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A L E X A N D E R R I E S E R
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01 / about
profile.jpg
Hey, I'm Alex. I like inventing things.
I finished gymi (the Swiss equivalent of high school) in June, and since
then I've been working full time, and honestly a lot in general, on
merged.,
my portable stereoscopic wigglegram camera.
“So fancy how Alexander Rieser, 6i, showcased his self-built, iconic and stylish Wigglegram Camera. Simply great. The audience felt like they were at a Steve Jobs keynote — only better and funnier. In storytelling, minimalism and charisma, Alexander was in no way inferior to the original.”
— KZU, after this thesis presentation went on to be named best final-year project in the canton
Outside of merged. I play tennis, though I'm not very good at it, and I
run, especially half marathons. I log most of it on
Strava
if you're curious.
I also really enjoy photography, both wigglegrams and normal flat images,
and I love to travel. Exploring Egypt last year was a particular highlight.
02 / projects
Three things I've actually finished. Tap one for the full story.
The world's first commercial digital wigglegram camera: 4 lenses,
instant wiggle.
What's a wigglegram? It's a photo taken with
four lenses spaced slightly apart, all firing at the same instant. Cycle
through the four resulting images and you get a short looping animation
with real depth and parallax, like the subject is gently rocking in 3D.
Wigglegrams go back to novelty film cameras like the Nishika N8000 from
the 90s. They were never digital, and pretty much died out along with film.
I wanted one anyway. A modern, digital, instant version I could
actually carry around and use. It didn't exist, so I built it myself for
my Matura thesis: four synced lenses and software that turns the four
shots into a wigglegram automatically, no computer required.
This has been my longest-running and hardest project by far. I've
been working on it for over a year now, full time since recently, and
I'm currently working on turning it into an actual commercial product.
A fun project for learning control theory: keeping a ball balanced on
a plate that really does not want to cooperate.
A camera above the plate tracks the ball's position, and a control
loop tilts the plate on two axes to correct for it in real time,
constantly nudging the ball back toward the center.
This was a short one-week project, more of an exploration than
anything else. I wanted to get hands-on with robotics and control theory
outside of just reading about them, and it was also my first excursion
into hardware engineering rather than pure software. Between the
mechanical build, the wiring, and getting the control loop tuned, it
packed a lot into a week. Just a genuinely fun project.
A small Go-powered web project I built on my own initiative and ran
as a SaaS for my school, right up until I graduated.
It started from a genuinely annoying problem. We were allowed to sit
in classrooms during breaks or whenever a lesson got cancelled, but
actually finding a room that was empty was a real struggle, lots of
walking around and checking doors. So I wrote something that scrapes
the school's lesson plan and shows every currently free room at a
glance.
I built it just for myself at first. Then friends found out and
wanted access too, and from there it kept spreading. Once enough people
at school were using it, I turned it into an actual service and started
selling it to the school itself.
break-room.ch does not exist anymore since I graduated and the
lesson-plan feed it scraped is long gone, so the screenshot below is
the site rendered locally with sample data, to show roughly what it
looked like in use.
break-room.ch, showing free rooms (rendered with sample data)
