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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I’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).

An update on the global typography. I’ve filled in the western hemisphere, and extruded each country in respect to their population per sq. mile. Because the extrusions are essentially cone shaped, I’m actually extruding by the square root of the population per sq. mile. This also emphasizes the differences between most countries while making the sharp peaks not quite as harsh.

The result of printing…
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I’d like to share a work in progress. I’ve been tossing around ideas of what to do with our 3D printer, what might be interesting and engaging. I eventually arrived at this concept.

Each country is represented in their own language, the type creating the shape of the country, each done by hand. I hope that the hand-craft aesthetic of the type is an interesting juxtaposition with the process and material. Each country will be extruded outward a different distance, to correspond to some data set, such as population. Perhaps a series of these could account for multiple data sets.

This post is just to show the proof of concept. I’m working on a piece of software to generate the files to send to the 3D printer. Read on for how I’m doing this.

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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!

This final semester I’m taking a course called Experimental Form: exploring form through mountains of sketches and ideation and a handful of creations. Half sculpture, half product design; the idea of this course is to create beautiful, personal objects of function.

I’m spinning the class by incorporating as many programmatic elements as possible: parametric form, force-directed layouts, mathematical constructs, and data-driven form. I think there is a powerful opportunity there to create unique and interesting things. In mass-produced situations, these objects could be individually and personally unique.

Our first project was a quick one: a day to generate a concept and a day to build and photograph a model. The concept was a fruit platter generated by a circle-packing program built around the constraints of the platter.

Click the image to play with the template generator: press space-bar to randomly generate circles, click empty space to make a new circle, drag around existing circles. Click hold & press ‘z’ to delete.

From this program I export PDF files which are sent to a laser cutter, therefore each platter is unique. Ideally this product would be made from CNC milled porcelain.

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