Projects
Xanadu Desk (XuMu)
From the wikipedia page:
Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: “Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.” Wired magazine called it the “longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry”. The first attempt at implementation began in 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an implementation was released, and this was incomplete.
This project is currently in progress, a functionally minimal but complete implementation of the core features of Xanadu.
CharacterCreator
From the project website:
Many genres of interactive story are fundamentally limited by current authoring approaches: in particular, the amount of character dialogue that must be hand-authored. This project will use what is known about the creative work of human authors together with advanced techniques from the field of “natural language generation” to explore a new approach to addressing this problem. In particular, it will integrate a new model of dialogue generation into an advanced tool for interactive story authoring, then evaluate the results when both expert and beginning authors work with the tool, giving us our first understanding of the promise of such techniques for enhancing the creativity of authors.
The need for a new approach to dialogue is pressing. For example, the forthcoming commercial game LA Noire has a script of 2,200 pages (roughly equivalent to 12 feature films). Producing this amount of dialogue is simply impossible for educational game producers, and is nearing the limit of what commercial producers can manage, yet games can only continue to grow in sophistication by having more dialogue. This research works toward a solution for this dilemma, opening the door to further educational development and economic growth, by enhancing author creativity through cutting edge computer science.
SpyFeet
Fall 2010-Present
SpyFeet explores how techniques for language generation and dialog management in natural language processing can be incorporated into the narrative structures of games, providing novel approaches for game authoring that we hypothesize will eventually lead to more compelling and engaging games, appealing to a much wider segment of the population, and usable for a much wider range of purposes. We propose to develop a prototype architecture for a new kind of game, a Social Outdoor Role Playing Exercise Game. We will use the new architecture to implement a prototype novel physical activity-based social role-playing adventure game, Spy Feet, aimed at encouraging physical activity in young women and girls.
StorySigns
Summer 2008-Spring 2010
Designed to explore visual depictions of language and the use of active symbols, later called Gryphs, this project was my senior thesis as a Digital Narratives major, the second of which came out of the University of Maryland. The project web site has further detail on the versions, active development, and more. The active development site is password protected, but I will provide access if requested. My advisors for the project were Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum and Dr. Ben Shneiderman.
OptiWii
Fall 2010
Our project is to integrate Johnny Lee’s research on using the Wiimote’s IR camera to track the head position with a large 40-monitor opitputer. We will be addressing the variety of problems that occur in scale and system, including using multiple wiimotes to expand the field of view, using fingertip IR LEDs to track movement to allow rotation, scaling and panning around a 3D image, and of course creating a compelling demo to showcase the system.
TerpNav
Fall 2009
Developmental version
Current live version
TerpNav is my final large project at the University of Maryland. It is the oficial pedestrian walking map, and was designed and comissioned originally by a gemstone team. The project was a part of CMSC435, Software Engineering, and consisted of a team of 12 programmers. I was elected to lead the project, and in addition to providing server-side coding, I helped coordinate the team’s efforts and deadlines, interpret and assign tasks from the requirements and port the code from the old version to a new svn repository. The class is currently being taught by Dr. Jim Purtilo, and has not completed yet. The map’s curent incarnation can be found at map.umd.edu; however the development version can also be found at vis.cs.umd.edu:8080. The main objective of the semester’s efforts were to productize the map, add layers features and increase performance.
War Story
Spring 2008
This was a student film I wrote, directed and produced as part of a ARTT451: Advanced Digital Art class. I involved 6 actors, over 2 hours of footage and a final running time of just over 15 minutes. The film’s site, including bios and pictures and details about a future release of the film can be found on the project’s web site at the left. The film was selected to be shown at the 2009 University of Maryland Student Film Festival and is currently slated to be released to YouTube in the coming months.
*Xanadu is a registered trademark of Project Xanadu and Theodore Holmes Nelson