labs experiments and ideas

What would the Leaning Tower of Pisa look like upright? Thankfully, using photo manipulation, some things can be fixed. Have fun adjusting the Pisa Tower to an angle of your choice.

Regular expressions have various applications for text manipulation in computer science: search, validation, and editing. Regex machine is an online application to facilitate the debugging of regular expressions by providing instant feedback on a user-provided test set

While software like Microsoft Word suffers from never ending feature creep, some interesting uses can result from single-purpose tools. Verbosify allows quick and easy access to the thesaurus for every word in a piece of text, allowing for quick re-editing of sentences and paragraphs

HTML5 allows for speech recognition right from a web browser. This is a little demo that takes advantage of this, allowing the user to choose a color using their voice

3D has recently become really popular in the movie industry -- the internet is lagging behind in this respect. This is an experiment to see how isometric 3D can be achieved using only the viewer's head position and how 3D transformations can be applied to web pages

Ever since I was young, I have been collecting soda cans from around the world. It's fascinating what a variety exists even in one supermarket. This is an interactive wall of a part of my collection, allowing viewers to explore the visual diversity of can designers

HTML5 exposes a lot of interesting new tools for web designers, especially with regard to moving storage from servers to clients. This is a tool that facilitates the creation and debugging of websites taking advantage of HTML5 localStorage

One's geographic indication contains a lot of information about the things of interest. Conceived as a sketch for a mobile application, this is a tool that allows you to find wikipedia articles that are relevant to a particular location.

Fish are fascinating because they think together — based on very simple rules and poor sensory organs, they are able to form a school which allows them to survive in a dangerous aquatic environment. This is an exploration of a distributed algorithm for organizing fish

The periodic table's most commonly known design was made in 1869 by Dmitri Mendeleev. This is my take on it, with some HTML5 flair and a quiz to test your knowledge

Borrowing a concept from Jim Borgman's How do you feel today poster, this sketch explores how people are currently feeling on twitter

One of the greatest things about college is the ability to eat in a dining hall, often more a social experience than a culinary one. This tool brings easier access to the menus at Harvard, letting you make that crucial decision whether to go downstairs or to just content with Ramen

QR codes pose an interesting way to convey digital information through a visual medium. realtimeQR is a port of the QR encoder to javascript, allowing realtime generation of QR codes

Wikipedia is a tremendous resource -- unfortunately it has lagged behind in some aspects, such as UI design. This is an attempt to remedy that, enabling rapid preview of images from an article.

Langton's Ant is a cellular automaton that, although seemingly random, displays some interesting emergent behavior. This is a simulation of this rule.

When developing a webpage or website, it's useful to see many prototypes before commiting to a design. This Chrome Extension allows users to manipulate webpages through the browser, by dragging and dropping

As part of the research about peer to peer cloud computation undertaken by Mike Gagnon and I, we developed a simulator which enabled us to see what was going on with particular algorithms and workloads. This is a visualization of one run of the simulator.

Nature has many very complicated patterns that emerge from simple rules being applied over and over. This demo allows you to explore tree and root shapes by altering a few parameter

The goal of the majority of user interface design is to make working with a computer easier. This is a sketch to demonstate a way to make it harder

Jennifer Egan won a Pulitzer prize for A Visit From The Goon Squad – it’s a complex book full of links between characters, between different spaces and times. This is a visualization of the ‘social network’ in the book, as it develops through the pages.

This is a small processing.js sketch that uses circles to draw lines

Metabolics is the study of how cells are able to produce and utilize a wide variety of chemical compounds from a limited range of starting materials. This is an exploratory tool that allows one to explore how particular compounds can be transformed into others in the linked metabolic network

A fat, blocky font I developed in support of encoding QR codes using text. Each letter takes up most of a square with black

In many older train stations and airports, information would be displayed on large boards where letters would flip through the alphabet to the correct location. This project brings that to the internet

The computer mouse was truly an innovation in user interface technology -- but other improvements can lead to faster and more accurate performance. This is an exploration of the bubble cursor which may increase selection speed.