Wrapping up the Year

The year ends with one of my favorite things (something I'm terrible
at). I haven't had to solder much in my life. I must have seen it
done a hundred times. I even went out an bought a soldering iron for
the AR Lab to swap LEDs for infrared emitters in dollar store
booklights. The picture is of Stefan at Brock showing me how it's
done. He really had the knack but I think I held my own pretty well.
The component is a Parallax RFID reader, I'll post the code I got from
the arduino playground and the Max/MSP patch I've been using from the
forums.

IASC Media Tools for Interactivity

I've been keeping busy since I've been back in Ontario.  I've been teaching part time at Brock University in St. Catherines.  The course is Media Tools for Interactivity as part of the Interactive Arts and Sciences program.  It's a course on graphical programming languages and peripheral devices framed by a survey of New Media Art  History.  It's teaching students to explore digital art and interactivity as practitioners.  It's loosely based on programs that I took in the Digital Media stream of Fine Arts Cultural Studies at York University though the focus on graphical programming languages as their own entity is an important part of the course.  And of course there will be good fun with Arduino boards.

It's got me thinking about what sort of courses I'd be interested in pursuing.  I'm definitely still interested in taking a course on 3D Modeling and perhaps one on C programming (I'm kind of getting anxious to program for platforms like the iPhone).  But what to do about a Masters or PhD?  While taking more interactive art programs such as ITP in New York sound great, I can't help but think I still want to pursue Augmented Reality as a field of research (both practical and theoretical).  I'm not sure yet what courses are better suited to that kind of research.