control showcase at the GDC, which I thought was amazing. And it seems like alt control is becoming the name for this stuff. And it really fits because it's alternative controllers, right? And so I think that's going to be the genre name that ultimately emerges. Alt-control. Okay.

But it's harder because you're not just writing software. You have to write the game software. You have to do all of the the state machine and game flow yes but now you also have to build hardware in a repeatable way i know i mean that is the fun part of course but it's it's also the bleeding part and i and the carrying the prototype we actually this was a so i have two friends downstairs who also make physical games and it's a really, there's not a lot of us. It's a small community of people at this point. I would say if you packed time we get a commission, there's almost no way that game survives from commission to commission. We always have to fix something. We always have to rebuild it because robust systems are hard and gamers are

intense. They're not just going to touch your project and stroke it gently and be like, Oh, soft little engineering project. They're going to slam it. And they're going to take it to 11, like immediately. That was a real surprise when I first realized that the level of robustness was far greater than anything I had ever engineered before. I've seen people do things with knobs at video games festivals that it shocks the mind.

I think it's just i think it's also like people changed how they approach a knob i think when i was growing up knobs had a bit more of like precious like people would treat them a bit more preciously because they were attached to electronics now like really young kids are used to ipads and they're used to like really, really rapid, quick responses. So they'll turn your knob up and down like 50 times in two seconds. Doesn't sound like a big deal. You stack that up over two weeks and you better make sure those wires inside are really firmly attached.

So this sounds a lot like doing toy development for kids well i was gonna say exactly the same museum concepts oh because those get such uh intense usage from kids really although i have been known to turn things very fast and And Christopher's ability to push buttons is always astounding. That's button pushes I expect. The knob thing actually shocked me. I made a really cute little step sequencer game and somebody dislodged one of the knobs. I had those things hot glued to acrylic.

I don't even know how. But somehow when I opened it up, they had ripped the wires in the like tiny little like space. I was just like, how? How did you manage this? And I'm just mad. I'm imagining a three year old pulling it and jerking it. I can see how it probably happened. But actually, yeah, chewing actually, it could have totally been chewing. Because kids, right? I had a, and I have done that. Don't ever try and engineer in a lack of sleep state.

I have done this. And I did that once at a game jam. It was gross. But I worked previously to my current condition where I live in Goldsmiths and or live in that should tell you how often I work, live in London, work at Goldsmiths. I was living in New York and I owned a game studio with Ben Johnson called Dozenize Games. And we made museum installations and that taught me everything I know about robustness. I really changed how I approached making these games because some of the stuff we made for the museum had to be just really, there's no bugs, there are no bugs. And that's a very different kind of approach than say like prototyping. It's a more manufactured production approach,

even though you may only be doing one or two of an instance. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to cut a circuit board. You're going to weld the box shut. Like you're going to do that kind of thing. And unlike Maker Faire or festivals, you're not going to be standing there to fix it. No, you're going to be 3,000 miles away, possibly, in my case. That can't go wrong. Okay, other than robustness, what do we need to know about entering this field, about making physical games to take places? The biggest thing I would, there's a couple things I would advise for like young designers. Think about suitcase size. You want to be able to travel with your game and you

want to be able to take it to festivals to show it off. And that's a really great, fun way to shake hands and meet people and learn about the space, but you have to be able to pack your game down. So you really do need to think about modular design. And the CNC machine is your friend. The other thing I would say to consider is how you design and develop yourself a travel kit for your tools. So getting the right tools and getting the tools that you can travel with easily is really important. Like I have a USB based soldering iron, I have a set of tools that's really light but strong, because I put them in my bag all the time. I also have a pretty good understanding now of what the TSA will let through and hand luggage. And it's surprising that they will take a lot of things. I have had

my USB soldering iron in my bag numerous times and they've never taken it out, which is actually really surprising. So stuff like that is really important. The other thing I would say is to plan to have your game ready to show a month before you show it and play test it, play test it, play test it. Because people are going to do really weird things with your hardware and children are going to do extra weird things to your hardware. So running it on a large audience like something you would experience at Maker Faire is an excellent, excellent testing ground for a really successful game festival. So I was just at NowPlayThis. They had thousands of people through. It was sold out every day that they were there. So you sometimes have to be prepared for thousands

of people playing your game. There needs to be really clear reset. There needs to be also ways for you to access it and check on it remotely. So one of the things I do is I have VPNs on all my machines. That way I can log on, I can look at them. If there's any, like it crashed out or my restart scripts, because you really want it to start and set itself up, launch. And if somebody pulls the power plug out of the wall, it reboots itself when it gets plugged back in. So you have to really think about all of these edge cases for disaster. So that would be my advice, my technical advice.

Well, actually getting down into the more technical pieces, what kind of sensors, I mean, haptics is very cool and you mentioned accelerometers. What else are we looking at here? Give us the whole architecture of a game. Yes. In five minutes or less, please. Well, okay. It's yeah totally uh downstairs right now

there are three hackers that make games and it looks like an adafruit store okay uh it's if there's a brand new piece of hardware that comes out we're on it like really quickly because we are like what are the potential for new game ideas that are novel that I've never seen? And my friend Robin, who's here right now, BombGuard, he, I bought this piece of elastic conductive string and I was like, oh, I'm going to make game with this. I'm going to make game with this. And I took it when I hung out with Heather in Chicago and we couldn't think of anything to do with it. And I was like, there's going to be some, this is going to be cool. Somebody's going to do something with this.

Sure enough, like two weeks later, Robin made possibly the most adorable play prototype ever, where when you stretched the string, there was a string on screen and you were trying to keep little characters from falling off of it. And they were adorable. And he did a one-to-one mapping of the string elasticity to the string on screen. And it was amazing. So these new technologies that get brought out by like Adafruit and SparkFund in an Arduino-friendly ecosystem really do make our jobs easier because we don't have to think about, you know, going to China and sourcing stuff.

But we're on it really quick if we see something new, because it's going to open up new avenues for us to play with. Well, that brings to mind, people often ask us, I want to learn X technology, or I want to learn Y processor. And our answer to that is always, you have to find a project you want to do. You can't just learn C for the fun of it. You should learn C so you can get to somewhere else. Exactly.

And this physical game sounds like a good, I mean, it's partially art. It's a performance art sort of thing and yet it's also electronics and microcontrollers and software and you put it all together and you build something that's far more than just a sensor absolutely and you're thinking like how your software can work and interact in the physical world and c is really it's really cool because you never just use one language with these kinds of games. That never happens. I'm usually rocking like three different languages.

And sometimes I even have like a machine learning pipeline in there. I'm doing all kinds of trickery to make this stuff work. And often that trickery is where you learn like super interesting stuff like I got into machine learning for performance and gesturing games back in 2010 because I really needed a way for a camera to be able to recognize my movement and motion tracking just sucks it is not for me I it's just way too much static I needed need it in an easier way. And machine learning, I met this really amazing woman who I work with now at Goldsmiths called Rebecca Fiebrink. And she and I started a collaboration. She was doing her PhD at the

time. And she was trying to make machine learning accessible to people like me. And I just became her beta test. So it was really, really wonderful, because I could take my sensor data, which is usually let's just admit it, all electronics is is basically signal massaging. I feel like often I'm trying to get a piece of data into like a usable format for something else. And she helped that process so, so much because I no longer really needed to care about what the data looked like. I just needed to care about what the output of it I wanted it to be and trying to get it clean enough that the neural network in between it could handle the noise. And that was really useful. Neural networks for sensor-based games,

they're the jam. They're worth learning how to build yourself. And some of them you can get small enough, like the K-nearest neighbor algorithm, you can get that small enough, you can run it on like, you know, a Teensy or something, which is really nice. Because then you're getting a kind of bit of machine learning in your sensor process for signal processing. And it's, it's really nice. I highly encourage it. You can run it on a teen seat. You can't necessarily train it on a teen seat. Well,

you could, it would just take a long time. Yeah, no, no, you're not going to train that, but you can run it. I made no claims about doing your training on the teen seat.

That sounds like a, just a disaster. You're going to want your data trained ahead of time. Yeah, exactly. You earlier said that your favorite sensors were ones you built and ones you worked with, with your class. So what kind of sensors do you mean by that? Well, right now downstairs, I got in a fight with Bruce Sterling on the internet, which seems to happen more often than it should. And he tweeted about this pair of yoga pants. Okay, come on. I'm just going to go ahead and say a $300 pair of smart yoga pants is ridiculous, right?

It is possibly like the whitest thing you could buy. It is super privileged. You know, I just, I can't even look at it. But at the same time I saw them and I thought to myself, yes, that is what I want. Machine learning embedded in my pants. And I just thought to myself, like, you know, he was like, this is, you know, he was kind of like downplaying and like making fun of them. And I was like, yeah, but they're onto the right idea. They're thinking in the right direction. They're thinking about how we could use gesture and motion

in a natural and organic way and make our technology much more part of our lives and less some sort of weird disconnected screen experience. And he was like, well, you know, I'll send you $3 if you tweet a picture of yourself in these for a 1% or discount privilege. And I was like, I'm an engineer, yo, I don't have to, I can make that for $3. Don't even. So I was like, I think I'll just build my own just to be a jerk. So I've been building it this weekend with my friend Helen, and she is the CEO of Do It Kit. So she's downstairs right now working on a sensor that we designed yesterday, which is a pressure sensor that also gives us XY stretch data. I don't know how to hold up and washing over time. But we've made it like, of course, because, you know, I'm ridiculous and from video games on silver Lycra.

And it looks like we basically made disco pants, but they do allow me to track motion and they do allow me to track yoga poses that I could train into a machine learning system, particularly with a neural network. I think it would do quite well with that. So anyway. You said disco pants, but the picture I saw on Twitter really made me think of space yoga. Space yoga. Yes, space yoga. Okay, now this is going to turn into a game. I'm finding myself way on your side with this.

And I know the initial reaction is, a lot of people for these things is like Bruce's where it's, oh, this is ridiculous. You know, it's a one percenter thing, but it's also the first try at something, right? And okay, we have to get the silly rich people to buy this because so we can get the next one, which is less expensive or does something more useful.

And it's exactly what you're doing. You're seeing that and saying, well, that's overpriced and ridiculous and I can do it for cheap. And that's exactly the way it should work, right? Okay. I think so, yeah. That's a little bit of weird inspiration, but look what I can do with this now for a fraction of the price and then things develop. I mean, if you don't start with the ridiculous thing, how do you ever get to practical? Yeah. I mean, I might not be able to get there. Like I think they're using

this like connective net factor fabric, but man, my postdoc at work, Perla Moreno, I hope I'm saying Perla's last name right. She's amazing. And she designs like skin for robots for ESA. She's awesome. And she invented a conductive stretchable lycra and i'm just like i could use prolo's lycra on this you know and it's like she makes amazing sensors and that was immediately when i thought of the lycra she had shown me uh she's italian and she has really good access to like fashion industry folks so she's done like conductive material on one side, but then on the other side, she's made like a nice black mat, like if I'm if memory serves and she's put them together as one piece of fabric, which is really cool. But anyway,

what we're doing downstairs is kind of inspired on her idea. I just don't have it like welded to a nice piece of Lycra. I have it like, I'm using like iron on fusing like stuff for regular lycra so it's not as fancy but it it works and then we've used a bit of velostat it's just the velostat conductive fabric trick right um it's not pretend we don't know what that is pretend that you don't know what that is. Pretend that you don't know what that is. So Velostat is a piece of, uh, resistive material that changes resistance when you put pressure on it.

And you can buy it from my favorite place to buy materials in the world. Less EMF. So less EMF is this like they specialize in ghost hunting equipment, which is amazing. Yes. I'm not joking. Go to less EMF is this, like, they specialize in ghost hunting equipment, which is amazing. Yes, I'm not joking. Go to Less EMF. I didn't think you'd teach ghost hunting. It's amazing. And Less EMF, but what they specialize in, actually, the ghost hunting insanity funds their materials research.

So they have a ton of amazing conducted materials on their website. And I don't know if they're making some or sourcing some or making the rest. I'm not really sure what's going on over there. But every time I'm back home, I bring a bolt of their material back with me because they just have the most amazing material. So I got stretchable conductive lycra there, and I also got velostat. So the velostat, I've cut a square of it and basically if you put it between two panels of conductive material what you can do is if one is you know attached to voltage and one is attached to ground the resistance in between them will change when

you press down on the velostat as long as you make the velostat large enough that the two conductive pieces can't touch each other does that make sense yeah i think so yes yes it does i'm still sketching in my head but yes yes so it's two pieces of stretchable conductive lycra with a piece of velostat in between stuck in between and i designed the leads of the lycra to go into the seam of the pants and then what I think I'm gonna do is use a silicon wire and sew it into the side of the pants for now I think that'll be like a nice little trick and I really liked they designed with like snaps and my friend Marco and Heidi they had this project called Xsense, I think. XSense, they use snaps to you to connect their sensors to their board. So I might sew on some snaps to snap the board on and off so you can

wash them or do cool things with them. So I don't know. They'll be fun to make regardless. I'll probably, you know, make them and do yoga with them a few times just to play with it just for fun. Yes. And then maybe, maybe space game. I don't know. Anyway, I, you have to choose the right yoga position in order to get to different areas of the game. Oh my God. That's amazing you have totally this is this is so much better than the like what was one of those one of those big gurus who boomers really love made a connect yoga game that was really terrible oh god it's called leila i think leila deepak chakra No. It's such a crap game. It is so bad. But I could make this ridiculous and fun. You mentioned Do It Kits and Helen. And we haven't talked about what that is. So,

could you give us the, you know, 10,000 foot view of what is Do It Kits? Do It Kits is a set of learning materials that's designed for GCSE curriculum to allow teachers to teach STEM topics in much more tactile and meaningful and impactful ways. So there's a lot of research that supports that building something and doing something physically really does take the knowledge you've learned in something like a textbook and turn it into something applied in the real world. And it just connects the learning in a very solid and tangible way. Helen's been writing educational materials for years, and I've been engineering weird stuff for years. And Nat Hunter is a bit of a mad genius because

we both applied for residencies at Machines Room and she sat us right next to each other. And I think she knew what would happen. Because like eventually these two things started to merge and Helen started to make stuff with me and I started to like talk to Helen about how that could be, you know, work. And she's really awesome and smart and gifted. And I love making weird stuff with her. But functionally now, like, Helen and Phoenix make stuff happens on weekends. And then Helen is smart enough to think about how to sell it so Phoenix can eat. And that's working out. So that is something that is you know is going well it's it's definitely nice to be connected to someone who not only knows how to market stuff but really does have like a strong

passion for like thinking about how physics education and math education cannot be so boring. And there's a lot of maker kits out there. There's a whole ton of products for the maker market. But what they fail to really understand is the teachers and that the teachers, they don't necessarily know how to hack and they don't necessarily have much desire to learn. They just want to be able to run their class. And they already in large part have a scripted set of curriculum that they have to accomplish. And Helen writes the lessons around those curriculum goals. And she makes the hacker projects easy enough that you can build without much technical scale, but the application of the science is still really in line with the educational system. Does that make sense?

Oh, the pedagogy is important and you have to work inside the school's curriculum because they don't have any time to play outside. They really don't. And they're broke and like stressed out and teaching is hard. We've really come down. Every time I hear on the news, these ivory tower academics, I swear to God, I want to throw my sad $46,000 a year paycheck at somebody and be like, really? Where's my ivory tower?

Where is it? Because I'm owed that. I want it. Please let me back into the ivory tower, please. Do you have a favorite kit? Oh, we have this really great kit going on right now. There are three kits. It's called the science of music or the science of sound. Science of sound this a guitar one it is a guitar it is a synthesizer and it's a microphone so you can have a band it's really fun so this synthesizer yeah sorry go ahead i should let you explain because i only saw the picture yeah it's because the flank of wood that's for the guitar isn't in the kit. So you have to have flanks of wood. That's the only thing.

But you can kind of use any piece of wood, like really any piece of wood will do. But the synthesizer is a combination of Forrest Mim's classic 556 synthesizer with Nicholas Collins is little synthesizer from the first chapter where you make anything soundy it with a synthesizer chip. My mind is drawing a blank. It's like the HC seven, seven four Oh one or something. I've forgotten the number on it. But yeah, it's, it's basically those two combined and you make a little synthesizer. So it's ridiculous. That sounds really fun. It does.

But how is it fitting into the curriculum? Physics, oscillators, waveforms, math. I mean, you could go really far with that. I mean, signal processing and much higher levels of math exactly GCSE is 12 years old though so they're going to get to what an oscillator also British education is

far more advanced they get out of like their undergrad like they get out of their high school experience with what our second level of college might be they are doing physics at 12. As they should be. As we all should be. I know, right?

I got physics my senior year. So that should tell you a little bit about the American education system. But yeah, so oscillators, right? And frequency and like absolutely the frequency that you tune the 5.56 cent to is all physics. So there's that. No, and it leads to lots of other discussions that you could start pointing back to. Oh, if you want to know more about that, you can add this to this kit. It's a buildable thing. So I can see that.

What other kits? Do you have another favorite kit, or is that really kind of the darling right now? Those are the ones I've worked on. So before that, Helen was doing her project absolutely. It's mostly hers, to be honest. I have an academic job, so I kind of just get to drop in and do cool stuff it's really she's really the hands-on when they're doing all the work um but she has a kit called time to react which is all about reaction time she would have to tell you more about that

because i haven't read the manual the the education book for it yet but it's all about like reaction times and human body and uh it's a button that you hit and it gives you the time it took you to react so it's i think that's what it does that makes sense and i can see making that more technical all right all right let's go on then um there was something else the code liberation foundation which is yes sounds so militaristic yes i started my own anti-army i did i did absolutely went recruiting so video games how how deep do you guys want to go in this topic deep as you want so video games can be rather hostile to women and non-binary and queer identifying souls. It can not necessarily be the safest or most welcoming

environment, not only on the development side, but on the player side, which is ironic given 52% of people who play games are women. But a lot of those women play the kind of games that guys don't think are real games. I definitely fall in that category. I still play threes. High fives. That's awesome. Yes, I agree.

Threes is rad. But see, like, you know, somebody from like the gaming scene would be like that's not a real game exactly yeah does not shoot anything you don't you don't allow me to shout profanity at you while you play no and i really always thought the reason i wasn't included in games was because i was weird and I'm used to people not including me in spaces because I'm weird. And I never ever for even a minute thought it was because I was a girl. And that maybe the kinds of games that I liked just weren't being supported in the way they should be. And I made a, you know, PlayStation made an amazing miscalculation and asked me to make a prototype for the Vita, which they really loved. And I ended up going to the GDC and E3 and they used it to show off their new console when the Vita came out.

And I found myself front and center in a really serious, like you don't get more serious than like the middle of the PlayStation booth on the GDC floor. Like that's games with a capital G. And I have never been treated so badly in my professional career. I got programming quizzes. I had men walk up to me and ask me who had made my game. Like it was just a litany of insanity. I was like, what is wrong with these people? Did they think

somebody else made this? Like, I'm just like, a little bit naive and totally confused. And I'd never been to the GDC before because I was an outsider. And so I thought, okay, now my shift is over. I'm going to put my game down and go have a little break and walk around the convention. I thought Comic-Con was bad. Holy Jesus, I was not prepared for this. I was, my jaw was on the floor at like the number of booth babes and women in latex rolling around on the floor with like dragon images behind them. Just super uncool, like not cool. And later that night, I went to an indie party by a developer named Notch, and he made a game called Minecraft. Oh, I've heard of that game. I hear it's really, really super, super popular. Yeah, it is.

Played by a lot of 13-year-old boys. It is. And older. And older. And girls. Yes. I only went because, you know, my friends were going and Skrillex was playing and there were supposedly free booze in the VIP access room we had access to. So I was like, fine, I'll go to this. And I went in and it was all the men who were like winning the awards and getting all the attention and who were at all these game companies like in really serious roles,

like all the Sony people, all the Xbox people, all the capital G games people that my students hoped to be one day. And Notch swears he didn't hire them and it was the club, but I don't care who hired them. There were women who were working in that room. And by working, I mean their skirts barely covered their bodies in a way that was appropriate. I think that they would have probably been stopped on the street. Some of them didn't have like, you could basically see pretty much most of their boobs. Mesh clear net shirts, like that whole kind of thing. And it was super awkward. I was like, okay, this space is just hella toxic.

I have never been basically taken to a convention and had this experience. And I met a bunch of really cool women at that conference. And all of them felt really similar to me. So when I got back, I asked them, I had them over for pizza. It was Nina Freeman, Nina Freeman, Jane Friedhoff, and Kat Small, who are all three amazing cats games right now are blowing up. She's doing amazing work with diversity in games. And I really love all of their projects. And I asked, I was like, hey, do you want to change this with me? And they were like, yes. I'm like, let's teach people how to be devs for free. Let's find other women and let's teach them how to program for free. And we really quickly started coming up with curriculum and ideas and approaches and pedagogy. And we ran our very first class at NYU Game Center in the summer in New York, which is

really, really hot. 86 women showed up to learn C++ in July. I was just like, holy crap, the demand here is huge. And not only did women want to make games, they had just been looking for any reason to have a group of friends to make them with. So Code Liberation in New York was wildly popular. We taught a couple thousand women over a span of years. So like my cat, when I moved out of New York, it was around 2000. They have continued to run that chapter without me.

Cat was the executive director for a couple of years, putting in like a lot of hard work. Now Adele Lynn is doing it in a kind of informal capacity. And they have a whole rank like Carolyn Sanders and a whole bunch of just really amazing women doing amazing work. We just ran a hackathon with the Girl Scouts and the UM, which was really cool. And they made 3D statues for women that had been left out of historical locations around New York. It was kind of similar to the Hidden Figures app, just

more. And it was great. They had a good time learning the three new model together. And yeah, and so in London, where I started a chapter here, and we've been working on slowly building a really grassroots community. I've gone much slower in London, because I am formally employed, and I do work full time and I do do it kits and I hack and I make my own work. And I'm doing a PhD in haptics and sound. So I'm pretty overwhelmed. But we have a nice chapter. It's got about 20 some members in it. We ran one really successful workshop with the VNA. And we exhibited in parallel worlds in the lights, which was really cool. And there were 16 brand new games that were made from our first cohort. We're about to run our second cohort.

It starts in July. It goes all the way through September. It's like a long seven-part class with an exhibition in London Design Week at the end of it at the V&A, and I'm really excited about it. So, yeah, that's me attempting to change the world. Yo, it's gone pretty well. It's been pretty crazy. This year, Nina went from like, it was amazing. One of the best things that happened is three years in, three years later from that party where Nina and I were both at, at that notch party, to just being completely unknown. Now she gave the awards

at the GDC last year. I just wanted to high five her like a thousand times. So I feel like we've done it. I feel like we've really made massive change. So that's that. I really, really like this story. We don't often cover women in tech things on the show because you can whine about it or you can do something about it. And you can't always do both. And I'm so happy that, yeah, okay, it's a problem. Let's do something. Let's fix this. Yeah.

I mean, I'm a fixer by nature. So, yeah. I really didn't think I was going to be doing something quite so revolutionary. Like, had you told me that, like, I was going to end up on Al Jazeera and Caroline was going to end up on MSNBC and Nina was going to be giving the awards out at the GD3 three years later, I would have thought you were crazy. But it happened. And life.

If somebody wants to know more about this upcoming in London V&A, that's Victoria and Albert, the museum, right? Yep. Okay. How do they find out more information about it? Codeliberation.org. All right. That will, of course, be in the show notes.

Yes. Click on the blog. I need to put the link, the application up on the homepage still because I've been busy hacking sensors and i apologize for that those yoga pants they're very engrossing they are i was supposed to put this on the internet but you know you gotta just be a bit bruce sterling offered to give me six pounds now so i guess you keep talking them up yeah exactly i know you can get him up to a whole he's good for it he is i'm just gonna send him a link link to my nonprofit and be like, so your donation will be generously

accepted. It's tax deductible. It is. See if you can rope William Gibson in with him. Yes. See if I can get the whole Monty crew of 90 science fiction writers involved. I don't want to keep you because I know that you have a house full of amazing people. And now I want to talk to you after about getting them on the show.

But Chris, do you have anything you want to ask? I have so many things. But what else should we cover? Don't be so interesting. Sorry. Don't be so interesting. Sorry. Don't ever apologize for that. I guess, you know, one thing that comes to my mind is

a lot of the people who listen to the show and who are on the show, they make electronics, they work with Adafruit boards like you're talking about, and they make things out of electronics, predominantly electronics. What I don't know is that there's an easily visible path to learn about the other stuff, the fabrication, the inspiration, like the wearable stuff that you're talking about. I don't know where I would start if I'm like, oh, I want to do something, but I don't know anything about that world.

Yeah. I mean, the fabrication stuff is harder. I fought for years to have laser cutter access, like years. That was a struggle. And like when NYC Resistor finally got one, I was ready to cry tears of joy. And then now 3d printing is pretty accessible. You don't have to build one by yourself that that's pretty rad. So you can kind of find that stuff. But the CNC stuff is still relatively rare. You have to join a hackerspace and take a class. There's really no other way around it because those machines can actually kill you the other thing that i think is cool is like fusion 360 is a really nice intro starting point and autodesk has really tried to include our community in a way that i think is working although their purchase of eagle has me ready to vomit in a bag because if they screw that up, I'm going to cry because KiCad is really hard to teach to new people. And I really just don't want to have to try again every time that the process of making a board in KiCad is just so much longer than it is in Eagle for new kids.

It takes, I can do Eagle in half an hour. It takes a week for KiCad. And KiCad, I think, is arguably more powerful. But Autodesk is, let's hope. Autodesk, if you're out there listening, do not make that totally obnoxious. Keep the good stuff. But yeah, I don't know.

I think makerspaces, join a makerspace, join a hackerspace. NYC Resistor in New york is awesome i love that place that they have a shop by also there's just like more of that now machines room in london has one there's a ton in holland and belgium that are really cool that's that's what i know of so far and then also for the fabrication stuff that's beyond that the wearable stuff lynn burning i think that's her last name. She has the best resources on the internet and they're really undersubscribed. I like to consider her the much

shyer, much more technical Becky Stearns because she goes much deeper than Becky does in a lot of her tutorials. And she really has a huge breadth. Also, there's the woman who makes How to Get What You Want. I forget her URL because it's kind of weird, but I'll send you a link. And the front of her site just says How to Get What You Want and is a just ridiculously, tremendously useful crafter, hacker, wearable site. I don't think there's like a better resource online. So that's my advice there. And also, Less EM online. So that's my advice there. And also less EMF.

Google that. I just started looking at that site and it's amazing. They're very serious and I don't, but they're bonkers. There's some bonkers stuff on there. Yes, but the fabrics rock. I'm looking at the Faraday canopy for your bed now. Okay. Who doesn't need a Faraday canopy for the bed?

Who doesn't need a faraday can of canopy for the bed who doesn't i told i always tell people if they come over my house is totally silver i've really lost the plot unless emf but man they they sell this stuff super cheap so like the bare conductive paint that you can pick up here in london is probably a bit higher caliber but for like a little jar it's like 18 pounds or something might be cheaper now but you can get a gallon of that stuff for less emf for 50 oh i found the ghost hunting section wow they have party kits. Ghost hunting party kit. Oh my God. Yeah. This is amazing. I know.

I know. But conductive materials because they got us to keep the ghosts out. All right. All right. All right. You too. Both of you. Wow.

So many interesting things to talk about. And I don't. Yes. We should do this again sometime Yeah, totally I never got to ask you What are you teaching this year? Oh my god, can I plug?

I want to plug something I wrote a master's I made a master's I made a master's degree for people Who want to make weird, playable Physical games And VR and theater And immersive spaces and escape rooms people who want to make weird playable physical games awesome and vr and like theater and like immersive spaces and escape rooms it's going to be a goldsmith it starts this fall it's called

independent games and playable experience design join me we are still taking applications and i am super excited you should be that would be totally cool i want to sign up for it Except I'm all old and crotchety now And far from London Well, I'm old and crotchety But I still manage to have a lot of fun Phoenix, do you have any Thoughts you'd like to leave us with? Oh my god

Indict the president That's not our normal genre, but okay Go ahead Oh, my God. Indict the president. That's not our normal genre, but okay, go ahead. Please get that man out of office so I can come home one day. America, you want me back? Our guest has been Phoenix Perry, lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, CTO of Do It Kits and founder of Code Liberation Foundation. Thank you so much for being with us, Phoenix. Awesome. Thank you. This was fun. And thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And of course, thank you for

listening. Our quote this week comes from Elizabethizabeth akubla ross people are like stained glass windows they sparkle and shine when the sun is out but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.