Video Projects

My Projects at the ETC

• Project Awesome - This project created a personalized greeter system using unique identifier technology to recognize a guest's arrival and make them feel welcome. It was a lot of fun to make as well as use.
• Dinosaurs Alive! In-fossil-ble!! - This is a project for the Earth Theater, a 210 degree slice of an omnimax sphere in the Carnegie Musuem of Natural History. My group was tasked with creating interactive content for the large screen. We developed an interactive show allowing audience members to bring dinosaurs to life! We installed BioBeams on the seats in the Earth Theater. When you shine the laser of your BioBeam on the dinosaur skeletons of the experience you create BioBubbles which will bring the dinosaur back to life! I was particulary involved with networking, show programming, and rigging the computer controlled BioBeams in the theater. Read more about it on the website.
• Building Virtual Worlds - Building Virtual Worlds is a work and time intensive class in which groups of four people design and create virtual worlds complete with motion trackers and headmount displays every two weeks. I hope to have more of my worlds documented in the future but right now I just have my lightening round (6 days) world on the web.
  More great videos here (they're all good, but you can search for my name :) http://www.etc.cmu.edu/curriculum/bvw.htm
• Magic Mirror - Audience Interaction - The uber-goal of this project is to create a fun activity for large groups (400+) of people to interact with. Under that goal we set out to show our creations before the regular weekend movies here at CMU. That provided us with a readily available audience, albeit a rather tough to please one. Our main interactions stem from the fact that we put a video camera in the front of the audatorium and project the audience themselves on the screen in front of them. Then we add simple motion effects to the audience so as they move they light on fire or freeze or cause objects to fly from their onscreen-bodies. We've experimented with beachballs (both real and virtual), various characters (from chickens to killer tomatoes), and even taken Magic Mirror to the local Pittsburgh clubs.
• Jam-O-Elvis (best with IE) - On this project I was the sole programmer in charge of creating a new development environment, updating the old one, and designing and building the components of this new experience. C++ was again the programming language of choice for this project. However, not all my time was spent programming, I also ended up being selected to provide the voice of Elvis and even, dare I say it, his evil nemesis. Everything turned out great and the team and I are very proud.
• Virtual Puppets - Or Virpets. On this project I dealt with procuring materials, laid the groundwork for skeletal animation of the puppets, modeled some environments, and created a GUI to facilitate the linking of joystick and midi controls to the controllable parts of the puppets. I worked in C++ with the LithTech 3D gaming engine. The project has since turned into a full blown suite of software making Virpet controlling easy as pie.

Past Projects

• Sporkfinger Trilogy - The doorway to the websites for the movies I have been involved in.
• CG - At Rutgers I had a very challenging and fun computer graphics class.
• Kandinsky Wonder Program - I did some research into applying graphic techniques to attempt to reproduce the visual properties of the artist Wassily Kandinsky.