sunshyness The portfolio of Akshay KothariAkshay Kothari
akothari [at] stanford.edu
facebook Bytes
Actively documenting your life using media like blogs and diaries requires a lot of time and effort. But, many people already have their social interactions recorded on Facebook through their regular use. We visualized these experiences temporally to provide a compelling glimpse into one’s personal history
Brain Melody
Inspired by the movie “The diving bell and the butterfly”, where Jean Bauby wrote a full book only by blinking his left eyelid, we worked towards creating a musical instrument that uses no hands, no feet – only head. We hacked a EEG wireless headset to allow the player to control music by his level of concentration
Matrix game
The keymaker is riding with you. His fate depends on your bike riding skills. Can you take him safely through the highway, avoiding multiple Agent Smith randomly popping up? You have 45 seconds to go…
SF Ticket Evader
Out of the 7 times we drove up to San Francisco last summer, we got 3 parking tickets and 1 speeding ticket. This got me thinking – is it just me or have SF cops gotten stricter? Are there neighborhoods in the city where there’s a higher probability of getting ticketed?
Komera
Malnutrition affects over 2 billion people globally and is linked to 60% of child deaths in Rwanda. The Komera (“Be Strong!” in Kinyarwanda) aims to solve this problem. It is a low-cost mixer that attaches to small-scale mills and evenly distributes fortificant into flour.
Farmers’ Exchange
Continuous, natural speech input to voice user interfaces enables a conversational interaction, but requires sophisticated speech recognition. Farmers’ Exchange assesses the usability impact of restricting input to isolated words in a voice-only search interface.
ZapShot
In this age of e-greetings, facebook wall messages and twitter posts, ZapShot aims to bring physical postcards back into this world. But, it makes it as easy as three clicks on your iPhone – Pick a contact, pick a picture and type a message. ZapShot will print a real physical postcard and send it to your loved one.
ZapText
Say goodbye to tiny keyboard keys forever. Experience the revolution of 3 tap texting! Running late for a rendezvous? Just checking in on the way home? Wish you could send a quick (free) SMS in just 5 seconds? Say hello to ZAPTEXT.
chirp
text + 140 characters = twitter = dry, non-emotional, spammy broadcasting
audio + 7 seconds = chirp = personal, emotional, touching broadcasting
ubi
Did you ever wish to text machines? How about turning off the home thermostat from your office by texting it? Or telling the oven to stop beeping multiple times from your bed? Ubi (early proto) allows you to turn off your kitchen lights from your phone!
ZenMail
BAM! [Cars crashing]. If they had been using Zenmail to listen to their email a Ferrari could have been saved … rather than (illegally) squinting at your tiny blackberry screen, you are listening to the speech synthesized music of your email after it has been prioritized by your AI Zenmail secretary. Hands free, eyes free safe access to email while driving