Building a Post-Phone Future in the Electronics Lab

In a hands-on electronics lab, a software engineer steps into hardware prototyping—soldering boards, bridging pins, and building a minimalist e-ink device designed to live beyond the smartphone. The project explores a "post-phone" workflow, where XR glasses and a low-power embedded system deliver AI-driven journaling prompts without constant notifications. Blending rapid prototyping with real-world testing, it highlights how playful hardware experimentation can reshape everyday human–device interaction.

Transcript

00:00:00 So, where are we going exactly?
>> So, we're going down to the electronics lab in the basement. So, I just got these boards in the mail and I'll just put a bit of like solder um on one of these like jumper just to bridge a connection just to make a you know pull a pin to ground. All right, come on in. We spend a lot of time here just like building things.

00:00:23 I'm a software engineer. I was in um computer graphics for like the last 15 years and then at some point started doing extended reality work but never on the hardware side. It's a good change. I actually enjoy doing something with my hands. It's nice to just like come down here, play with the soldering irons, and this was my final project in that class, how to make almost anything. And the

00:00:43 idea here was to make something that could build a bridge into a future that's like a postphone future. So the idea was to test if I could board a flight with just XR glasses and something like this and without a phone. I actually went and boarded a flight, sent my boarding pass to this device and uh the kind people at the gate let me actually board.

00:01:06
>> They didn't seem a phase by that.
>> No, I think maybe part of it was that like I prepared them for it. I just walked up and said, "I'm at MIT. I do weird things. Would you please let me try this?" and uh they were okay with it. In hindsight, some people told me maybe you shouldn't have done that. It's a major US airport. Part of the ethos here is to, you know, not just do things

00:01:28 that are academically interesting, but also like take it into the wild and test it and see if how it reacts to the world and how the world reacts to it. So, the initial idea was um to use this as a device that interacts with my XR glasses so that the screen essentially becomes a portal into that virtual world. It's e- in. It's low power. Ian was invented here in the media lab. So, it's a nice

00:01:49 nod to our past. I didn't want to have any additional buttons on this just for like size constraints. So, I just have two pins that if I if I bridge those two pins with a bit of solder and I can just flash software on it. Started using it for kind of like personal little use cases. What it does currently is every morning it sends me a journaling prompt and I can, you know, accept it or say I

00:02:11 don't want to do that right now with the two buttons. but it lets me interact with an AI system that sends these prompts without taking out my phone without being flooded by notifications. So, it's nice to just have a moment of peace and quiet in the morning. It came to together relatively easily, but that's also because I had a lot of support here. Some of my fellow students

00:02:29 here are just very good at hardware design when I am not. It's not my area of expertise. But Cassie, for example, she literally made Guatemala's first satellite and she designed the power system for that satellite. He was somebody I kind of consulted with when I designed the power system for this which is much simpler than a satellite. Like what I really enjoy is

00:02:51 like experimenting with stuff like that. You know we have like our core research and like that's important but then having the space and the ability to like work on things that are from our own you know learning and enjoyment but then hopefully also interesting use case for other people. I think that's really important keeping it playable even though you know we have lots of problems

00:03:08 to solve but doing fun things like that also important.