day/night
cherry blossoms in tokyo
spring 2009


maple leaves
fall 2008


geylan at night
spring 2009

friends, not food
modeling/rendering, Maya
spring 2008


birds
acrylic on canvas
summer 2007




star reader prototype
Tangible User Interfaces class
fall 2007

Star Reader is a clear screen that can be held up to "stars" (LED lights) in an exhibit, labeling constellations and important stars by name, and displaying lines connecting the stars in a constellation. The user can also reconnect the stars to save their own constellations, to encourage the kind of story-telling that occurred in ancient times with constellations. As the engineer in a group of artists, I programmed a prototype of the interface in Java, based on my group's sketches, using a laptop screen with a webcam affixed on top to mimic a clear screen. I also built the constellation exhibit with three constellations using black foamboard and LEDs. The system correctly identified all 3 constellations from various angles. Ideally this would occur continuously in realtime, but for the prototype, the stars and constellations were identified for a single frame at a button press. With the mouse, new constellations could be connected and later shown to others viewing that group of "stars".

other teammates:
Sangwook Park (Harvard GSD)
Jae Park (Harvard GSD)
Mary Murray (MassArt)

thanks to Angela Chang for the photos and video.





smile detector
Image Processing Class final project
spring 2008

Smile Detector takes live video feed from a webcam and uses symmetry detection (as described by a 1990 computer vision paper by Reisfeld, Wolfsont, and Yeshurunt titled "Detection of Interest Points Using Symmetry") to detect facial features including the mouth. The mouth shape is labeled as a smile or frown based on concavity. This project won a class award for best presentation. The paper describing the implementation can be found here.

tattletail
Tangible User Interfaces Class final project
fall 2007

The second group project for the Tangible User Interfaces class involved adding small anthropomorphic cues to household objects, to allow the object to convey emotional information in a minimal manner. For our working prototype, we added a tail to an alarm clock that wagged happily when the alarm was turned off, but thumped in annoyance at being snoozed repeatedly. The tail can be limp or taut and can curl in 4 directions. Its movement is controlled by servos and a micro-controller, which translates commands sent by serial/USB from a host computer. I was responsible for writing the programs on the host computer to control the tail animations for each alarm scenario. The paper can be found here.

teammates:
Michael Bernstein (MIT CSAIL)
Adam Kumpf (MIT MediaLab)
Kosuke Bando (Harvard GSD)