ROBBIE TILTON

An Abstract Memory in Unity3D

26 January 2012 | JavaScript, Unity3D | no comments

For my first week in Pixels to Polygons (with James George) we were asked to recreate a memory and make an abstraction of it using primitive shapes in Unity 3D. I created a visual from a dream I had several years ago in which I was looking out the window at my parents house (on 94th street and 3rd ave) and viewed the end of the world. Within these scene you can view the yankees stadium (with blimp) in the distance off to the left, you can view the PS334 of 95th Street and also the 96th street mosque. In the center you can also see a red sphere glowing a red light. This sphere is the sun in a condensed state before it enteres the earths crust to destroy the world.

I used James George’s Geometry Helper to call these primatives. The main functions I called are as follows:

CreateCube(pos : Vector3, radius : float)
CreateCylinder(pos : Vector3, scale : float)
CreateCapsule(pos : Vector3, scale : float)
CreateHorizontalPlane(center : Vector3, width : float, depth : float)
CreatePointLight(position : Vector3, range : float, intensity : float, color : Color)
CreateSpotLight(position : Vector3, direction : Vector3, range : float, angle : float, intensity : float, color : Color)
ApplyColor(object : GameObject, c : Color)
Camera.main.transform.position = Vector3(x, y, z)

Sisyphonus

6 January 2012 | Art, Web | no comments

As an art piece I decided to create a website that will endlessly be stuck loading itself. The site can be found on www.sisyphonus.com. People waste endless hours viewing loading bars and I thought it would be appropriate to bring some self-consciousness into this viewing experience and the emotions it evokes. When a loading bar first begins it often progresses fairly fast and then slows down. During this process, most people experience a feeling of optimistic excitement to a pessimistic frustration. This website is meant to draw out the emotions of waiting and allow one to self-reflect on life and your own ability to stay level-headed throughout a process where the destination is unknown. This analogy can be compared to human life. I was also inspired by Waiting for Godot and The Myth of Sisyphus (which the title plays on: Sisyphus + onus (onus means “wait” in Latin)).

Mark and Me

22 December 2011 | Web | no comments

Mark and Me is my latest web project that I created as my Intro to Web final. I created the idea to make a social bookmarking site that is simple, less fussy, and gets down to the core of the product — bookmarking. The site allows users to create a password protected username where he/she can add and categorize bookmarks as desired. The site features publicly viewable bookmark lists, but are only privately available for editing. I plan to launch the site on Markand.Me shortly via heroku and will post a tutorial on using Heroku when everything is up and running. Currently you can view and use the site on my dev link here.

Macho Joe

17 December 2011 | Art, Physical Computing | no comments

Since a young age I’ve always been afraid of death. The fact that we all must eventually go to this shared destination is a scary and unavoidable thought. To create an art piece to express this fear I felt a toy would be the perfect manifestation. A toy has no control over its surroundings. I’ve also played with machoism and human vulnerabilities by creating a fictitious character “Macho Joe” who is a world class wrestler struggle to gain freedom and not die within his packaging.

I made the piece with 2 Arduino Uno’s, 1 Wave Shield, 3 servo motors, an accelerometer, a range finder, and an 8ohm speaker. Macho joe has 4 distinguished states of agony. When a viewer first walks by the range sensor the piece comes to life pleading for the viewers help. Once the user picks it up, the piece begins to move a bit differently and it’s head movement is mapped to an accelerometer that gives the illusion of the toy always looking at the viewer in the eye. Lastly, when the user places the toy back on the shelf and leaves, Macho Joe gives his final plead for his life before dying.

Overall it was fairly difficult to get the inputs and outputs to work together. I used two arduinos: 1 to manage the 3 servo movements along with all of the sensors and 1 to manage all of the audio output. In order to avoid issues with the Wire library I created communication between the two Arduino’s by reading and writing directly to their digital pins.