They are afraid – the great firewall of China, the blocking of Facebook in Pakistan, Bangladesh and others, Iran’s blocking of foreign media and the eventual temporary internet and text message blackout following 2009 presidential elections (Zuckerman, 2010), these are just a few instances of how powerful social and citizen media have become and how governments are attempting to cope with the loss of informational control. In countries where the press is tightly controlled, citizens, and often foreign media as well, turn to various self-reporting outlets such as Twitter, Indymedia, YouTube and other blogging sites. These social media networks allow not only information to disperse across borders with unprecedented ease (such as the case of Iran’s bloggers) but also allows cross-scale interaction between transnational actors and local, previously out-of-sight groups (such as the Mexican Zapatistas) (Dodds,K., 2007). It has become common to see Twitter and YouTube posts referenced on various American news outlets as part of their main news segments (Zuckerman, 2010).

(Divya Gunasekaran and Tim Tregubov, Summer 2009)

Our goal for this project was to create a simple, but addicting game that played off of old-fashioned handheld and vintage arcade games, but utilized newer technology that allowed for a more modern feel and the implementation of more exciting features. We succeeded in creating a challenging game that takes the user’s movements as inputs via an accelerometer to move the player on the board, which consists of a small 8x8 RGB LED matrix with a seven-segment display showing the timer and score. A piezo is also included to produce different sounds for specific actions in the game. These components contribute to a gaming experience that is stimulating both tactilely, visually and aurally. The game design also makes the game easy to reprogram to include more levels and additional features.

The Greenlite Project: An animated polar bear which aims to educate students about the impact of electricity and other resource use.

This was a Siggraph 2009 information aesthetics video submission we made. Although we didn’t get into the information aesthetics category we did end up with a Siggraph Poster and were invited to a Panel. This video provides a good summary of what the project was about.

This was an awesome summer. I lived in a van and spent two nights+ a week in the drawing studio. Unfortunately most of these photos were taken with a phone camera and so the quality is not that great. I’ve given most of them away so no chance of retaking. There were lots more but the photos were simply too blurry.

Spooked and Confused
Final 3D animation project from CS42 at Dartmouth. I worked on this with: Graham Baecher, Jen Huang, and Justin Slick. Some good times spent in the lab!

When Google acquired SketchUp in 2006, they announced a competition for college students across the nation to model their campus in 3D using SketchUp, and then to geolocate the buildings in Google Earth. Seven winning teams would then be invited to a three day SketchUp seminar at Google Headquarters in Palo Alto and their models added to the official buildings layer in the Google Earth database. In a span of about 2 months, I helped lead a team of 10 individuals who collectively took over 2000 photographs and modeled over 130 buildings. On the day of the submission deadline, we submitted a complete model of the entire Dartmouth campus. A month later, among 350 teams, we were announced as one of the winners.

(celtic knot carving)

I used to do a lot of wood carving, chip carving in particular. This is a style of woodcarving found in traditional folk art around the world. Geometric patterns composed of 2, 3, or 4 sided pyramid shaped chips are carved out of the surface, usually with a single knife. Each chip comes out as a single piece. It can be used to decorate large building surfaces as well as more intricate pieces such as boxes or art frames.