Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

Problem 1. Create a function the takes as input a wavelength in pixels (float) and an amplitude (float) and draws a series of crested (upward pointing) waves.

Problem 2. Create a function that draws a repeating hearbeat pattern, as seen on an EKG. Do this by compositing a series of sin waves.

Problem 3. Create a function that takes as input a number of petals (int), an inner radius (float), and a petal length (float), and draws a daisy-like flower using a single continuous line loop.

Problem 4. Create a function that takes as input a number of teeth (int), an inner radius and an outer radius, and draws a flat-tooth gear as specified.

Problem 5, 6 and 7. Create a function that takes as input a seed number (int) and generates a random blobby form using a contouring function that combines three or more low-freqency sin waves. Be sure that the sin waves make complete cycles to ensure a smooth transition from the last point to the first. Find 3 photographs of either natural phenomena or industrial products that involve repeating contours or surface profiles, and create three functions to model each of them. Include the photographs in your assignment postings. Generate either a line form or solid form that reflects your personality, and changes with the mouse position.

source code:
Read more

Follow theses simple directions to create your own serving of ASCII Rap!

Ingredients:

- Text Edit, Word Pad, or other text editing software

- iTunes, WinAmp , or similar MP3 player

- SnapzPro or any screen capturing program

Steps:

1. Find a good beat from your MP3 library, favorite streaming radio station, or file sharing software (i.e. Limewire ). Cue the track up, then minimize the player on your computer screen. ( This will allow you to credit your sources )

2. Open text editing software, select a font of your choosing, then resize the window so that is compact, though substantially larger than the MP3 player. Make sure these are adjacent to one another.

3. Launch screen capture software, selecting the range tool so that it encompasses both text edit and MP3 player window. 320×240 works well for maximum visibility / streamibility. Press Record. ( Worst case scenario, you can use the built in iSight camera on a Macbook placed uncomfortably close to one computer in conjunction with iMovie to record the screen of another computer. )

4. Type along with beat. You can either freestyle type over the beat, add a backup here and there (i.e. “jeah” “that’s right”) or if your not feeling ready, just double up for the chorus of the song. Also feel free to utilize such techniques as on-the-fly format changes to text and rapid use of the tab button.

5. Finally export the video an Quicktime, Windows Media Video or related, and upload it to your website or YouTube. Now your ASCII Rapping!

Serving size:

- The masses

Sample:

http://itp.nyu.edu/~ts1200/Usergenerated/Cookbook/ASCII-MC.mov

I created a switch from a children’s book, removing one of the card stock pages and replacing it with conductive strip metal. When the book is closed the circuit is complete, and sends a trigger to the iPac chip. It can be used to play a Flash game. I’m contemplating modifying the book further, so that each page is a different switch. I would also like to make it more durable, through use of thicker and better hidden wires. As the child flips through the book, on screen animations come up on the computer screen, thus bridging a long standing gap between old and new narrative media.

In the distant future the Sun is losing energy. Your mission is to fire hydrogen rockets at it from your base on Earth. Just avoid hitting those pesky inner planets!
http://itp.nyu.edu/~ts1200/Inclusive/Sunshine/orbit3/index.html

view source code:

Read more

Our health care system, though hi-tech when it comes to bioengineering and cancer research, is seriously lacking in lo-tech areas like in-office work-flow. Last month my girlfriend got sick and spent a full day waiting at the doctors office and was then stalled half a day on a prescription for basic antibiotics that should have been over-the-counter.

I suspect that a solution wouldn’t necessarily weigh on building more clinics or raising the pay levels of a jaded staff, but rather eliminating the amount of paperwork that gets pushed through clinics. This tendency for offices to want everything filled out by hand is wasting trees and time, and this problem is prevalent not just in the medical industry, but the law business as well.

While temping for law firm in Santa Monica, I spent most of my time securing printed company emails of the firm’s clients into binders, and then going through each by hand and retyping key details into Case Map; essentially an excel database for the law firm.

Why a business would choose to take text already existing in digital form, print it out analog, and have someone go through it by hand, is a result of an age-old societal tendency to view print on paper as truth, and an uncertainty of all things digital; potentially deletable or subject to change at a keystroke. In court cases a printed email can serve as an exhibit that is called upon by a lawyer and then extracted from a binder. Couldn’t the same document be called up promptly and displayed on an electronic tablet mounted at key areas of the courtroom with just as much validity to those who are viewing it? Such a device would probably pay for itself, when you think of the time throughout a day that it takes a patients to go through and hand write their addresses in a health care facility or a high-paid lawyer to walk across a courtroom and hand off documents to a jury.

Trust of security of data is probably the biggest issue with a paperless data-entry device, but this is on the increase as more people begin to pay bills and purchase products online, and realize that the system works.

When I was looking for an internship to round out the fall 2007 semester at ITP, I was particularly interested in an opportunity at a small company in the Flat Iron district called Phreesia that had been posted to the list serve.

“Phreesia replaces the patient clipboard with a free wireless touch-screen PhreesiaPad. We provide everything you need (short of the broadband internet connection), including a wireless network.”

“Phreesia provides a hands-on opportunity for students to work on Usability Research, Documentation and Design for a small health care software company. We have a very exciting interaction challenge presented to us by the wide range of users working with our product, the limitations presented by touch screen technology on a small screen and the complexity of the information we’re trying to collect and deliver.”

I ended up interviewing for a position early this week, where I talked with the staff, interacted with the device, and finally accept an offer. For more information and a nifty flash animation, visit phreesia.com

Eric Beug and I hooked up the Xbee radios for programming the not-so-easy way, by dismembering an Arduino and using it for power in conjunction with breadboard, capacitors and voltage regulators to connect to a computer via USB. Tom Igoes little Processing Terminal emulator enabled us to type some basic commands to it to set network IDs. We eventually had two of them talking backing forth in an exercise where potentiometers were used to control the brightness of an LED over wireless.

As a teenager in the mid-1990’s I spent many afternoons designing cities in the popular Maxis title, SimCity 2000, on my parent’s Gateway PC. This early simulation game, originally created by Will Wright, allows the user to start from scratch, generate a custom terrain, lay the foundations for a town, and build it up into a metropolis. There is no clear goal in playing the game, aside from generating revenue to build whatever the user desires, or for that matter, destroy the town through subjecting it to relentless natural disasters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnsx_u9ZOGg

The reason why I use SimCity 2000 as my example, as opposed to the later SimCity 3000 or more recent EA distribution of SimCity 4, as that by the end of SimCity Classic era, and onward to SimCity 2000, the groundwork for the game and game play had essentially been established; most other changes after this point were “improvements” the graphics engine and sound, rather than additional variables or infrastructures to improve game play. It is conceivable that once mastering SimCity 2000, a user could become bored of SimCity 3000 after the initial infatuation of cosmetic improvements wore off. Furthermore, these surface level changes do not seem to lend themselves to accessibility.

Terrain Generator function allows users to set the grounds. This process could be made easier through more responsive game interfaces; click and drag a pain.

One of the first things I would propose to improve accessibility would be to make SimCity 2000 freely available and playable online. SimCity Classic is already available as an online game http://simcity.ea.com/play/simcity_classic.php, though this basic version is not as fully developed as the sequel, and misses some key aspects such as accurate proportions of town infrastructures; police stations are is large as small neighborhoods, and two-dimensional top-down perspective that removes the users special perception. The bandwidth is there to make a 3D game such as SimCity 2000—which is more along the line of pseudo-3D ( 3D structures do not exist as vectors, but are rather 2D flattened graphics, with special layer properties that gives them an air of dimensionality )—playable over a network, perhaps even within a browser. As an online title, users could establish forums to discuss game-play, or maybe even watch other users playing the game, offering up critique.

Police department dwarfs low income houses. Design flaw?

For improvements to the visually impaired community of players, it would be great if users had the option of setting the colors of all the structures before building a city or opening a tutorial. Perhaps this could even be worked into an HUD, where a user could mouse over an object, it’s name would be revealed through both text and speech, and then a color spectrum would pop up, giving users a choice of how to represent water or commercial zones or bare land. Also it would be nice if a translucent letter “R” might hover over a residential zone, an “I” over each industrial zone, and so on, so long as it didn’t obstruct the players visibility. The reason why the distinction between zones is crucial is because of the strategy involved not only in the placement of, but also maintaining health ratios of different zones. Residential zones, for example, seldom develop properly next to industrial zones, but without proper visual distinctions a player would have little means of knowing the differences between zones, aside from spotting an occasional dead-giveaway smokestack—typical of industrial zones, but not all industrial zones can be factories, particularly if the game is to maintain it’s status as a simulation, so this is something to consider, when making visual changes to the game.

In terms of audio accessibility, one of the few improvements I noticed between 2000 and 3000 were the addition of the government advisors. In this mode an appointed head of mass transit, might inform you of inefficiency in the current transportation system, and suggest additional highways or subways around traffic-heavy areas. Some text to speech functionality was probably built in to the aspect, but it would be nice of these problems were notated on the city map as text, and once clicking on them the user could then see and hear an advisor’s report. This notation aspect could also remind players with short-term memory loss of the continuing problems faced by the city, in a way where they wouldn’t have to access this information in a separate window.

to the colorblind this would present an unclear view of low value residential areas alongside industry.

Finally, the technology is in place to make SimCity accessible to the deaf and blind. I envision an interactive table where the player could use their sense of touch to both build a city and feel it out at the end—similar to the bed of nails toy that people use to make imprints of the their hands and face, only motorized. Vibrations to a wristband could relay information about the conditions of the city, while the tabletop map changed slightly from moment to moment. This and other accessibility technologies are within the reach of the game developer.

This is my first project in Open GL used with the C programming language. If you run it it xCode or Eclipse you will be able to scroll your mouse across the draw window to make the moutains grow, the cloud fade, and the river widen. Download the code here

source code:
Read more

For the first assignment Eric Beug and I have built a computer keyboard entirely from scrap in the ITP shop. The keys are cardboard, glued to springy metal contacts, then secured to a wooden base. A chip called at Ipac is used to convert the key triggers into ASCII values. Some of these values were incorrect, so we built a simple Max patch to correct them. The end result offers limited functionality with typing in a text editor, is extremely quite, and uses a very small foot print on the desk space.