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Interactive Design
Welcome to Savannah I did not realize how ambitious this project was until too late. Prof Fu tried to warn me that I was getting into a tricky area when I explained to her my idea to develop a tourism centered information portal built in Flash. My stated goal was to create an application that would act as a hierarchical directory of information for visitors to our area, delivered through four different avatars. Each had its own personality that determined which options it would recommend to you. At the onset, the user would be asked whom they would like to act as their guide after a brief introduction of each avatar. After choosing a guide, they would be asked a series of questions designed to deliver a set of information, such as local golf courses, where to find a restaurant, or an antique shop. According to the answer of each question, the user was given another array of choices based on that answer. Each personality had a preference for certain selections in this array, and so whom the user picked as a guide would determined the order and visual importance of the returned options. This allowed for users to use the system more than once, and not receive the same recommendations. Midway through the project I came upon the idea of developing a system where the application would track your choices and align you with or against certain avatars or 'guides'. If you continued picking options that were family oriented, you would soon be presented with the young girl scout as your guide. If you initially chose the old antiques dealer as your guide, but made enough hospitality and entertainment related choices you would be presented with the pirate as your guide. To track this affinity towards each avatar there was a meter at the top of the screen that showed your current preference for each guide color coded to their specified color. Though in the end, the visuals suffered as I spent the bulk of my time with Colin Moock's Actionscript book open in my lap trying to figure out how to manage three-dimensional arrays of information and ever changing variables, the aesthetics matched the system closely enough that I considered it a successful first prorgamming project.
Click the above screenshot to launch the site (local) For your reference, here is the FLA file.
Dale Chihuly - Tribute Website Prof Diana allowed everyone in the class to choose an artist whom they were interested in to design a tribute site to them. She then challenged students that had previous experience with HTML to design a site using CSS, DHTML and Javascript in a creative way. I took up the challenge and came up with the concept of creating an entire site inside one page by exploiting the multiple levels of visbility inherent in DHTML and the customization potential of CSS. My finished project has 19 pages of printed source code and was completely hand-coded. I also found out several methods for exploiting the differences in browser execution of CSS, one being the fact that images load on top of each other based upon a reverse order in code. I used this to my advantage by structuring the code in a way where I achieved a 'loading' animation effect due to the fact that the popup window would load all of the thumbnails underneath the splash page before the page had completed being sent to the user. My fellow classmate Chia-Hsien (Matt) Lee and I also found an undocumented way to tile or stretch (depending upon the browser) alpha-transparent PNG files to mimic opacity changes in browsers that do not support the CSS 3.0 standard.
PROJECT THREE: Beat Garden My first project working with sound in Flash, this assignment was to create an abstract system for playing sound loops. In addition to editing the sound loops, and bringing them into Flash for a seamless loop, we had the additional problem of allowing the user to change both the volume and the panning of each sound. My solution was an abstract garden, where the user would select a symbol that represented the seed of a tree and plant it in the garden. Rolling over each seed before you selected them would tell you an unrelated, celestial name for this 'aural vegetation' and give you a hint of the type of sound loop that it would yield. There were four rows to plant the seed in, and the lateral placing of the seed would dictate the panning of the sound. After planting the sound would be silent until you watered it. With each watering the volume would increase 10% leading to a cacophony of sound if the garden was full of all 6 trees.
PROJECT FOUR: Poddy - A Podcast Aggregator SNDS 355 - Sound for the Web and Interactive Media This was the final project in the class, and I was very happy with it. Podcasts were not very well known when I began this project, and it was fun trying to explain to folks that pretty soon everyone would be talking about them. Our project was open to us to do something with Flash and sound. I chose a podcast aggregator because there were none at the time. And for good reason. Podcasts are stored as XML files, and the vast majority of web servers restrict consumption of XML files by Flash when run on the server. This put a damper on my project as far as a web app went, but it still works great as a standalone player/aggregator. The concept was that you can set a local XML file that Poddy can read to subscribe to podcasts around the world. It would then contact the remote XML files, parse them and return the information to the user. Since podcasts are just lists of URL's of different MP3s, and since Flash can stream MP3 songs as it downloads them, Poddy was a true Podcast player. Since I didn't hae an iPod I didn't want to be excluded from this freely available content, so Poddy seemed like a good solution to my being without a physical MP3 player.
Click here to download the feeds.xml file containing the XML structure of which feeds to load into Poddy on startup.
PROJECT FIVE: Helifight ITGM 719 - Scripting for Interactivity The most complex project I've done during my classes at SCAD so far, Helifight was the final project in Prof Leong's online Scripting for Interactivity class. The game is a side scrolling shoot 'em up style game with the player's avatar being a US Army helicopter equipped with a machine gun that must get through three levels to win the game. There are three levels of difficulty to the game, and there are unique enemies on the last two levels. There is both a health and scoring system, and multiple levels of damage can be taken. This project was a considerable challenge. There were many many 'active' objects on the screen at once, each affecting the user, and each being dynamically added and removed from the system. There were literally dozens of variables per object, and sometimes there were 15-20 objects on the screen. The development of realistic motion and accurate hit detection were some of the most difficult aspects of this project, but having completed it, I feel very confident about any other dynamic interface I would ever need to create. The central thing I learned from this experience was the incredible importance of code optimization. Once the game itself was completed, I spent weeks trying to get it to run smoother, faster and be more visually appealing.
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