I Should Have Loved Electrical Engineering

Summary

Author’s note: Drafted in 2022, lightly edited and finished on Sep 1, 2025 for clarity. Substance unchanged. I tried to not glamorize my undergraduate experience but I could be hallucinating. “Hardware invention enabled the information revolution. The internet and all the fancy applications are nothing but some byproduct of the advancement in computer chips and fiber optic cables”, 18-year-old me thought wishfully, concluding that the next natural sequence in the major global transformation must be done with another dramatic hardware innovation. After giving this grandiose topic a little more thought, I decided that we are limited by the way we are interacting with computers. Look, it’s just screens and keyboards! There has been no fundamental change since the early days of computer history. Sure, you can have a fancy OLED 120 Hz touch screen in your pocket, but at the end of the day, you still have to thumb-type with the same keyboard! It seemed crazy to me that with all the amazing technological advancement we had, our efficiency in communicating via the computer wasn’t much higher than someone with a typewriter 150 years ago. “We need better ways to interact with the computer.”, I reminded myself while walking to school’s cafeteria during my first week in college. Then, I saw this TED talk. SixthSense Tinkering Christmas It immediately clicked with me. The hope to not just use the screens but augment all the physical objects around us to retrieve information and the promise to use natural gestures instead of mice and keyboards to interact are everything I had hoped for. So immediately after finishing all the finals in my first quarter, I bought a small projector, a webcam, a mirror and some colored paper to complete the setup. When friends went on trips to enjoy the winter break, I stayed at the dorm to tinker with colored paper the future of computing. I had the projector and webcam plugged in, the colored paper worn on my finger, ready to go. But I don’t know h...