A-Frame, WebVR

Much of my involvement with VRPlants was spent investigating the A-Frame WebXR framework. WebXR poses opportunties for education by making immersive experiences accessible to users on various devices on the spectrum of immersive technology by requiring no proprietary software other than a modern web browser.

The "Ram's Horn Rodeo" experience was deployed as a web application for Oculus Rift at the ASPB Southern Section conference in 2019, and was later optimized as smartphone browser experience. Pictured here are the 3-degrees-of-freedom interactions used in the smartphone version, which has users "charge" a throw by holding their touch on the screen (or holding down the trigger on a Google-Cardboard-like headset while the app is in VR mode) and launch a Ram's Horn seedpod by releasing the touch/trigger.

GitHub Repo

More info

Live Demo (Mobile)

3D Scanning, VR Scultping Software, 3D Design Tools, Unity

For our involvement in the Moogfest 2019 event programming in Durham, NC, our team worked together to develop a workshop that would allow attendees to walk away with their own "virtual" bouquets. Attendees moved between different stations, where they physically arranged a bouquet and used a Structure sensor to scan them, sculpted a vase in Masterpiece VR, chose a "glaze" by projecting an image onto their vase model, and assembled the pieces together into a model hosted on Google Poly. I created a model viewer for the Looking Glass light-field display so that attendees could view and substitue pre-made flower scans, vases, and glazes; I also helped determine the software stack to most smoothly transition each of the attendees through the creation process.

View completed projects from workshop here

TouchDesigner, Microsoft Kinect

As an undergraduate Computer Science student I also attended various courses for my minor in Art & Design. This installation was created for a course on programming for animation, taught by Emil Polyak. Many exercises focused on creating scripts for animations in Maya using MEL, however later assignments also delved into using sensors systems to create animation.

For this project, I scaled and projected user's bodies continuously as they are captured onto a plane that moves back and forth in space depending on the user's distance from the Kinect sensor. The resulting live animation is projected behind a mirror using a projection mapping tool. I experimented with moving the virtual camera generating the animation, basing it on the user's head location to create the illusion of looking "into" a space behind the mirror.

Unity, Magic Leap

Attending the MIT Reality Hack hackathon during January, 2020, I worked with a small team attemtping to create a augmented reality game for the Magic Leap headset. Our plan was to create a game where users deposited snow over real-life objects, creating a path for a sledding character. I contributed by creating a controller for the sledding character and integrating the Lumin SDK components for Unity to allow the character to travel on surfaces recognized by the headset.

Github Repo

Unity, Oculus Rift

A VR walking tour of two WWI-era environments. A team historian provided the historical context for the project, and team designers created the scences by sourcing public content and creating their own 3D models. As a developer on the team I optimized the experience for the assets provided, implemeted the Oculus integration package, created locomotion mechanics, organized spatial audio, and implemented post-processing using existing Unity tools.

GitHub Repo

Scratch, Physics, Tutoring

as a tutor I used the visual programming language Scratch to teach younger students Computer Science fundamentals. Many projects took the form of small games or apps. I created this project to help teach students about simulating physics using programming; the player can click and hold a point on the screen to create a source of gravity that the character is drawn toward. This helped students grasp concepts like velocity and acceleration, which were necessary for more complex projects like "platformer" games, etc. Students were tasked with expanding on the project by making an obstacle course for the character to be drawn through to reach a goal marker.

(Written lesson coming soon)

Project Page

Scratch, Data, Tutoring

As an advanced lesson for my Scratch students, this "Snake" game project was created to illustrate parsing and serialization. Because Scratch doesn't have a multi-dimensional array data type, one way to simulate this behavior is to serialize an array and store it as a comma-delimited value. There are other ways to simulate 2D arrays, but having students write the project this way introduced them to writing reusable functions and processing and storing more complex data. Multiple arrays are used to store data for segments of the snake as well as to buffer values when serializing and parsing data.

(Written lesson coming soon)

Project Page