Hello world!

I am Shan, a senior in Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction. I am a programmer who also happens to draw and paint. Exploring the intersection of Computer Science and Art has always been a great enjoyment to me. Honestly speaking my interests in both fields originated from playing video games (and I know I’m not alone in this haha). There were so many epic moments in games that made me think “Ahhh, I wish I could make this”. I started by attempting implementing character control via keyboard in middle school, and this eventually led me to systematically study CS as a CS major while keeping sketching and painting. Of course I know both CS and Art are so much more than game developing, but it’s game that brought me here.

Nowadays I like to make cool stuff in my free time, game related or not. This includes coding cool looking things like particle systems and simulations, tools for procedurally generating cityscapes with night illuminations, tools for generating animated impressionism paintings from photos, and adding touchpad control to unexpected things (for example robotic arms). Here is a project from last semester that I especially like. It is a hackathon project called Super Duper Mario:

The project is basically an augmented reality version of Super Mario. It is an Android phone game implemented with Android SDK, pretty standard stuff. In this game we turned the real world into our game world by running edge detection on camera input and using the edges as platforms for Mario to jump on. The idea was simple, but we had a lot of fun implementing edge-based platform generation and combating noise from the real world.

The motivation of this project was to escape from level design. Because my level design skill is kind of horrible, I tend to work around level designs by building levels from existing matters (like maps, photos, large data sets). Super Duper Mario follows the same rationale. However, it doesn’t mean the game excludes level design. To the contrary if you are interested in creating your own level, it’s as simply as drawing down your level on a piece of paper and point your camera at it. This is a cool aspect of the game that the video doesn’t demonstrate ;) You can even form levels with your body, or your friend’s body (in which case it would become a cooperative game in which the other player “holds” Mario for you). There are a lot of exciting things you can potentially do with the game mechanism, and I wish to revisit this concept some time in the future to further polish it.

Links

github: http://github.com/yemount

twitter: http://twitter.com/yemount

Hey there, my name is Austin McCasland, and I am a current student in the Master of Human Computer Interaction at the HCII.  My background is mostly in interactive sculptural work.  I am currently very, though not exclusively, interested in bringing media out of the screen and into the real world.  I am hoping that this class will strengthen my portfolio with some beautiful data visualizations, and interesting experiments in unusual ways of representing that data.  I am hoping that I can leverage the expertise of the people in the class, and learn enough to where I can confidently approach data visualizations of all shapes and sizes.

Twitter

GitHub

Sound Room is a CV piece which uses an IP webcam mounted on a beam in the roof of a hangar to track the locations of movement in the room and play sounds which vary in shape and tone depending on where within the exhibit the movement is. In the video you can also see a few of my other pieces – though these are all are part software, part sculpture. Everything in this show was made from recycled computers and components. I think that the piece was very successful – the goal of it was to create an presence which was impossible to ignore in the room as you explored the other pieces in the show; it was meant to infect the perception of the entire space and the pieces within it in an uncomfortable way. The intent of the show was to create undesirable interactions with computers using each of the three sculptures, and the irritating sound that the viewers themselves were responsible for made their experience of the show that much more grating. I think that this piece fell short in an over saturation of tones. It was supposed to feel like every time you moved you created more/new sounds, but when a bunch of people got into the space it just sounded like a screaming banshee and an individual’s movement didn’t affect the overall sound in a noticeable way.

Hello.

I’m Brandon, a second year phd student in HCI.  I studied film and electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin as an undergrad and have a master’s from the MIT Media Lab.  Before coming to CMU I worked at Samsung in Korea for a few years.

Most of my work has been focused towards the hardware end of things (custom sensors, hardware design, gesture recognition) but there is usually a software side (even if it’s just try and see why the hardware isn’t working right).  At Samsung I worked on gesture recognition for the TV platform.  Samsung is not big on openness so I don’t have much to show from my work there.

For my master’s thesis, I developed a grasp-recognition system called Graspables. It used custom capacitive sensor arrays to detect how someone holds an object and use that as a means of interaction.  I was going to talk about this project, but it’s not really representative of what I am hoping to do in this course.  Instead I’ll post about the Ionosphere.

When I was an undergrad, I got a internship at the Applied Research Laboratories working with scientists who studied and modeled the Ionosphere.  I had no particular interest in high atmosphere physics, but I needed money and a things to put on a resume, so study the Ionosphere I did.

Ultimately, the goal was to produce models of the Ionosphere which would work like weather prediction models to correct GPS errors introduced when the signals passed through the Ionosphere.  To this end, I was tasked with cleaning up satellite data sets and running various analyses on them.  These data sets consisted of hundreds of millions of data points collected continuously by several satellites over a span of years.

Using a terrible combination of fortran, perl scripts, matlab and C code, I spent the next 2+ years trying to detect events that were of interest to the Ionospheric science community.  A sudden increase in electron density (see below) during a satellite’s pass could indicate a weather event worth studying.

A Segment of Electron Density Measurement by Satellite Latitude

As I worked, the plots I developed became more complex.  Events could be better visualized and explained.  The map below was automatically generated by an algorithm searching decades of data for narrow bands of elevated electron density associated with storms.

Detection of a Storm Enhanced Density Plume

Ultimately, I graduated from UT and moved on, but whenever the subject of big data or visualizations come up, I’m reminded of my brief tenure in Ionospheric science.  The problem that was holding back understanding of the Ionosphere wasn’t a physics problem, it was a problem of finding the relevant data.

Ever since then, I’ve been particularly interested in trying to apply techniques across fields.  I’m hoping that this course will give me the chance to explore new things that may turn out to be useful in some unexpected way down the road.

 twitter – @brttaylor

github – bttaylor

Hi everybody! I’m a first year grad student in the Music & Technology program at Carnegie Mellon University. I did my undergrad in Electrical Engineering from LUMS, Pakistan. Most of my previous work has been hardware intensive, although I have experience of using MAX along with a few scripting languages. Being part of various underground bands in the past, I also consider myself as a musician. At CMU, I’m part of the A Cappella group Deewane. From this course, I’d like to take away how to put together today’s technology to make something that impacts people- along side, I’m excited to explore computer-driven visualization and the truth it uncovers. My previous works can be looked at my website http://harisusmani.com

Twitter: @uzmani90

GitHub: https://github.com/harisusmani

Suspended Motion (Fall 2013)

Suspended Motion is an arts-engineering project based on a Philosophical Theme revolving around Scientism. I came up with the idea, wrote/did the narration and made the first prototype. Then we incorporated an eight channel setup to enhance the experience further along with a re-worked audio.

Course Project for Advanced SIS: Hybrid Instrument Building (Prof. Ali Momeni, Fall 2013)

Suspended Motion is a setup that tends to make the user believe that he/she is in a state of motion on a spinning chair, while in fact for most part of the experience the user remains stationary. It is based on a Philosophical Theme revolving around Scientism.

More Details

Today, we all live in the Age of Science and we embrace everything that science brings with it. Just look around and you will find that we are surrounded by technology that was just science fiction some decades ago- but this sometimes tends to make us believe that Science is the most authoritative worldview: it has all the answers to our questions and it alone can explain the true inner working of the universe- only science can answer how the universe came about, how we evolved or what our purpose in this world is. Suspended Motion gives a different perspective on the topic.

Suspended Motion II (Group Work) consists of a rotating-chair and an eight speaker array below which the user sits. The user is instructed to close his eyes and to observe how the sound field exactly matches his current position. This is done by angular position data sent to the laptop via OSC from an iPhone’s Compass attached to the chair. After about 40 seconds, the chair is let go to set off in a decelerating rotation. The user focuses on the sound, and experiences Suspended Motion for the last 25 seconds of his spin.

(Disclaimer: Lock Howl-Storm Corrosion from the 2012 release “Storm Corrosion” is the copyrighted property of its owner(s).)