2023– · Founder and inventor · Venture
Scramble Deck
A deck of physical playing cards whose faces are e-ink displays, so one deck can become any game.
Outcome
Three provisional patents, a CHI PLAY paper, and a seed round in progress.
Card games are one of the oldest interfaces we have, and nobody has changed the hardware in a few hundred years. Every new game still means a new printed deck, and remote play means giving up the cards entirely.
Scramble started as Proteus, a research project at the University of Waterloo. Each card carries a small e-ink display and a Bluetooth radio; an app decides what every card shows and when. The same 52 objects can be a poker deck, a language-learning set, or a game that mirrors a live broadcast. The hardware is deliberately commodity so the product can be built at scale; the interesting parts live in the software.
I invented the platform, wrote the patents, and published the research (a CHI PLAY 2024 workshop paper and a full CHI PLAY 2026 paper with Oliver Schneider and Mark Hancock). The company now has a CEO leading a seed raise while I hold the technical and IP side.