Role: Senior Developer
Client: Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Team: Potion Design
Technology: Cinder, C++, OpenGL, GLSL, Node.js, Python, SQLite, WebSockets, LED, NFC, DMX Lighting, Bash Scripts, LaunchDaemons, Multi-Touch, Mesh Networks, Multi-Platform, BeagleBone Black, Embedded Linux

Overview

Forest Friends is a multi-location interactive environment that provides positive distraction for pediatric oncology patients.

Goal

Create an interactive experience that provides positive distraction for patients through various phases of their treatment.

Challenges

• Positively distract pediatric oncology patients while providing continuity through their treatment journey
• Enable hospital staff to easily maintain the installation without additional burden
• Create an experience that compliments each treatment phase

Role and Team

My responsibilities included developing the core interaction and animation systems for 3, 2D animal companions (rabbit, frog, duck) via animation and finite state machines. Each animal exhibited up to 13 unique behaviors in different situations and locations, as well as had some level of autonomy. I also built a Node.js service to create a mesh network between installations in multiple locations.

The Potion Design team consisted of 4 developers, 1 designer and 1 producer in close collaboration with a number of stakeholders and vendors.

Final Product

The experience is spread across the oncology floor and consist of 4 main areas/interactives:

Waiting Room

Patients begin their journey in the waiting room. They choose a virtual Forest Friend (rabbit, frog, duck) in the form of a bracelet with an embedded NFC chip. They can then scan their bracelet in each of the spaces and interact with their chosen companion. The experience consists of a 6-screen multitouch wall where patients can explore a dynamic, evolving, forest environment. They can play with their forest friend, interact with other patients’ forest friends and discover hidden interactions in the forest environment. Focused sound domes provide an ambient soundscape with soothing audio and interactive feedback for patients.

Exam Rooms

Each of the 3 exam rooms contain a multitouch kiosk in vertical orientation. The patients can use their NFC bracelet to bring up their forest friend and play a game of hide-and-seek. The installation also consists of soothing ambient LED lighting that complements the background on the screen. Once the examination commences, the interactive can be ‘muted’ which changes it to a calm environment and a soothing ambient light.

Induction

This room is where patients are sedated prior to their treatment. The interactive in this room consists of a projection in a dark room that plays an animation of the patient’s forest friend settling down for a nap. This provides a soothing and calming experience.

The Bell

In keeping with tradition, patients ring a bell to celebrate the end of their treatment. The bell is augmented with an ‘invisible’ piezo sensor and ARM-based microcontroller. When patients ring the bell, it sends UDP messages to all interactives on the network that set off a multitude of celebratory animations and sounds on each interactive.

Results

• The end result was well received by pediatric oncology staff at Wexner Medical Center and became integral to their activities.
• I authored, co-authored and contributed to three open source libraries over the course of the project that were adopted and used on a number of other interactive installation projects – a spritesheet block for Cinder, a basic sound management block for Cinder and a 2D scene graph block for Cinder.
• I learned a lot about animation state machines and finite state machines, I was able to utilize, apply and refine these learnings on numerous projects thereafter.
• Forest Friends won the Communication Arts, Award of Excellence.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/161289798]

Role: Designer, Developer
Client: Self, Parsons MFA Design and Technology Thesis
Team: Nick Hardeman, Bruce Drummond
Technology: C++, openFrameworks, OpenGL, OpenCV, SuperCollider, OSC, Photoshop, Maya

social sqncr is an interactive audio-visual installation that aims to make people more aware of the act of creating their public identity.

To create their ‘identity’, participants use their bodies to physically interact with a pseudo-musical instrument projected in a physical space to create virtual musical creatures based on their movements. The instrument consists of eight zones that participants interact with which influence the shape, movement, and aural properties of the resulting entity.

Once complete, the system captures an image of the participant to attach to the creature which is then set free into an eco-system inhabited by similar entities. The entities react to one another, much like human beings in a social network. Participants can cause environmental disturbances by physically interacting with the projection.

The physical movements required of participants ensures a high level of investment in the process, causing a heightened awareness of their creation, and thus themselves. Watching their entity interact with other entities is a reflection of their own interaction in their social networks.

Final Thesis Paper

Role: Senior Developer
Client: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History
Team: Potion Design
Technology: C++, OpenGL, GLSL, Objective-C, macOS, JSON

Q?rius is an interactive science education space at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

The installation consists of a series of interactive kiosks that provide young scientists a way to discover science and nature via a series of digital tools and activities. Users can access and explore the museum’s vast collection of scientific artifacts – physically and virtually and curate their own collection of specimens in the form of a Field Book, which is accessible on the kiosks as well as online.

Transmutation: Abstraction is OS X application for live visual performance written in Processing. It has five configurable, audio reactive scenes with numerous parameters which can be manipulated in real-time. Frames from the application are streamed in real-time, via Syphon, into Resolume, where audio reactive, visual effects are used to further abstract the visual composition.

Nonlinear Division (nadir version) is an extract from live audiovisual performances with musician, Speak Onion, between 2012-2015, made with Processing. The music is choked with dense atmosphere, folding in on itself repeatedly, while the visuals are expansive, building outwards in every direction. The compound effect is a feeling of infinity: no beginning or end, no inside or outside, no familiar reference points. This causes a new and impressionistic experience of time – less a straight line and more an arc with ill-defined limits, which eventually feels just as familiar as it does new.

Transmutation is a custom audio visualization application created for Speak Onion’s live performance on 01/27/2012 @ The Charleston, NYC. It includes four audio reactive scenes, the parameters for which can be manipulated via a GUI in real-time, and splitscreen capability.

The application and source code can be downloaded from the github repository.

Parameters for each scene are mapped to logarithmically spaced averages retrieved from an FFT analysis of the input audio. These parameters include sensitivity, scale and position of elements in each scene, and can be tweaked in real-time using a GUI.

This project was coded using Processing. Some of the code is based on examples from Daniel Shiffman’s – The Nature of Code.