by
GEORGE SKINDILIAS
- Seeing More
- Sketchy Projects
- WorkWork
- DemeDesign Studio
- ID Case Studies
- Is Ai Moral
About Me
Hi I’m George and I do
Check it out
by
GEORGE SKINDILIAS
- Seeing More
- Sketchy Projects
- WorkWork
- DemeDesign Studio
- ID Case Studies
- Is Ai Moral
About Me
Hi I’m George and I do
Check it out
AirPods, misused.
They were built to track your head so sound could stay fixed in space. But that's a 6-DOF motion core sitting in millions of ears — and it doesn't have to stay there. Worn on your head, held in your hand, taped inside a toy, or fused to another device, the same sensor becomes an input nobody designed it to be. A year of explorations in play, performance, and drawing.
Ongoing exploration
They were built to track your head so sound could stay fixed in space. But that's a 6-DOF motion core sitting in millions of ears — and it doesn't have to stay there. Worn on your head, held in your hand, taped inside a toy, or fused to another device, the same sensor becomes an input nobody designed it to be. A year of explorations in play, performance, and drawing.
Ongoing exploration
Index: The Racer · On Your Head · In Your Hand · In an Object · The Wand · The System · The Unlock
The Racer
A 3D drift racer with AI rivals, tire smoke, a rear-grip slip model with live drift-angle and combo scoring. Steer by turning your head, gas on the volume rocker, handbrake on the stem.
Then I taped over the sensor, dropped the AirPod into a toy convertible, and drove the car by turning the car. The input had left my body entirely, and still worked.
It came last. Everything below is how I got here.
Every experience starts the same way: the AirPod worn, your head as the controller.
Sky Drifter, fly and shoot. Head banks the plane, the volume rocker is the throttle, the stem fires.
Take the AirPod out of your ear and nothing breaks. The sensor reads the same, now driven by your hand.
Shape Drop — a pick-and-place puzzle. Move the cursor, press the stem to grab, press again to drop into the matching slot, scored on speed.
Sky Hop is an endless hopper. A slight tilt steers, the stem jumps. Plays equally from your head or your palm.
The sensor doesn't need a body at all. Embed it and the object becomes the controller.
The drift racer, driven from a toy car. Sky Drifter, dropped into a toy plane and flown by banking the plane in your hand. Same sensor, a different vessel each time.
The last step: fuse the AirPod to another device.
I taped an AirPod Pro to the tail of an Apple Pencil Pro and pointed it like a laser. The AirPod tracks where the pencil aims, and the Pencil's own double-tap starts and stops the ink.
Two Apple devices, neither doing its job: the AirPod is the nib, the Pencil is the trigger. Together they draw flowing letterforms in the air, on no surface at all. The least visually showy experiment here, and the one I'm proudest of.
The System
One foundation under all of it:
CMHeadphoneMotionManager for orientation and raw IMU, MPRemoteCommandCenter for stem presses, AVAudioSession volume observation as an analog dial, and a silent audio looper holding the now-playing session open. Five experiments, one system built to make them possible.The Unlock
These wouldn't have happened without AI. Not because I outsourced the thinking — because I outsourced the syntax. As an industrial designer, I'd never coded. But having a partner to iterate with — ask a design question, get something working, break it, ask what if, prototype the next version on my iPad in Swift Playgrounds — made the gap between idea and experience disappear.
The hardware is already in everyone's hands. The barrier was never the device; it was the software knowledge to push it somewhere new. That barrier is gone. If this is what one designer can prototype in a year, what happens when every designer can?