Creative Technology portfolio

Every bachelor’s program has a Parents’ Day once a year. At this day, the parents of the first year’s students visit the university to take a look at what their children do at the study. Last Tuesday CreaTe had its Parents’ Day. Since there are not that many students, there also weren’t that many parents. However, with such a small group it was very nice to do some brainstorming.

The parents had to come up with a story line for a game to make young adults (or old children?) more aware of the world around them. Of course the CreaTe study program was part of the story lines! With the professional supervision of Anton Eliens, the parents developed three different story lines. All story lines were applied on the students lives by the parents.

Some weeks ago I wrote about our robot vacuum cleaner for Human Factors. By now, we finished our interface prototype. We ran some tests with test subjects and the results were quite positive! Later on, I will post some more information and the report on my portfolio page, but you can already check out the interface prototype. It’s a bit slow and I didn’t test it in Internet Explorer, so better use Firefox instead.

Last week we finished the course Creative Exploration of Structures. Although the name doesn’t sound like it, it was a mathematics course. It was about some less common subjects of math: infinity, the golden proportion, self-similar structures, etc. We proved some classic math theorems ourselves and tried to make some nice images with fractals. At the end, we all had to write an essay on a (more or less) math-related topic. I chose to write mine about anamorphosis. The result can be found in my portfolio.

For the course Interactive Visualization, we held a moodboard election yesterday. The assignment was to make an interactive moodboard with Unity. The subject was not specified, so we could use our own creativity for that. The results of the election can be found here, together with the submissions of all students. My own moodboard can be found here. (Unity web player is required, ~2MB)

For the course Interactive Visualization Jan Kolkmeier, Douwe Bart Mulder and I are working on a visualization of a telemedicine scenario. The idea behind the telemedicine application is to create a platform with which care givers, care takers and relatives can communicate and to help the people who need care. The system designed by the telemedicine department at the University of Twente is called Julie. Besides the ability to facilitate communication between people, it can also keep up tasklists for patients; remind them to take there medicines or to do exercises and warn the caregivers in case of emergency.

To illustrate the working of the system, we’re making a visualization of a nursing home. People can walk around and discover how the systems reacts to several different events, such as heart attacks.

The latest version of our work can be found here. (Installation of the Unity browser plug-in is required.)