This week has been absolutely awful. I don’t think I’ve ever been up until 8AM four days in a row. We mailed out our CS143 semantic analyzer on Tuesday – working perfectly but sans secret characters or the victimize keyword. My CS223B project is a disaster – pre-competition results put us in dead last. I did come up with a fiendishly clever hack last night, which I will brag about later if it works. Doougle is trying to get me to go to San Francisco this evening, but I think I might just sleep for 16 hours.
Our prototype “Tangible Bits” project for CS247 is working. There’s not really anything “tangible” about it, though. It’s the world’s first computer yelling interface (a claim that I am sure will be disputed by various HCI tools). Lots of people interact with their computers via yelling, so we thought it would be cool if yelling at your computer actually made it do something (like overclock itself so that it finishes whatever it is doing faster).
The premise of my game is that you have to help Tom after a disaster. Tom’s kind of an idiot and is prone to doing stupid things that get him killed. When Tom starts to do something dumb, everyone is supposed to shout at him. If enough people do so, then he will reconsider his action and try something else. Whoever is on the other side of my wall must be really tired of hearing “No! GODDAMN IT TOM!” in the wee hours of the morning.
What should have been the most difficult part of this project – grabbing microphone input in realtime – turned out to be relatively easy thanks to FMOD. The thing that should have been easy, playing video, absolutely refused to work well and ate my night.
The project is done in C#. I’ll post the source to my code page when it’s done.
