04/22/12

“Dead Balls” is on the app store!

Dead Balls is the result of the 48 hour “molyjam”, in which Lee Petty, Patrick Conner, Bill Gahr, Alex Vaughan, and I made a game based on the tweet “Imagine survival horror mixed with bowling.”  I jumped at the opportunity to go slightly off the rails in unity.  Fun times!

Just released it for free on the app store for iphone and ipad!

 

04/19/12

Spaceship of the Imagination : Earth Day Remix

This is a music visualization I made for a song from our (currently unnamed) band. The track was from a rough practice session, but my bandmate Matthew did an awesome job remixing it for Earth Day 2011. I decided to revisit it in honor of Earth Day 2012 (April 22nd).

The solar system itself is pretty rough here – planet orbital distances and period’s should be roughly correct, and I scaled the planets up so you can see them. It’s not particularly interactive, mostly just for listening and watching.

Check it out for yourself in the web player, or download the native PC or Mac client.

Web Player

Mac OS X

PC

 

 

02/26/12

Real-Time VFX in your Living Room

This year I’m submitting a talk to Siggraph titled “Real-VFX in your Living Room”. It explores what happens when you take traditional visual effects and apply them to a scene containing live depth and color buffer data from a camera (in this case the Kinect). Deferred lighting, soft particles, snow accumulation, depth buffer noise filtering and more will be covered. This video was my supplementary submission material. I hope it gets accepted!

02/25/12

Embedding Processing Sketches – The Verdict

Java Applets feel outdated and archaic, especially with the explosion of powerful javascript rendering libraries like three.js. However the upload process for getting processing.js files into WordPress is also extremely annoying. I like to work in the native .PDE format, referencing that like so

data-processing-sources="my_test.pde"

But WordPress won’t let me upload files with a .pde extension. I can change the extension to .js and then upload it, but even then I still have to reference it by the absolute path. And don’t even get me started on how to include additional data like .jpg’s.

The ProcessingJS word press plugin provides a wrapper to write processing code directly inside of the WordPress blog editing field. But who wants to write code there? You can copy/paste from another editor but all the data paths will still need to be touched up.

My favorite part of processing is the feeling of creativity and spontaneity it fosters. Processing.js is powerful, but for me the overhead it requires is still just a bit too much. For example I just spent the afternooon wrestling with HTML instead of actually making something fun! So for now… i think I’ll just stick with the standard Processing environment, and if I make something I like take a video :) Plus that way I can go nuts with ridiculously expensive GPU rendering!

02/25/12

Embedding Processing.js directly with the WordPress Plugin