The Free University in Amsterdam wants to do research into means to influence the spending behavior of people in order to encourage healthier purchases through pricing strategies. Apparently there is little to no consensus about which strategies work the best (pricing down the healthy food, pricing up the unhealthy, discounts vs. taxes, etc.) To study this, they commissioned us (read me, I’m the only person working on this) to make a “serious game” type application, in which people can get their groceries as much as possible “like in real life”. The point is, that the client believes that a web-shop kind of application would not suffice as it is to far removed from the “real” thing.

Buzzwords

• serious games
• physics
• customizable data through CSV files
• low-poly, modular modeling

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in Games

The University of Amsterdam is doing reasearch into the possibility of treating patients with panic disorders in the CAVE virtual reality environment at SARA. For this purpose, I implemented an application in which the patient can be led through a virtual environment in which a variable of avatars are present. The patient as well as the avatars can be static (i.e. standing around) or move along a predefined path. The path is interactively designed by the therapist beforehand, but can be adjusted at any time during program execution. In total, there are 6 scenes available (7 if you count the two modalities for the restaurant: the less busy and the more busy one).

Buzzwords

• multi-processing
• multi-threading
• distributed application
• complex environments
• avatars
• crowd simulation

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in Virtual Reality

The vtkVR project aims at creating an abstract framework that allows to runthe same application in various Virtual Environments without the need tochange anything in the code of the application. This is done by moving manycommon components from the application into system-dependent configurations.vtkVR is based on Kitware’s VisualizationToolkit (VTK).

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in Virtual Reality, Visualization

In this work, I designed a framework aimed at separating the user interaction specific part of an application for VR and AR setups from the main implementation. The goal is to achieve device independence, in order to create real portable VR/AR applications. See my latest publication about this in the publications section.

in Virtual Reality

The project “Window in Virtual Reality”, also called “WiVR”, is aimed at creating a Virtual Reality (VR) environment based on a portable screen that functions as a window through which the user can look into a virtual space.

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in Virtual Reality

Alize in Otherworld is a tech demo for a game that I developed together with my sweetheart Anja. It was made with the Torque engine, Lightwave 3D, and lots, lots of patience, perseverance and a modest amount of ingenuity. more

in Games

This is a little thing I wipped up for Sinterklaas in 2006. I know, I’m nuts …

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in Games

VINE is a utility I am developing in my spare time. The basic idea is to use the introspective capabilities of Python to create an interactive environment, where one can inspect and manipulate object networks. The main application is to use it as a visual pipeline editor for VTK, but it is designed for flexibility, allowing to use also other toolkits like vtkVR. VINE is implemented in Python using Kitware‘s Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and wxPython.

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in Python, Visualization