I thought it would be fun to revisit a classic assignment Michael Beirut mentioned in a recent post on DesignObserver.com where he showed his student portfolio. The idea is to simplify an animal to it’s most essential elements and create a logo-like image. It occurred to me that those same skills are exactly what is needed when designing characters for game design, and with the game engine Unity now free we should introduce motion as an element.
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Published on December 8th, 2009 in
discourse, interactive design and tagged with design, gaming, interactive, Unity •
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My favorite microcontroller, the Arduino, has hit the big time – a WSJ feature article! For the uninitiated, the Arduino can be hooked up to sensors to detect presence and then it can send out signals to the computer or to motors, LED lights and a bunch of other stuff. The nice thing about doing interactive design with the Arduino, is that it can be a stand-alone installation without the need for a computer to remain attached.
Published on November 28th, 2009 in
discourse, interactive design and tagged with interactive •
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I’ve been working on a new site design for the last few weeks and would like to announce that it’s finally been launched! Let me know what you think!
For my design friends that are curious, the whole site is done in WordPress, which is a free content management system that you can install on most web sites. It is basically a blog setup, but it is pretty easy to customize it so that it does not look like a blog. There are a ton of cool plug-ins and built-in features that make managing a complex site very easy. For example, for my image pages I can upload all of my images at once and they are automatically formatted into a gallery. I can create a new post, and it will be added to my navigation and menu areas in the appropriate place.
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Published on November 1st, 2009 in
discourse, interactive design, new work and tagged with cloud, design, interactive, iPhone, WordPress •
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I was blown away to hear today that Unity is now free for small independent developers! This is the same gaming platform that I used for hypocenter, a recent installation piece. The great thing about Unity is that if you are familiar with javaScript you can easily write code for this platform. As a gaming platform, Unity has built-in physics and all of the standard features you would expect.
I think that this development will make it much more likely that alternative uses of gaming technologies are developed. Cool!
Published on October 31st, 2009 in
discourse, interactive design and tagged with gaming, interactive, Unity •
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tag cloud: a Processing Java Applet
Production Notes
These are screenshots from a Processing application that I wrote for my web site that displays a tag cloud with the diameter of the circles determined by the number of tags and a random tag as the fulcrum point. My idea was to highlight the most frequently used terms in my site while also drawing attention to a new random tag each time a person visits the site. Hovering will freeze a tag in position, while clicking will take you to posts with that tag.
The physics is based off the Bouncy Bubbles Processing application written by Keith Peters. The data loads the most popular tags from a text file created by Wordpress. The file is a static text file called test.txt, which is created on the fly. The information is parsed into an array for use in Processing. The original tag cloud is on my tag cloud page.
Media
- Software used: Processing, PHP
Source Code
Published on October 27th, 2009 in
discourse, documentation, interactive design and tagged with interactive, typography, WordPress •
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This fall students in interactive design will be collaborating with sculpture students on a kinetic sculpture project about the Digital Body. I am very interested in the topic of how we are existing today, whether our online state is significantly different from our off-line. (more…)
Published on October 8th, 2009 in
Teaching Activities, collaboration, discourse, interactive design, special projects and tagged with digital, interactive, kinetic, sculpture •
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My interactive piece hypocenter was accepted into the Digital Nature exhibition at the Denver Botanical Gardens.
Published on September 17th, 2009 in
Juried Exhibitions and tagged with interactive, PING ultrasonic sensor, sensors •
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