Semester Postmortem – Winklr May 20, 2009 at 2:38 pm
And so ends another semester at the University of Pennsylvania. Last time this happened, I said goodbye and good riddance, but I actually had a really good one this time around. The next few posts are something of a rehash of Spring 09, and should feature some work I’ve done, some thoughts I’ve had, and are generally designed to get me back in the habit of updating my website more often. So, without further ado…
One of my favorite classes this semester, and one that you will probably hear of several times after this post, was Data Design and Information Visualization, or simply: Info Viz. It was a small class with a somewhat experimental syllabus. You see, despite the fact that Penn has been offering a cross-discipline major in Digital Media Design for more than ten years now, there has never really been a cross discipline course between the Computer Science and Fine Arts departments, much less one dealing with the visual aesthetics (read: Design) of interactive, data driven computer applications (read: Digital Media). Thankfully, the course was taught by one of the best professors in the Fine Arts department, David Comberg, and TAed by the equally passionate Nirav Sanghani. It was also the first class I’ve ever taken to feature a blog as an outside-the-classroom learning tool, which I thought was totally awesome.
In an art class full of engineers, you’re expected to come up with some really awesome looking final projects, and we certainly delivered in that regards. One project, by Brynn Shepherd, used a really slick language called Processing to make a visualizer for her mutual friends on Facebook. Another took data from the Penn Computer Science department and made an incredibly depressing (but very informative) flash animation on the declining number of female computer scientists. Yet another project laid out in very plain terms the process to convert waste glycerol to fuel for vehicles.
My final project for the class was inspired by my previous failures with the Subculture Genome Project (my second project for the course, which I’ll get to tomorrow). I basically wanted to make a program that could take in data from the Music Genome Project or similar classification-based data sets, and display them in a way that you could explore and have fun with. I started out trying to make an interactive Flash animation, but then I realized I didn’t know enough Flash to do anything interesting. Eventually, I borrowed some code from a cloth simulator I wrote for a different class, and started writing a C++ application. The idea was to create a system of virtual masses and springs that represented the set of data I wanted to look at. Because positions were actually determined by a physics engine, and not pre-calculated, I found that I could manipulate the mesh of masses any way I wanted to, and still have the masses maintain their relationships. Plus, it was kind of fun dragging everything around and seeing what kind of new relationships I could see. And so, after nearly 24 hours of straight coding, I created Winklr, which you can now download from the Studio page.
I’m really rather glad about how Winklr turned out. It was really the first worthwhile, distributable program I wrote, and it got really good feedback at the demo session we had as the class’s final critique. I’m also glad that, even though it’s finished, it still has a lot of potential for growth. Of course, there are some bugs to work out, but in addition to that, I’ve been considering creating authoring tools for users, as well as possibly integrating it with the Music Genome Project so you can visualize your music tastes.
Now that you’ve heard the story, you should go try out Winklr! Leave some feedback too, so I can improve it and really make it fun and useful!
Next up on the Semester Postmortem: The Subculture Genome Project
