HELLO THERE
I'm Johannes. Msc in IT Product Development from the department of Computer Science, Aarhus University.
I like to build stuff that is simple and economic behind the scenes, yet artful and elegant to use.
My interests range from graphic design, through web- and software development, to building tangible interactive systems with IoT and embedded systems.
I have a lot of experience working in teams, and I love hacking together something cool that works, and then be embarrased at how badly the implementation is at first. But hey, premature optimisation is the root of all evil!
You can find me on Github and LinkedIn.
See a selection of my work below
TableBot
Masters Thesis
My Masters Thesis is on the implications of wide field of view on telepresence robots. So since we needed such a robot, we just built one using a few motors, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, a 180° camera and some WebRTC magic. We call it TableBot.
A tabletop formfactor
TableBot is different from other telepresence robots. It lives on the meeting table, not on the floor. So it is much smaller (and cuter), and the pilot can reorient themselves towards both people and notes on the table. Pretty cool!
TableBot
Project course
Hey ho. Another TableBot? The projects is actually much older than the Masters Thesis, which is the third iteration. Before that the robot was blue, a little smaller, and used a smartphone as the video conferencing system to be able to join the existing ecology of devices and services.
A learning process
So why did we move away from the smartphone then? Because it proved to be an inferior solution. The screen is too small, the audio is very directional, and the field of view was too narrow to partake in a meeting. Hence the glow-up.
Visualising Bigfoot sightings
Data Visualisation
As part of a course on data visualisation I built a visualisation in Vega showing Bigfoot sightings in the USA, collected from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organisation 👣. The visualisaiton allows for rapid exploration of the multifaceted data to find out when and where you need to go hunt for Bigfoot.
Hall of fame
The visualisation allows for complete crossfiltering of data between charts to fliter out noise, something my lecturer thought was pretty cool. He even used it as an example in a news article on the course. Neat!
The visualisation is still live!
Try it out here
RemoteU
Innovation Project
Okay. You may think I have a soft spot for small cute telepresence robots. It certainly looks that way, but I promise, this is the last (for now).
This is where it all began, with a course on innovation, with a theme of hybrid communication. Hybrid being when some are in the same room, and some join through video calls or similar technologies.
This is where the idea of a tabletop telepresence robot emerged, along the idea to integrate it with existing devices to make it fit any setup. We called this prototype RemoteU.
Size matter!
RemoteU had some issues. But it was not the smartphone that was the culprit. It was the painfully slow motors we used, which meant that you could go do your laundry before it was facing you. So we gave it some bigger, nicer motors and wheels and called it TableBot from then on.
LEMEO
First Year Project
On the first year of IT Product Development we did a big project full-time on educational technologies. My group and I focused on interactive, tangible tools to help learn english grammar for fifth graders (Obviously for non-native english speakers).
Each of the block is a word in a sentence, but oh no! Someone scambled the order and grammar, turning are into is, and cat into dog. The pupils must work together to find the correct order, and flip the devices to find the correct tense or form, or just the correct word.
