Projects

Squidball at the SIGGRAPH 2004 Electronic Theater

Reverb by Lorie Novak, shown at ArtSway, England.

Interweaving photographs of significant moments from the last 50 years with personal images, Reverb places the individual within a deeply political and historical context. Viewers are enveloped by images and sound.

Impersonator by Janet Zweig
installed at Santa Fe Community College

Impersonator is an interactive computer artwork that invents and writes a new line of text and displays it on a mechanical "flip-disk" sign (like ones in train stations) everytime someone enters the building through the main doorway, activated by a contact in the door. The computer that runs the sign contains a text-generating program with grammar rules and a lexicon programmed by Janet Zweig. The programming strategy was to use a large number of syntactical structures as templates, and, for each sentence, choose from them randomly and then choose every word in the template randomly from a large lexicon. This provides sentences that are coherent, often funny, and never the same.

I created the rule-based software used to interpret Zweig's grammar rules and generate sentences.

Collected Visions by Lorie Novak,
shown at the International Center for Photography, NY

Microsoft Expression "Sparkle Interactive Designer" at Microsoft

Sparkle is the codename of a new Microsoft product for building Avalon ("Windows Presentation Foundation") user interfaces.

I worked at Microsoft on the Sparkle team as a Program Manager, for just over a year, while the product was in its early formative stages.

Hypermedia in Poplog at Integral Solutions, UK

HiPWorks is a multimedia authoring environment, similar in some respects to HyperCard or SuperCard, but running on Unix Workstations, and integrated with a powerful object-oriented programming environment. HiPWorks contains a collection of rich-media widgets for animation, bitmap and vector graphics, and forms controls. It also has a powerful scripting interface.

HiP was initially developed in 1992. Although HiP never shipped in great quantities, much of the code for HiP was migrated to Clementine, now a leading data mining application sold by SPSS.

Painterly Rendering at NYU Media Research Lab

This is a pure-Java implementation of Aaron Hertzman and Ken Perlin's Painterly Rendering algorithm, written for Artography Direct. The algorithm aims to combine the expressivity of natural media with the flexibility of computer graphics.

I ported Hertzman's implementation to Java and tweaked the rendering code.

Perspect - Perspective Image Editor

Perpsect is a image distortion toolkit. It supports Photoshop-like layers, and allows a full range of 3D and perspective distortions of the images on those layers. Unlike Photoshop, Perspect lets the user do all of their warps in real-time on low-resolution proxies. The system uses hardware 3D acceleration to make editing operations fast. When the user is satisfied with an image, they can render it out at very-high resolution. The system makes use of high-quality implementations of filtering and warping functions, and produces great quality results.

Emotive Virtual Actors by Ken Perlin

The goal of this project is to create a framework for procedural emotion shaders. The idea is to allow an artist/programmer to add subtleties to the movements of 3D virtual characters so that they convey mood and personality, without destroying the base moves or paths of the characters as they move through a scene. Ken Perlin developed all the animation software for the movements of the characters. I worked on some of the software architecture aspects of the system, and assisted in connecting the virtual actors to external models.

Responsive Animated Characters at NYU Media Research Lab

The Improv Animation System was developed at New York University's Media Research Laboratory as a set of tools and techniques which make it possible to create virtual worlds and applications populated with animated agents that behave, interact and respond to user input in ways that convey mood and emotion. The goal of this project was to make improvisational animation accessible to professional artists and creative amateurs with minimal knowledge of 3-D animation, biomechanics, behavioral psychology or artificial intelligence, and to enable researchers and educators to exploit these technologies without relying on expensive production efforts.

I contributed to the Java and KPL software for Improv, notably in the area of rendering effects, user interface, and model import.

Botanica Virtual at NYU Media Research Lab

The Botanica is a real-time interactive environment created by the Media Research Lab to demonstrate our Improv animation system. The Botanica was premiered at the SIGGRAPH '96 Digital Bayou, in an exhibit called Spirits of the Bayou. It ran on a Silicon Graphics Onyx with RE2, using sixteen processors. Audio was generatd using Max on a Macintosh. The system had a head-mounted display with head tracking. I helped to develop the software and also assisted with the production work.

NASA Data Visualizations with Ben Bederson

With Professor Ben Bederson of the University of Maryland, I created several zooming data visualizations for NASA. The work was funded by the Advanced Automation and Architectures Branch (Code 588) of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and supervised by Chris Rouff. They were interested in effective visualizations for analyzing satellite telemetry in "Lights Out" ground systems, which involve constellations of large numbers of satellites. Our main concern was to provide a high-level overview of the entire constellation, so that an operator could quickly identify problem areas. We proposed several approaches, and developed a fisheye table and a fisheye scatterplot prototypes in Java. This work was complimentary to the work being carried out on the Web-Altairis ground system software, written using the VisAGE toolkit.

Agile2D - Java OpenGL Graphics2D with Ben Bederson & Jean-Daniel Fekete

Agile2D provides a nearly complete implementation of Java2D built using the industry standard OpenGL API. OpenGL provides a number of interesting hardware acceleration capabilities, including alpha blending, double buffering, antialiasing, and texturing, which can be used to deliver impressive two-dimensional graphical applications. The implementation is capable of rendering Swing applications via OpenGL (shown here).

I created Agile2D under contract from the University of Maryland. It has since been significantly enhanced by Jean-Daniel Fekete.

Piccolo and Jazz at UMD's HCIL

Piccolo is a Java 2 toolkit that supports the development of 2D structured graphics programs in general, and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) in particular. It makes it easy for Java programmers to build their own animated graphical applications with zooming, multiple cameras, layers, images, etc.

Piccolo was created by Ben Bederson and Jesse Grossjean at the University of Maryland. I helped with the initial implementation of Jazz, and also acted as an advisor for Piccolo.

Jasmin - for Java Virtual Machine with Troy Downing

Jasmin is a Java Assembler Interface. It takes ASCII descriptions for Java classes, written in a simple assembler-like syntax and using the Java Virtual Machine instruction set. It converts them into binary Java class files suitable for loading into a JVM implementation. I created Jasmin for the O'Reilly book Java Virtual Machine (now out of print), which he co-authored with Troy Downing.