Cory Hughart

In the fall of 2012, I emailed the proprietor of venuspatrol.com (and IGF Chairman), Brandon Boyer. Venus Patrol had recently been successfully kickstarted in 2011, and the site had just gone live.

In my email, I congratulated Mr. Boyer and asked if there were any plans for equipping the site with mobile responsiveness (as in, the ability to shrink down to fit comfortably on smaller screens), and I offered my services. To my surprise, he said "Have at it!", and I had the priveledge of adapting the excellent design of Cory Schmitz.

I developed a mobile-first responsive CSS+JavaScript (JS for certain iframes and image maps) solution based on their initial CSS that is currently live and visible if you scale down your browser window or visit using a mobile device.

To be clear, if it isn't obvious above, I did not contribute any graphic design to Venus Patrol; I merely (but not trivially!) redid the CSS and added some JavaScript and tiny bits of HTML where necessary.

MIRROR: The Game that Plays You was my BFA thesis project from 2010 at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

The screen at the beginning of the video is displayed at all times until someone sits down in front of the monitor and their face is recognized. They are instantly hurtled into a strange world with an avatar that reacts intuitively to their input. Their only directive is to escape... until they are told that the only way to escape is to get up and leave!

My thesis paper can be found here, free to read and download. You can even purchase a hard-bound copy if you feel inclined.

MIRROR was designed for an art gallery setting and so is not easy to distribute. I have plans to revisit and build upon what is rightfully a prototype here, hopefully figuring out how to make it available to anyone with a computer and 2 mice. The haptic feedback will be missing, though... until haptics are standard in computer mice.

The music in this trailer was made with Beep Box by John Nesky at http://beepbox.co

MIRROR was made with Processing and the Arduino.

These open-source libraries were used to make MIRROR:

• JBox2D
• OpenCV
• proCONTROLL
• Arduino & Firmata
• Minim
• FullScreen API

Special thanks to Daniel Shiffman for his PBox2D helper library for JBox2D in Processing.

(MIRROR has gone open source!)

ChromaWaves was a student project that started in the fall of 2009 and was published to the App Store in the summer of 2010. It's an ambient color mixing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Essentially, you defend a water droplet in the center by firing colored bullets at similarly-colored enemies.

I was part of a team of 13 people that came together for a game design seminar jointly offered by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art. The goal of this semester-long class is to bring artists and coders together to make a game that both functions and looks good. It was this project that helped me validate my desire to be both an artist and a programmer.

I worked on a variety of things for ChromaWaves. I provided most of the visual effects animations, including the bullet, splash, and wave, as well as the iGameTeam logo and splash screen. I also built a simple program that automated the task of making sprite sheets from a folder of sprite frames.

Visit the official ChromaWaves website for more details about the game, and see this write up by fellow artist Andrew Kuhar on Bitmob, who also produced a series of podcasts about the development process and what we learned, accessible at the Escape Route blog.

During the summer of 2009, Jacklyn Watson and I were commissioned by Dr. John Fredieu of the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine to develop an interactive learning tool for Human Embryology students. We worked with him and a graduate student, Tanya Nikiforova, to develop an application that helped students visualize certain processes that occur during embryo development, especially deformations of the face and palate.

The application, made with Flash, features an animated 3D model of a developing embryo from 5 to 8 weeks. The 3D model is rotatable and colored labels can be applied in order to follow the migration and growth of certain areas of interest.

The project was funded through the Scholars Collaboration in Teaching and Learning Fellowship at the CWRU School of Medicine. It was published on the peer-reviewed MedEdPortal.org, a program of the Association of American Medical Colleges, on January 26, 2011.

My contributions on this project were mainly programming, but I also helped with 3D modelling/animations and the user interface. Considering the limitations of 3D in Flash (at the time, at least) I had to come up with a way for the user to view this 3D animated model at many different angles. I developed a system for packaging an animation from multiple angles into a single video and displaying the appropriate segment according to the angle the user sets.