Since he was a young boy, Bert Schiettecatte has always allowed his passions to consume him completely. His first passion was Lego building blocks.
“Some Legos have gears and motors and you can make robots with them,” Schiettecatte said. “I always liked those, and I think the idea stayed in the back of my head.”
The idea resurfaced in Schiettecatte’s subconscious after college at Stanford University in 2002.
With a degree from the university’s center for computer research in music and acoustics in hand, Schiettecatte returned to Belgium and thought about how he was going to change the world.
Schiettecatte’s second passion was electronic music, a love he found as a teenager. From the marriage of Legos and digital sound production, AudioCubes were born.
“I combined my two favorite things: musical instruments and Legos,” Schiettecatte said.
Like glowing Rubik’s Cube robots, the AudioCubes are smart, wireless blocks that come in sets of four and are programmed to play music by sensing the location of other blocks or objects. Users plug one block into their computer and point different sides of the remaining blocks at it. A system of lights and sensors trigger the devices to combine beats and sounds into a rhythm.
It’s the future of computer interface — tangible interface.
“I invented the first commercially available and affordable tangible interface system back in 2003, the AudioCubes,” Schiettecatte said. “Before that, tangible interfaces only existed in the academic world.”
Gregg Cannady, music teacher at STEM Magnet Lab in Northglenn, is always looking for cutting-edge education to integrate into his classroom. When he read an article about AudioCubes and Schiettecatte’s strides in electronic sound production, he was mesmerized.
“I told (my bosses) that ‘if you really want me to do something that no one else has done before then we have to get these things in here,’ ” Cannady said.
He bought two sets of AudioCubes and began to correspond with Schiettecatte, who now lives in California. After introducing the cubes to his first- through eighth-grade classes, Cannady arranged for Schiettecatte to meet his students and discuss his invention.
Braxton Reed, 9, was impressed.
“You can’t describe it in any way. It’s that amazing,” Reed said. “It’s totally new technology.”
Reed sauntered up, wide-eyed, to Schiettecatte at the end of his presentation and asked him how he managed to make those glowing cubes wireless.
“He told me there are antennas inside each one that connects to a computer and can go long range or short range,” Reed said. “It blows me away … Think of what you can do with this technology.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com
