Wii-rionette

This piece was for a new course at Hampshire called "Radical Innovations in Digital Arts." The idea was to bring artists and computer scientists together to produce completely new pieces of art. For the final project I proposed making a system that used a Nintendo Wii remote to control a 3D puppet. After proposing my idea to the class, a lot of people were interested on working on it so I ended up leading a team of five students to build this system. It was an ambitious project that depended on many pieces, a program that I made to interface with the Wii remote, a program to communicate the Wii accelerometer data to a 3D animation program, a 3D puppet with simple physics, and then tying it all together to work as one package.

Stuck Block Game

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I made this game in the Spring of 2008 just when Apple had announced developers could make native iPhone apps with their iPhone SDK. Like many others, I was amazed at the level of games that could be made for the iPhone, so I started thinking about a fun simple game that would work well with the iPhone's touch controls. Nob Yoshigahara's 6x6 puzzle game felt like the perfect fit. While learning Objective-C to program iPhone apps, I made this prototype in Java using the Processing 2D graphics library. You can watch a video of a toy version of the game here.

Braitenberg Vehicles

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The first time I stumbled upon object oriented programming was when I was making this simulation based on Valentino Braitenberg's book "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology." Braitenberg Vehicles, as they are known, are a combination of sensors, actuators and their interconnections, that while simple in design could generate behaviors thought as aggression, love, foresight and even optimism. Braitenberg vehicles proved to be an excellent example of the benefits of OOP, that I constantly find myself analyzing software as objects.

Oscar IEEE

Since Spring of 2006, I have been teaching an extraordinary kid named Oscar how to program. In the three years I have worked with him I have taught Oscar how to program Robots with the LEGO NXT kit, MIT's Scratch, Alice, and even Processing. For a kid only in 5th grade I still taught him about computer science concepts that are normally taught in high school, and he still wishes to learn more. This past March I helped Oscar win an award at the IEEE Aerospace Junior Engineering conference of 2009 for making and presenting a program he built in Scratch about constructive and destructive wave interference. Play with the program here.

Thumb Brothers

A 3D animation of two 'Thumb' brothers getting into a fight. I made it using Maya, and did everything; modeling, lightning, texturing, and animating. Because I built models with a skeleton and skin I never animated the fight. But one day I might go back to animate it and add sound and music.

Attack of the Schwartz

Using a camcorder and Adobe After Effects I made a small short of my friend Ian Schwartz being chased by clones of himself. A lot of rotoscoping techniques were used, and even with some video glitches from importing the tape to digital, it produces a convincing illusion (especially at the end of the video).