I meant to publish this a long time ago, but time slipped by me. Better late than never.

In my senior year I gave a presentation to the IDSA in which I had to summarize my work in 7 minutes. I opted to speak over a video, rather than a powerpoint, since it would force me to stick to my time-limit.

It’s been too long since this presentation, and I forget my speech, so you’ll just have to imagine what it was I was babbling while this played.

The central theme was the power of using computation and data in design to create things previously impossible.

Every year for the last few years, my family has sent increasingly more complex and interesting Christmas cards. It’s become tradition to put well over 60 collective hours of production time – half of which past midnight (and not just by myself), hundreds of dollars and a frantic last minute mass mailing just to hear the words “best card yet” from our family and friends.

This year, instead of shipping out a hundred hand-made books or three-foot-long fold outs, we decided to save our fingers from the paper cuts and our wallets from the printing costs.

We had Kinkos whip up a box of these…

The inside reads: “Find them this holiday season at byronmurray.com”

Happy Holidays to you all, and thanks for a great year! Here’s hoping that 2009 is as fruitful as the last.

If you live in San Francisco, come out for the release party tonight!

After the release party, you will be able to download it for yourself!

Fireflies is a game using anaglyph red/blue 3D. Joannie Wu and I designed and developed the game over the last two months for Kokoromi’s Gamma3D exhibition, this upcoming Wednesday, Nov 19th. If you’re going to be in Montreal for the MIGS video game creators conference, be sure to check out Gamma3D and play Fireflies!

After the exhibition, you can download and play Fireflies yourself. Fireflies runs on Mac OSX, and we recommend an Xbox 360 controller for the best gameplay. You’ll need anaglyph glasses, which you can get for free online.

I’m happy to say that there is now a web-ready version of Roku.

I won’t be releasing a downloadable version because I feel this is representative enough of the gameplay.

Click the screen to go play Roku! It is a rather large file (15MB), be patient for the download.

Roku has a simple game metric chosen to link together the virtual and physical game play: Cellular Automata.

Roku is made from an arbitrary number of cells arranged into a hexagonal grid, like a honeycomb. The concept of Cellular Automata is reflected in Roku by each cell recognizing and affecting only it’s direct neighbors. This allows the game play to be very simple yet unique.

While this version has only two games Warm and Cool, other games could be created from this same base mechanic. For example the introduction screen is actually Conway’s Game of Life implemented in hexagonal space.

Physically, Roku exhibits strong Modular Design by using identical physical cells. It would be possible to build a Roku game board of any shape and size which allows for unique physical implementations while enabling mass-production.

Roku Warm is much like the game Lights Out. Pressing a cell will cause all of its neighbors to toggle between up and down. If a neighbor cell was up, it moves down and vice versa. Pressing the same cell a second time would return the board to it’s previous state.

To win the level, all cells must end up in the down position.

Roku Cool is about making clusters of the same color. Pressing a cell causes the colors of it’s neighbor cells to rotate. Pressing again would cause a second rotation. Six consecutive presses would return the board to it’s original state.

Make clusters of a common color to eliminate them from the board and buy you more time. Top out the time-bar to win the level.

Roku uses Cellular Automata and Modular Design techniques within a Game Design method. The result is pretty interesting in terms of a physical-virtual game crossover, expandable systems and furniture design.

Hopefully, the result is just fun!