Bert Schiettecatte is a Belgian entrepreneur who created the Audiocubes

Audiocubes

The AudioCubes are a collection of wireless intelligent light emitting objects, capable of detecting each other's location and orientation, and user gestures, and were created by Bert Schiettecatte...

.

Biography

Bert Schiettecatte was born in Ghent

Ghent

Ghent is a city and a municipality located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital and biggest city of the East Flanders province. The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Lys and in the Middle Ages became one of the largest and richest cities of...

, Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

. He has an electronic music production background . He holds an MSc in computer science from the university of Brussels

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has two campuses referred to as Etterbeek and Jette.The university's name is sometimes abbreviated by "VUB" or translated to "Free University of Brussels"...

 (VUB) and an MA/MST of Arts in Music, Science and Technology from CCRMA, a department at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 (BAEF

BAEF

The Belgian American Educational Foundation or BAEF is an independent philanthropy. It supports the exchange of university students, scientists and scholars between the United States and Belgium. The foundation fosters the higher education of deserving Belgians and Americans through its...

 grant).

While studying at CCRMA, Bert Schiettecatte developed a strong interest in hardware engineering, electronics, and human-computer interaction. Together with Eto Otitigbe and Luigi Castelli, Bert Schiettecatte created a customized dance pad and a laser harp (such as the one of Jean-Michel Jarre), at CCRMA.

After taking several research positions, Bert founded his company Percussa in 2004 to develop tangible user interface

Tangible User Interface

A tangible user interface is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment. The initial name was Graspable User Interface, which no longer is used....

 technology for music making. Percussa's first product, Audiocubes

Audiocubes

The AudioCubes are a collection of wireless intelligent light emitting objects, capable of detecting each other's location and orientation, and user gestures, and were created by Bert Schiettecatte...

, was launched in January 2007.

Awards

• 2009: he received the Qwartz Max Mathews award for the invention of the Audiocubes
  Audiocubes
  The AudioCubes are a collection of wireless intelligent light emitting objects, capable of detecting each other's location and orientation, and user gestures, and were created by Bert Schiettecatte...
  
  
• 2010: he was invited to give a talk at TEDx Mediterranean in Cannes.

Publications

• Schiettecatte B. Extended abstract, In Proc. of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2004, Vienna, Austria.
• Schiettecatte B., Vanderdonckt, J. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, February 2008. Bonn, Germany.