2023– · Inventor; founder · Research → Company
Proteus → Scramble Deck
Physical playing cards with e-ink faces, so one deck can be any game. Started as a thesis artefact, now a company.
Outcome
3 provisional patents, a CHI PLAY demo paper and a full paper in revision for ACM ISS 2027, and a company with its own CEO.
Path
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2023 · Question
What can a familiar physical object do once it is programmable, without losing what made it familiar?
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2024 · Artefact
Proteus: 52 cards with e-ink faces and Bluetooth radios, orchestrated by an app. Built at Waterloo.
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2024–26 · Papers
CHI PLAY 2024 demo paper; full paper in revision for ACM ISS 2027, with Oliver Schneider and Mark Hancock.
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2026 · IP
Three provisional patents: broadcast sync, skill-biased dealing, AI rule mediation.
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2026 · Company
Scramble Deck incorporated; a CEO hired to run it while I hold the research and IP.
- Card games are one of the oldest interfaces there is, and the hardware hasn’t changed in a few hundred years. Proteus asks what happens when it does.
- Each card has a small e-ink display and a radio. An app decides what every card shows and when, so the same 52 objects can be a poker deck, a language-learning set, or a game that mirrors a live broadcast.
- The research question is about familiarity: how much can you change about an object before people stop treating it as the thing they know?
- The company exists for two reasons. The answer turned out to be commercially interesting, and the only way to study the deck at scale is to make a lot of them.
Papers from this work
- Proteus Card Deck: affordable, scalable, and familiar electronic cards. In revision, ACM ISS 2027.
- Proteus Card Deck: enabling remote play with a physical card deck. CHI PLAY Companion 2024.