Songfever
Augmented Music Reality
Songfever, at it's heart, is a tangible front-end for iTunes. Album covers are projected onto four physical objects standing on a shelf. With a scroll wheel, attached to the shelf, you can scroll through your music library in a Cover Flow like fashion. The goal was to reintroduce the aesthetic quality of a physical music collection (CDs, LPs), while maintaining the comfort of a digital one.
Each of the four covers are tracked by a webcam mounted above the shelf. Their positions are translated in software in the same way the projector located relative to the webcam in the real world. When rendered in a 3D OpenGL view and projected back onto the shelf, the album covers line up with the physical objects again.
Songfever was our main project in the 4th semester for "Digital Media" at the Hochschule Darmstadt. I was responsible for the programming. Visit the Songfever Website for some more photos and videos.
Yuckfu
Arcade Game for PC, Gameboy Advance and the iPhone
Yuckfu is an award winning arcade game for Windows PCs, the Nintendo Gameboy Advance and the Apple iPhone, in which the player has to collect boxes, while dealing with the physics of the spacecraft he's controlling. There is no goal, other than to gain a high score. Yuckfu follows the paradigm “easy to learn, hard to master” in its purest form. The games task and mechanics can be grasped in just a few seconds, but it takes hours of play to be able to control the spaceship fast and safely.
The iPhone version of Yuckfu has full 3D graphics, refined sound and music and a more precise analog control scheme that utilizes the iPhone's built in accelerometer. It is currently available on the iPhone AppStore as a free trial and a paid full version. More info about the game can be found at Yuckfu.net. I also wrote about the development process in my Yuckfu Dev Diary.
The Nintendo Gameboy Advance port of Yuckfu was build for the 2004 Mbit Contest. 28 Entries were submitted to this competition and Yuckfu was picked among 9 other games to be burned on some 500 cartridges and sold to the public. The graphics and overall presentation was refined, in order to work well with the small screen.
The Windows and GBA version, together with an online scoreboard, can be found at the Yuckfu website.
Klangpong
Cross-Platform Audio-Game
Klangpong is an audible interpretation of the arcade classic “Pong”. It extends the gaming experience by enabling gaming between seeing and blind people by providing audible feedback of the game elements. The game and the menu interface do not depend on the graphical representation and can thus be enjoyed in its entirety with just a pair of headphones and a WiiMote.
Klangpong was developed in the 2nd semester for “Digital Media” at the Hochschule Darmstadt during the interface design course curated by Joerg Waldschuetz and Oliver Schneider. The game was implemented with the Processing Framework and features OpenGl 3D Graphics, OpenAL 3D Sound and a multiplayer mode over TCP/IP networks. My responsibilities on this project was the programming and the 3D Graphics (modeling, texturing).
Klangpong is licensed under the GNU General Public License. You can download the source code and read more about the project at the Klangpong Website.
Asaph
Microblogging System
Asaph is a micro-blogging system, focusing on collecting links and images from other pages. It allows you to post content directly from any page you are on. Asaph is not a full blown blog and it does not aim to be one — it just does this one task, but it's pretty good at it.
The heart of Asaph is a Javascript Bookmarklet that, when activated, instantly shows you an interface for posting a quote or image from the site you're currently viewing in your browser. This unique functionalty quickly found its fanbase with thousands of Asaph Blogs spawning all over the world. Be sure to watch the screencast to see it in action!
Asaph is free software and licensed under the GNU General Public License, so anyone can download, install and modify it to their likings. Visit the Asaph Project page or my own Asaph Blog for more info.
PageNode
Extensible Web CMS / Publishing Platform
PageNode is a simple yet very powerfull Web CMS, that I started in 2005. It can be used by novices who just need a publishing platform, as well as experienced web designers and programmers to create about any web application.
The main design philosophy behind PageNode is, that every page on a website can be assigned to a node in a tree. Therefore, an unlimited amount of branches and nodes can be created within this tree to construct a complete website. A node can be of one of several different types, like an article, a blog or a category.
Node types can be added without any knowledge of programming, as easy as extensions for your browser. This makes PageNode extremely flexible and also a much appreciated tool for web programmers, that need to adjust their web applications fast.
This flexibility allows PageNode to drive a number of vastly different sites. From my own personal Blog PhobosLab, to my older gaming related site Chaosquake, the German community portal Zimmerschau with more than 20,000 registered users, or the website of Ellen-Wille with many hundred product pages in severall languages.
Having tested countless CMS myself, none of them provided an uniform and intuitive interface. They all seemed badly designed, or outgrew themselves over the years. PageNode was designed from minute one to provide the best possible usability — not only for end users, but also for web programmers, who want to modify the system to fit their needs.
Venetianization
Flash Music Visualization
Venetianization was my project for the “Media Design” course at the Hochschule Darmstadt. The task was to create a flash animation with simple shapes that are synced to a musical piece. I choose to not do this animation by hand, but rather to program all effects and transitions with ActionScript 3. The result is Flash file, where every object is created on the fly and animated by a simple hash table with timing codes and animation callbacks.
Never having done anything with Flash before, I had to learn the program as well as ActionScript as I went along. Especially syncing the music to the animations turned out to be tricky, due to the lax timing in Flash. You can read more about the inner workings of this animation and download the complete project files and source code at my Blog.
