The semester is finally wrapping up, with the last two weeks spending more nights awake than asleep. Final presentations went very well. The only project that isn’t finished is Roku, which is slated for release at the end of January.

Flirtastic! wowed everyone and was a flag finish. We have a mostly working vertical prototype, the result of a 5 day power session. It’s quite slick, jump around a bit. Make sure to try recording your own answer to our heroine’s question. Latest flash player & webcam required.

Virtual Roku went over well with the Kokoromi’s Gamma256 project and is featured in short at the Gamma256 rundown. Unfortunately I don’t have a download available due to some weird compiling issues with the controller. I’ll most likely release a version with mouse control only.

We had a small end of the semester show a few days ago, which went very well. Amongst other things, Roku was on exhibit: both virtual and physical work in progress.

Roku Virtual had an outstanding reception. I think I may have created a few new addicts! The video game ran on my laptop for the majority of the show and got nonstop action from a variety of people. It was really great to see such positive response to the game and really see it in the hands of new fresh players for the first time.

Roku physical is coming along well. The construction of the physical cells is completed, although the electrical components haven’t been installed yet. I decided to put a satin finish on the cells, which is much nicer to the touch and won’t leave thumbprints after play.

Flirtastic! is in the final hours, our presentation is at 10am, mere hours from now. I’d like to present a piece of our final work, the video sketch. Paul and Chris spent a lot of time, effort and sleepless nights over the last week on the production of this and it’s worth showing off.

Flirtastic! A way to meet new people online! The video along with the rest of the project is Copyright all mentioned at the beginning of the video. You can also watch it in Sweet Loving HD!

How does one feel during finals week? What is the general frame of mind? Well, I can’t keep my mind on work that actually has to get done, rather I end up dreaming and toying around like this…

Mad credit to Alex Riegelman for this idea!

This is just a quick experiment using the recently posted face detect library for Processing by Jaegon Lee. I worked out a bit of persistence tracking to remember who’s face is who’s between frames. It works for multiple people too, who dream about different things, but sometimes Mike dreams the same way I do.

Okay, back to work…

Roku is coming along slowly but surely. It turns out that these cells take a long time to construct, and a lot of time each on the laser cutter. I have limited access to laser cutters and so that’s creating a significant bottleneck for the construction of these. I thought it worthwhile to show an image of a few of these cells together so you might start to get an idea of what these are going to look like. Over the next week or so I’ll be cranking out the remaining 16 cells, and hopefully getting a good start on the table surface.

I’m sure my father felt great pride when he was able to have his very own table saw in his home shop. Personally, I can’t wait to take home a laser cutter.

This isn’t quite as visual as most, but because it’s a solid stake in the ground for me, I thought it was worthy of being posted to the Process blog.

I’ve been taking a class on Cocoa, the development platform for Apple OS X, and this is my Final assignment for that class.

Download it and try it out for yourself. Draw around to start up a board and click Start or Step to advance the Simulation. Random and Clear can generate interesting patterns as well.

Up until now my complete programming knowledge has been for deployment on the web or for creating small custom tools in the process of a larger project not for deployment at all. Learning Cocoa has been very challenging for me, and a great foray into deployable applications (and programming in C for that matter).

The midterm project for this class was to create an RSS Reader.

This was particularly challenging for me considering the amount of back-end complexity that needed to be implemented considering that I have no prior knowledge of C code.

It’s functional and if you’re really down with an almost-elegant Really Simple Reader, you can download the application and try it out for yourself.

Yet another thing I’ve been working on over the last few weeks. A particle system alphabet, where typing new letters pushes the old letter out of the way. I’m working on a few different applications for this, which will hopefully see this page in the future!

Here’s a bit of preview into the games of Roku. I posted a video of one cell moving about a few weeks ago. Here are screen shots from the video game which is controlled by an XBox 360 controller.

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