Aniomagic is brought to you by a tiny band of friends: Nwanua, Ali, Ally,
Andrew, and Brad, based in Boulder, Colorado.
Our mission is "to research new ways
to add computation and programmability to all sorts of objects and
surfaces." We create design elements that enable you, the designer, to
create interactive artifacts, and our modules can be incorporated into fabric,
painted on paper, worked into ceramics, and embedded into larger surfaces
like tables and walls. Read some of our papers
and philosophy of design.
The long-and-short of it is:
"We make tiny bits of e-textile magic that are easy to use,
so you can put them in anything, program them anywhere, and finish your
design, quickly."
We're not necessarily creating programming
environments and artifacts for novice programmers, nor are we making
programming
"easier." Instead, we are exploring a wider space
for a new type of fully symbolic tangible programming -- ambient
programming -- where the elements of instructions can be gathered from a
variety or sources. Unlike traditional programming where all the programming
activity is done solely at the desktop, ambient programs can be encoded in
everyday physical items, generated from the
desktop, produced on the fly with a felt marker, embedded into a painting,
or stored in other ambient computational sources for later use. It's a
fascinating area of research, and we're just at the very beginning.
Etextiles is one testbed for trying out these ideas, and for reaching a
different audience -- one that hasn't been been traditionally included in
discussions about programming and computation.
Our interest in etextiles began as a collaborative project with Leah Buechley
to integrate traditional textiles
with new fabrics and threads that conduct electricity.
Her
pioneering work
and in particular the Lilypad
Arduino (cooperatively designed with SparkFun)
influenced the design of our products.
We aim for
ROHS compliance and use lead-free components in all our products.