This project involved developing a system to animate a 3D face, to produce a open mouthed smile from a neutral pose. I had to create a set of animation frames for the red MPEG-4 control points, and develop a mechanism for animating the face as the control points moved. A more detailed decription can be found here.

This was a group project that involved developing an Eclipse plugin for Genesys Solutions as part of their 2005-2006 IBM proposal. The aim of the plugin was to check that a piece of code met a set of standards defined in an XML file, and if it did not, to suggest how to correct it. A more detailed description can be found here.

This was my 3rd year dissertation project entitled ‘3D Virtual Extra’s’. The goal was to create a system that could populate a virtual scene with background characters, whose movement and actions were completely autonomous. A user of the system could specify what type of characters would be added using several personality traits such as the level of extroversion or neuroticism that a particular character has. These traits would then influence how the character acted in the scene. A more detailed description (including my final dissertation paper) can be found here.

As part of my work at Genesys Solutions I was involved in the development of a Flash website for a deli opening soon in Sheffield. I worked as part of a team of four on the site and was involved in all aspects of the project, although the majority of my time on the project was spent working on the questionnaire.

This software was created as part of a module on HCI (human computer interaction), and was designed using HCI techniques such as the keystroke level model. The software was aimed at young children and was designed to be fun, simple and easy to use. Once created the software was tested on a set of the target users, who were observed using the software and who also gave feedback afterwards. The results were very promising although it became apparent that extended the number of colours and stamps would be beneficial.

This application was developed for my virtual reality module in Java using openGL (jogl). The task was to create a virtual coconut shy that could be run as a standalone Java application and on the Rave machine in the Reflex lab at Sheffield University. The Rave machine allows a user to see the application in 3D, and to interact it via gloves, and a visor that allows the users head to control their position and view angle, and there hands to ‘throw’ virtual balls. As part of this task I had to develop a simple physics engine that could simulate the motion of the ball and gravity, as well detect collisions and create appropriate bounce reactions.

This was an optional module I took in the first year that was outside of my computer science degree. The module focused on using Adobe Photoshop for various artistic and professional purposes. For instance I created the coloured photo on the left from the black and white one below it. For my final artistic piece I created the photo found here, it is intended to show the pain and suffering felt by many because of the wars in Iraq. It depicts a silhouette of an oil refinery, with the background be made my combing a picture of Iraqis in conflict and a picture of the sky.

I was asked to produce 3D modells of some work that had been completed by a design student at Burton Collegue. I created several models in various colours and textures, and also some ‘under water’ scenes using 3D Studio Max. These were then shown in Burton Collegues Art exhibition. More pictures are available here.

This project used Java to create both a web crawler and a web scraper. The crawler is a program that starts on a given webpage and finds all links on the page. The crawler is configurable to either stay on under one domain, or to follow links to new domains. The crawler also checks to see if the site it is crawling has a robot.txt file, and if so follows the rules stated inside it about any parts of the site that cannot be crawled.
The scraper uses an RDF Ontology to analyse the crawled web pages and extract information from the website, to produce a list of RDF triples that represent information found on the site in the form of relations, such as:
[computer,hasPrice,£10]

This project was completed in my second year as part of the ‘Software Hut’. In this project I was put into a group of 6 other students and we were given a real client independent from the university. Are client required us to design and implement a system for a dating agency that was capable of matching clients in a SQL database together based on their profiles. One of the main features of the software was that the GUI was generated dynamically based on values in an SQL database. This was necessary to allow the client to change the questions he used to generate profiles of his customers.