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.

Role: Senior Developer
Client: Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County
Team: Potion Design
Technology: Cinder, C++, OpenGL, GLSL, JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js, HTML, Jade, CSS, SCSS, Python, WebSockets, WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Multi-Touch

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink is a 20+ person multitouch interactive located at the education center in the Solid Waste Authority, West Palm Beach, Florida.

The interactive consists of a 20 foot multitouch table and a large video display system.

On the touch table, tour groups can explore an interactive map to learn more about the renewable energy facility and the area surrounding it. Users are also invited to participate in 3 interactive, educational games and learn more about recycling, waste and how to be more environmentally conscious. The experience is led by an instructor and controlled via a browser-based iPad application.

My responsibilities included developing a variety of features in the interactive map, 2 educational quiz games and an iPad controller application. The Potion Design team consisted of 1 designer, 3 developers and a producer.

Role: Technologist
Client: Shake Shack
Team: Big Spaceship
Technology: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SCSS, jQuery, Bootstrap, PHP, WordPress, WordPress Plugin API, Python, MySQL, Facebook API, Foursquare API, Instagram API, Twitter API

Shake Shack is addictive burger shop that grew from a small hot dog cart in Madison Square Park to become a New York Institution.

The website is powered by WordPress, a custom responsive, modern, theme and numerous custom plugins that employ popular social API’s to showcase Shake Shack’s large community and immense social following.

Visit the site.

Role: Senior Developer
Client: The Richard Avedon Foundation
Team: Potion Design
Technology: Objective-C, iOS, Python, WordPress, MySQL, JSON, AWS, EC2, S3

This coffee-table iPad app showcases Richard Avedon’s extensive work and entices individuals to explore, study, appreciate and differentiate between object types in this legendary photographer’s archive.

The minimalistic interface makes extensive use of UICollectionView and is utilizes a WordPress/API hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Download the app.

Role: Senior Developer
Client: Yale University Press
Team: Potion Design
Technology: Python, PHP, MySQL, JSON, WordPress, WordPress Plugin API

Interaction of Color is an interactive adaptation of Josef Albers’ most influential book on color.

I developed a custom WordPress plugin for content editors to easily create sophisticated color studies on the backend. The system comprises WordPress, a custom WordPress plugin for creating color studies and a Python script that generates static assets and json that can be packaged with the iOS app build.

The Potion team consisted of 2 iOS developers, 1 backend developer and 1 producer.

App Store link

Role: Technologist
Client: Google Creative Lab
Team: Big Spaceship
Technology: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Google Closure, Google App Engine

“What Do You Love?” invites users to search and view their results across a spectrum of Google’s products, interact with their wide range of services, and discover Google’s more specialized products.

Tweetlite is a visual commentary on our relationship with online social networks. It is an ambient light that represents a pixel – the smallest unit of visual digital information. This is represented in the form of a minimalist, 4″ white, plexiglass, cube that reads messages from a Twitter feed and displays them in Morse code. Each message is displayed in a different color and makes for a great mood light. It has USB and power connectivity and comes with a program that is used to enter Twitter credentials to enable the data feed visualization.

It needs to be connected to a computer with an Internet connection, via USB. The patterns and colors can be customized. Needless to say, it can be of great use to someone who can read, interpret or even want to learn Morse code.

It is powered by an Arduino Duemilanove and Python to read tweets from Twitter and send it to the Arduino as serial data. The python code is based on this example.

The objective of the game is to emulate an immersive virtual environment that is geared towards musical skill development and music improvisation. Audio signals from the players’ instruments directly affect the virtual environment and provide immediate visual feedback in the form of game characters.

Children of the Shred is built with Python, PyGame and Max/MSP. Open Sound Control (OSC) is used to communicate between the Python and Max/MSP programs.

In a two player scenario the game can be setup on two networked computers where each player has their own musical instrument. The two computers can be configured to communicate via Open Sound Control.

In collaboration with Clay Ewing.

Design document