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.

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

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).

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.

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.

Read on for detail images.
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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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