PagodaBlog

Sleep Superbly - Sleep Therapy

Jason — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:41:24 +0000

I’ve just wrapped up the final touches on an interesting new project that launched sometime last week. http://sleepsuperbly.com has a campaign going on involving a faux sleep analysis, and it was Oddcast’s task to build the application. Combining several of our technologies, both new and old, you are lead through a series of questions customized according to your own Facebook information (if you allow the application to access it). Your host is a talking 3D avatar who reads a text-to-speech script to you injected full of your interests, hometown location, the most recent friend to post to your wall, and other fun facts that it should not otherwise know. In order to keep the experience as engaging as possible, the whole time you will be staring more or less intro your eyes via a webcam, which is also how you answer questions; the application continues to analyze and track the location of your face within the webcam, and listens to your answer - yes or no - in the form of blinking.

This project kept me on my toes, since, as always, it was a rush deadline with less than cooperative clients (par for the course in the advertising world), and involved quite a few heavy little pieces that had to work in conjunction with one another programmatically. Code-wise, there is quite a lot asynchronous execution, and challenging conditions where we need maintain a smooth experience where in reality the state of the application under the hood is convoluted. Something I rolled out as a convenience for myself during development is a basic scripting language runtime interpreter. Although more robust solutions exist, it was fun to get elbows deep in tokenization, parse trees and interpreting. Essentially each question in the sleep analysis needs to be validated against certain conditions using Facebook info (are you male, do you have a wife, etc), so that you are not asked something irrelevant about makeup if you are a guy. Using my interpreter, I was able to keep such conditions as strings of script within the same xml file that the questions themselves were stored, and evaluate them at runtime without re-publishing the swf. For example:


        Do you feel that, lately, things with your wife {SPOUSE_NAME} have been going smoothly?
       {relationship_status} == {MARRIED} && {gender} == {MALE}

So go and check it out at the official site, or as hosted by Oddcast should the Sleep Superbly campaign end. Enjoy!

Despicable Me - Minion Dominion

Jason — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:31:41 +0000

Now that Universal Studios’s Despicable Me has been in theaters for a few weeks, I figured it was high time to go ahead and post the project I worked on at Oddcast, which advertises for the movie. The official site is http://www.miniondominion.com/, but if they eventually end up taking it down, you should still be able to access the app at http://host.oddcast.com/miniondominion/. A secondary part of the app allows you to customize and accessorize your own minion, and of course send him out to bother your friends via email, Facebook, and other means. You can get to that version here: http://www.miniondominion.com/create, as well as navigate to it via the “Customize and Share” button from the main app url.

Highlights of the project are that the characters are actually 3D, driven by Oddcast’s “Full Body” 3D Engine, complete with animations, texturing and sound. You can command the minions with your voice if you have a microphone, and if not, there is an option to type your commands.

The application will run a bit heavy on your browser, and may take a bit to load, but hopefully you find the wait worth your while. Now head on over and boss around the little yellow guys!

Working at Oddcast in Manhattan

Jason — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:22:41 +0000

Despite all of my efforts to get a job at a hardcore graphics studio writing shaders and coding up the cool GPU effects, I managed to find myself in a slightly different field. After several tiresome weeks of sleeping on couches in New York City (many thanks to my sister and friends), I got an interview, and very shortly thereafter an offer from Oddcast in midtown Manhattan. So, since the end of June, I’ve been writing ActionScript for an interesting type of Flash application. Oddcast’s business is totally centered around an in-house 3D face technology in which a user can convert a photograph from 2D into a 3D projection-mapped avatar. This character can then speak, emote facial expressions, and do all sorts of moderately entertaining actions. The codebase that I work with consists of a custom Flash 3D API (unfortunately no Papervision or Pixel Bender shaders as they’ve been doing this long before such technologies came into play (although coworkers and I are pushing for it), text-to-speech, microphone, phone recording capabilities, and of course common social network integration goodies such as Facebook Connect and Clearspring, to mention a few. Most of our projects are viral marketing campaigns where clients range from small companies to very large brands, just like any multimedia advertising studio.

All in all I suppose life isn’t too bad. I live a bit more than 10 blocks from work, once a month we hold an office meeting in which we relax, talk about the latest company sales and development, and celebrate birthdays with chips, cake, and seasonal microbrews. I’ve had a great time living in NYC so far, met some interesting folks, and hope there is much more to come.

Check out some of the projects I’ve launched so far (with many more on their way):

AudioPal

PhotoFace 2 Demo

Destructible Environments and SSAO

Jason — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:14:49 +0000

So, I’ve graduated, and with that come the [end] of my computer graphics quarter-long projects. To recap, my honors capstone project was to create a fully destructible terrain engine using BSP tree merging. Then, the Computer Graphics 2 project was to implement Screen Space Ambient Occlusion in addition to indirect lighting, or real time (fake) global illumination using GLSL shaders. I’m fairly happy with the progress I made, but will continue to work until they are fully optimized and useable by the gaming community. I’d like to release both as open source goodies should anyone be interested in using my progress in their own projects.

You can get the demo/source code from my portfolio here:
http://ambitiouspagoda.com/portfolio/

Then, be sure to check out the wiki project pages:

Destructible Environment engine - http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Destructible_3D_Environments
SSAO and SSIL - http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Screen_Space_Dynamic_Lighting

Now I just have to work on getting a job doing this stuff so that I’m not a big shlub all summer

Destructible 3D Environments

Jason — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:47:34 +0000

So I’ve been working on my honors capstone project steadily for the past 2 weeks. I’m trying to achieve a destructible environment game engine using BSP tree merging techniques, hypertextures and hopefully GPU acceleration via geometry shaders. So far the BSP works just fine, and I’m about to dive into some merging routines. Check out the progress here:

http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Destructible_3D_Environments

While your at it, you can see the progress Kent and I are making on the Ray tracer for Computer Graphics II here:

http://ambitiouspagoda.com/wiki/Ray_tracer

iTunes Radio Stream Title

Jason — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:40:32 +0000

For about three weeks I have been lounging around my living room at school listening to Christmas music. Of course, as the majority of my time is spent using my Mac, I came across a great station under the iTunes radio category of “Holiday”. SomaFM, with their tag line as “Chilled holiday grooves and classic winter lounge tracks” offers a very interesting mix of beats. Although I love the classic songs that we all know, such as those from Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Chuck Berry, I have to admit- along with my college friends who chill it up with me in “The Christmas Zone” (aka my living room) - that there is something about SomaFM that makes the atmosphere very likable. Many of the tracks feature indie hip hop and dance beats, which sample those aforementioned classic Christmas tunes. Honestly, check it out, and if you don’t have iTunes, you can still stream from this url: SomaFM

Getting more to the point, I found myself liking so many of the songs that every other minute I was interrupting my programming or Maya workflow to record the song title from iTunes and write it down so that I could check it out later. Then it dawned on me! Why not write a cheesy AppleScript to grab this data for me and concatenate it line by line to a file? Furthermore, how about setting this script to fire every time I press a certain key combination by setting a trigger in Quicksilver? Well, it turns out that it works great, and I’m currently priming it up and possibly integrating it with Growl instead of the current confirmation which happens when the hotkey is pressed: OS X’s Alex speaks it aloud to me :/ Amusing but… ok maybe I’ll keep it as an option. Yeah so look for that soon. I’ll make another post when it’s available (or using this idea just write it yourself. It was pretty damned simple).

First Attempt

Jason — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:18:36 +0000

So I had an extremely ridiculous idea the other day. My girlfriend, who is originally from Hong Kong, speaks Cantonese as her first language and is proficient in Mandarin. I, being a good ol’ American mono-linguist who took Spanish in high school and is now learning Japanese in college, only barely know the difference in sounds between these two Chinese dialects.

From time to time, I find it amusing (at my girlfriend’s expense) to string random syllables together that I deem sound like some sort of Chinese. I then look at my girlfriend with a wide, cheesy grin and ask expectantly for her professional translation. Of course this is ignorant, and I hope I am not accidentally overheard and misunderstood by a passerby. However, I have actually managed to come up with sentences- most of the time gramatically incorrect. It was after one of these “sessions” that I talked with a friend and decided it would be a great exercise in internet stupidity to blog about my findings. I call it Trial and Error Chinese for the Average Man Hoping Not to Learn a Language But Instead to Butcher it At the Expense of a Poor, Patient Chinese Girl: For Beginners…

Welcome to the Pagoda

Jason — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:00:41 +0000

Finally, ambitiouspagoda.com is at least reasonably respectable. I installed a blog (who doesn’t) and a wiki (really useful for all my project tracking) so that this site has a point in its own existence. I realize there are still a few design issues, but I’m happy for now, so people like Adam Butterworth who happens to be sitting right next to me should hold his tongue

I think I’m resigning from the web design stuff for a little bit, and I’m going to stay true to the theme of this Fall quarter here at the Rochester Institute of Technology: No Web Development In Jason’s Schedule! Hopefully I can use the time to populate this site with some content from the other fields in technology and art that I like a lot better.

Enjoy and feel free to browse around!