Arduino

LUMMB (Light Up Musical Motion Ball) is a small throwable device created in Experiments in Interactivity II course taught at USC towards the MFA Interactive Media Degree. Created the device with Evan Stern. With the use of an Arduino Uno, a couple of LED lights, bubble wrap, accelerometer and speaker, we created a device that will slowly count down till it reach a certain time interval where it would “blow up” with use of Processing to code in the behavior and to read in the movement data from the accelerometer. This project has gone through many iterations originally planned on using wireless X-Bees modules to track motion on the user hands and feet but prove to be difficult to implement. LUMMB is a device made to be played with the hot potato game.

Web

Movie Website: A movie website created and designed for Web Design and Implementation class. The user can click on the images for a larger view of them and various tabs to find out more information about the movie. There is an annotated css page where you can see all the different types of css tags that I use to create the visual look for the site. I use various web technologies to make the magic happen.

Interactive Movie: Based off the short film The Request built with popcorn and html.

Behaviors

Hunter and Prey (swf, source): There is a monster hungry for some moving vegetation. The brown creature finds the closest plant and chases after it. Detecting that the creature is coming after it, the plant tries to run away but to no avail it is eaten. The gray text box takes in a number (up to 8) and when reset is pressed, that number of obstacles will appear on the stage and all entities on the stage will attempt to avoid them.

Steering Behaviors (swf, source): Space is a lonely place and what is a better thing to do than to move around in an interesting way. All the sliders (accept Obstacle) affects each creatures behaviors. The orange line is their forward vector indicating the direction it is heading towards. The color circle changes color based on the creature’s reaction. Green for avoiding obstacles, red for fleeing the wall and white for no effect at all. Move each sliders to see a different behavior!

2D World (swf, source): Space is still a lonely place however help is needed! There are stranded ships in space that need help. For some fortunate event, there is a beacon in the area calling out to the ships. When the ships see the beacon, they become excited and begins to follow it. The beacon continues to wander but when it brings the collected ships near the space station all the ships swarms to the entrance for safety.

Building off the Steering Behavior project there are a few more behaviors added. This includes Unaligned Collision, Leader Following and Arrival, and Queuing. Click on the debug mode to see what behavior the ships are doing. White is normal state, Moss Green is obstacle avoidance, Pine Green is beacon following, Red is fleeing the wall, Pink is queuing, and Yellow is Unaligned Collision. Also in debug, the user has control over the beacon. Use the arrow keys to move the beacon around the stage to collect the stranded ships. Play with the sliders to check out different behaviors. Also generate more obstacles or ships for an even more dynamic world!

3D World (web – require Unity plugin, source): Everyone enjoys food! This world takes place in a super market and there are customers wanting to buy things. There are two main behaviors that make up this world. Path Following and Unalign Collision Avoidance. The Path Following is not set by a node but through A* path finding. There are multiple places that the customer can be heading towards when shopping so A* helps that customer to find the best path to get there. The color path corresponds to the color of the customer. This shows the player where each customer is going to. The player can hit the ’2′ key to switch to player view and use WASD to move the player avatar around. This allow them to have a tour of the supermarket. The player just has to hit the ’1′ key to return to the top down view. They can also use their mouse to find out more information about each square on the floor. This is used to help A* makes its decision on what path the customer can take. This application was developed in Unity and exported as a web application. Unity Web Plugin required to view.

Game Physics

Spider Web (source): This application developed in Flash and ActionScript 3.0 demonstrates knowledge of springs. Click on the start button to drop a spider on the web. At set time intervals, the spider “jumps” between the various nodes on the spider web. Each node will respond to the spring physics applied to them. The pause button cause the spider to stop “jumping”. The reset button sets the web back to its normal state and removes the spider from the web.

 

Tension (source): There is a box attached to 2 strings hanging from the ceiling attached to the top left and top right corners of the screen with the green box situated in the middle. This shows the angle that is formed from the 2 strings, the tension of the 2 strings, the sum of the y vectors and the weight of the box. The user can click to drag the box around the stage. This will change the box’s weight. The user can also enter in a weight value for the box at the bottom left hand corner of the program. This is all happening in a “zero gravity” environment however if there is gravity, the values calculated are the forces at that moment in time with a specific box weight.