Hatch date: TBA

       KeyTar aim to be an interactive education activity for preschool students to explore the connection between sound and frequency of vibrations. This project is intended to be a part of the Interactive Light Studio (ILS) project which explores different methods to allow hearing impaired students to experience sound.Since the major audience for this project is preschool students, the design of the display should be as clean as possible so it would not distract the students from the actual lesson objective.

       Activities that contain visual aids have shown to be very effective to teach young students about the subject in concern. For students who are hearing impaired visual cues are essential to their understanding of the world around them.

       In order to create a complete picture of "sound" for the students. It is essential to convey the fundamental concept of "what makes sound", which, in simple terms, is produced by the vibration of particles.

       Sound has many more interesting phenonmenon such as frequency and loudness. The task of this project is to make connection between the frequency (pitch) of sound to how each particle moves and to the colors that respond to the relative wavelength (longer or shorter with respect to each other).

       For example a red color will correspond to a longer wavelength and thus a sound that has a lower pitch. Vice versa, a blue color will correspond to a shorter wavelength and a sound that has higher pitch.

       To create the visual of moving particles and hence a moving wave, p5.js will be used as it provides useful libary to incorportate math models (sine & consine functions) with visual displays.

       Finally, to put all the components together and to add in an interactive component to the project, a keyboard-like component will be incorporated as an event trigger. The keys will correspond to the wavelength of the color spectrum (ROYGBIV), which will then be mapped to a tone based on their individual frequency. As the user click/touch one of the keys, the corresponding tone will play along with a display of a moving wave. The tone will be generated using tone.js.

       The current input of relies on clicking or keyboard characters. As the project should be interactive for preschool students, it would be ideal if the project can take input from motion sensors such as xBox kinect and other consumer products alike.

Hatch date: TBA

       The idea of creating a simple interactive model of our solar system, in which every major planet and the sun will be shaped like an egg, arise when I was working on the Egg Earth project using webGL as the medium for 3D graphic displays.

      The viewer (you) will be the main view camera, where you have the freedom to rotate and relocate yourself in any position at any angle to observe the egg solar system. The viewer should also be able to zoom-in or zoom-out. The above tasks should can be accomplished by changing the prespective parameters of the camera.

       The goal of the project is to immitate the general behavior of planetary motion. Thus the each planet, the moon and the sun will be rotating and revolving.

       The material look of each object will be achieved by texture mappings. For example, the raw texture map I used for Egg Earth was the following:

       Unlike the Egg Earth project, where there is a gaming aspect to it, this project only aims to create a semi-realistic model where the user can play around with the viewing angle and position. I intend to use this project to further explore and practice webGL.