Time well wasted

This a project I worked on for the summer of 2008 in the Shared Reality Lab at McGill. I am working on a graphical simulation of different ground materials to augment a tile system built for simulating the haptic perception of stepping in different materials. I worked mostly with Alvin Law under the supervision of Professors Jeremy Cooperstock and Paul Kry.

So for example, say the tiles were running in "snow mode," then my simulation would render a snow landscape on top of the tiles. Using motion capture, I will track the user's feet and deform the ground material based on how much pressure they exert on the ground, effectively creating footprints in the snow.

I wrote the snow simulation for this project using the Java OpenGL binding. A heightfield is dynamically deformed based on the forces exerted on the tiles. The deformation is fast and efficient becaase the GPU is used to perform all deformation operations, yielding a realtime simulation for our environment. A paper describing the system can be found here. Check out this recent video of the system:

This video reflects further work that was done on the floor system (including the addition of an excellent ice simulation written by Jessica Ip) meriting the system's acceptance into SIGGRAPH 2009 as an installation. You can see the submission description here.

This is a game I started in it's first incarnation shortly after I started college. It's my first real OpenGL based game, written in Java using the Light Weight Java Game Library. It's an investigation of music and rhythm and how these aspects can be linked to effective gameplay.

I had a streak of fierce brainstorming after getting hooked to a particular Timo Ellis album, and I wanted to make a game that encompassed the entire album from front to back and built a rather abstract narrative to go along with the shifting moods of the tracks.

So far I have just gotten caught up in designing effective beat detection technqiues for the gameplay, but I hope to eventually have a one level demo to show off.

The current system time on your computer dictates the play of two computer controlled players in the classic game of Pong. Watch the old school court of Pong turn into an active clock. This program was written using Java2D.