Interactive and Technical

Unity, Microsoft Kinect, and C#

This movie is a demo of my short arcade-style video game “Jet Fu”, which implements Microsoft’s Kinect inside the Unity game engine. Within the game, there is a lot that can be improved upon, such as the visuals, the game complexity, etc…however, I am happy with the direction it is going.

I had “Jet Fu” on display at Texas A&M’s Vizagogo festival on May 3, 2013, and people kept coming back for more game time. With loads of positive feedback and many students asking me if I plan on uploading it to X-box live, I was on cloud-nine the whole night.

Seam Carving using C++ and Open-GL

original image

after Seam Carving

(The image has been scaled down, but the castle and man automatically retain volume)

What is going on: The second image is scaled on the width, but the castle and the person have retained their volume. I have implemented an algorithm known as Seam Carving, originally discovered by Shai Avidan. The algorithm allows users to scale images without cropping the most important portions of an image. In my code, I compare a pixel with its neighboring 3 pixels above and find the difference in contrast. Whichever pixel has the least contrast becomes the current path, creating a map of least resistance for each column of pixels. After comparing each column, I remove the path with the least total resistance, creating a seamless cropped image. I developed all implementations using C++ and Open-GL.