Media/Projects

Media/Projects

INOTS (Immersive Naval Officer Training Simulator) Is a project that I have overseen for the last few years as the project’s technical director. It is a culmination of several core areas of research including realtime gesture and animation control, natural language understanding and dialogue management. My role has been to bring these research vectors into a product that is widely used in the Army and Navy for leadership training.This video features a brief interaction between myself and a virtual human.

CaveSL was a project I developed to adapt the Second Life virtual world to a large format immersive display. Since Second Life (SL) is designed for human interaction, I thought it would be greatly beneficial to interact with other avatars and virtual humans in a lifelike scale. Additionally, the assets and physical environments within SL are relatively easy to create and use, and the environments themselves are very much part of the human interaction experience.

However, the typical means of accessing SL is through a single computer screen, which lessens the immersion that is inherent in such a rich 3D world. Because of this, the SL virtual world is a good candidate for adaptation to large scale immersive displays such as a CAVE or other multi projector systems. I adapted the Open Source Viewer for this project.

PIC Based Midi Controller. This is a fun little midi controller that I designed, built and programmed from scratch. I used a PIC1440 Microprocessor, which is overkill for the project, partially because I had planned to build a much bigger audio switcher with it. I used the compiler provided by Microchip Technology.

Animation Sequencer. This was a piece of middleware I designed and wrote in C# for directors and artists to mark up and animate a character’s nonverbal behavior in a scene. It works with a skeleton controller called SmartBody and takes advantage of the systems procedural animations as well as a fixed animation library designed for the character. It features drag/drop/copy/paste etc. Before this tool was developed, the animators had to schedule all animation actions by hand in XML code.

Animation Sequencer

Joint Fires and Effects Training System (JFETS) is a large format simulator installed at Ft. Sill Oklahoma. I was responsible for the design of the 14 projector blended display system which gave soldiers the ability to practice communicating with overhead aircraft.JFETS