The GRAM was developed for my senior thesis in computer science and dance. Two accelerometers were attached to a dancer and as I danced, real-time visualizations were projected onto a screen.
MoreFor my senior thesis I developed a software application that allows an artist to generate visualizations based on a dancer's movements in real time. The idea was to create an immersive environment for the audience to enjoy the performance. The choreographer can configure the overall look and feel of the visualization that would be rendered. These visualizations could be configured based on Laban's Effort Theory. Each effort would control different parts of the visualization, including the color mood, the stronger moving lines or the texturized particles. The accelerometers used Bluetooth to send a stream of information to a computer backstage, which in turn sent information to the computer in the back of the house (theater), connected to the projector. The information was processed and projected as the backdrop to the piece.
This project was designed for PLOrk (the Princeton Laptop Orchestra). I participated in PLOrk during the spring semester of 2008.
MoreThis game simulates a ball in maze game. As you navigate your ball through the maze using your computer's built in accelerometers. You can explore a sonically interesting world. Be careful of colliding into walls, those sounds aren't quite as pleasant as the sonic texture of the rest of the maze. Work your way through the maze to the goal. The idea is that the direction and speed of your movement will affect the sound coming out. Tilting the computer left and right will pan the sound to the left and right speakers. Tilting it forwards and backwards will change the rates of modulation.
After taking the Freshman Seminar in animation, I decided I wanted more, so for the spring semester of 2007, I organized a student-initiated seminar in animation - COS ST05. Grab a professor (the amazing Adam Finkelstein), some students, and voila - it's an official course! Bubbles was my group's final animation. Notable parts for me here were - many hours modeling a complex sneaker to be seen for less than one second. This project was also lovingly made with Blender.
WatchGrowing up, I love love loved Pixar, and it was a major part of my decision to major in computer science, so I was really excited when I got into the freshman seminar in animation run by Adam Finkelstein. In this short, I did most of the animation of the first dummy we meet.
WatchThrough college, I was involved in a lot of theater tech, thanks mostly to Triangle Club. Besides being on tech crew for Triangle starting my freshman year, I was also the graphics designer. It came full circle, from performing in McCarter theater when I was a kid to now actually running the shows. From there, I went on to do set design for a few Theater Intime shows including Equus, and lighting design for many dance and theater shows.
Knights vs. Dragons is an online turn based game my team created for COS 333. Making an RPG style game has always been in my mind, since I first played one. It wasn't until this class, that I could assemble an awesome team consisting of my friends Kaitlin, Todd, and Bettina, that this could become a reality.
MoreIn Knights vs. Dragons, you choose an alliance to fight with, create your character and fight against players of the opposite alliance. In our game we implemented a map where you can travel around, find items, fight other players and receive quests. Items can then be used to purchase weapons at the shop. Skill points can be distributed to gain abilities. Weapons and abilities are used to create your battle profile to be used when fighting other players. All of these things can be managed in a player's inventory. We also set up an administrative interface to easily add and modify different aspects of the game including levels, map pieces, probabilities of items and quests, attributes of items and weapons, battle simulations, etc. Quests is the most flexible part, because an admin can create a quest that has a player do any activity in our game to complete the quest, from finding items, to fighting, and visiting certain tiles on the map. Finally we have an initial setup that lets a developer mimic the functionality of our game, but with their own choices for everything else such as alliances, weapons, abilities, etc.
Admin Panel
Basically most of the game is created through the admin panel. All the weaponss, levels abilities, items, maps, etc can be added, deleted and modified through the admin panel.
Quests are also created through this interface, and they are completely customizable.
We also have a battle simulation section where you can run thousands of battles, and it will give you plenty of statistics about what happened. This was particularly useful in testing our battle formula.
Initial Setup is probably the coolest part because any other game designer/developer can take our structure and implement the way they want. If someone wanted to make a games Elves vs. Dwarves, they could download our package, and install it on their own site, and customize it how they liked. What we give them is the interface, the battle formulas, and basically all of the back-end architecture.
Dancing Steph