Jun 19th, 2008
5:51 pm

Flooding in the Midwest

This summer’s floods were off the charts. This front-page featured map steps through a week of flood activity. Photographs of the locations are placed on pins in the map.

flooding front page

Jun 6th, 2008
5:16 pm

Moving the Grange

Alexander Hamilton’s 206-year-old home, the Grange, was moved to a nearby park. This graphic walks through the arduous process to move the historic landmark in a crowded city.

grange moving

Updates to the portfolio…

New additions to the website. Check em out!

Experimental Form
A collection of things made this past semester.

Box Office Revenue
First published piece in the New York Times.

Listening History
Official portfolio page for the Last.fm Listening History diagrams.

Daylight Calendars
A series of posters done to visualize daylight patterns for different areas of the world.

Stream Graph Paper
An academic paper on the aesthetics of stacked graphs, written with Martin Wattenberg.

May 27th, 2008
2:43 pm

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

My independent study for the second half of the past semester has been augmented stage craft. Using an infrared camera, a high-power projector and a custom app I’ve built using the fantastic openFrameworks I am creating an interactive scene of flora and fauna for the actors to become a part of.

Midsummer Night’s Dream - Projected Screen

Matt Gray and I have been working hard over the last few weeks to produce a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream using this augmented stagecraft. It’s being edited together at the moment and will be up for public consumption as soon as possible!

Midsummer Night’s Dream - From Above

It’s been much of a learning process for me. I’m doing my vision using the powerful IPP libraries which, if you’re a student, are quite affordable. I’ve probably learned more about lighting than software with this endeavor. Setting up good lighting is more important than writing good software, and when it comes to capturing from a live stage, that isn’t so easy.

May 12th, 2008
2:07 pm

The Pittsburgh Zoo – Mood Movie

Our senior design project group (Caitlin, Don, Scott, Kasey, Hallie and myself) just finished working on redesigning the visitor experience of the Tropical Forest Complex at the Pittsburgh Zoo. In the first 2 weeks, we were in and out of the Complex surveying visitor behavior and performing our own heuristic evaluation of the atmosphere and information systems.

The following video is a conglomerate of our research, based entirely on overheard dialog, and pitched in a manner meant to connect to the zoo staff.

May 7th, 2008
4:28 pm

Graduation.

This blog is usually all about things I make and do, and I’ve been doing a poor job of documenting active work lately - things are rushed - I promise a lot of updates over the next month as projects wrap up, NDAs expire and I transition out of school.

I can’t believe it’s been four years. It feels like just yesterday we were making shoes out of cardboard and drawing cubes, yet when we look back we look so young. Mike put together a slide show of superlatives to honor our graduating design class, enjoy.

If you’re looking for more nostalgic bliss, check out the full 20 minute slide show http://www.vimeo.com/986784

Apr 4th, 2008
12:10 am

Now you can see in 3D with RedBlue

RedBlueI’m happy to announce the release of a new Processing Library: RedBlue.

As you might imagine, RedBlue is a renderer for Processing that will give you Anaglyph Stereoscopic 3d images. It’s super simple to use, is web-applet safe, and should be really easy to fit into your existing 3D Processing sketches!

If you make anything awesome, it’s your job to let me know. As well as if you find some way to make it even better, such as making RedBlue for openGL which has trumped me so far (that Processing camera still baffles me).

Mar 22nd, 2008
10:34 pm

Waveform Organizer

Another product of Experimental Form. The Waveform Organizer is a desk shelf, the intersection of two sine waves which creates pockets and shelves to stash your things. The materials are a white ash ply and white acrylic bound with polished steel hardware to keep the acrylic suspended.

Waveform Organizer

While this doesn’t hail from computation nearly as much as my other pieces in this class, I did put together a few small programs to help the composition and in order to print out working documents for working with in the shop.

Angled View

Read on for detail images.
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