Bachelor's Thesis and internship in University of California, San Diego

This was my last year in the double degree program I have been doing for five years (Computer Science and Audiovisual Systems Engineering) in Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona and I had to do the end of degree project for both of them. Last summer I started looking for research groups abroad that would accept me in doing a long stay and work in one of their projects. One of the groups that accepted me was CREL (Center for Research in Entertainment and Learning), a group within the Calit2 division in University of California, San Diego. The director of this group, professor Shlomo Dubnov, proposed me the idea of creating an interactive tool for generating graphics in real-time of use in dance performances and I thought this was a perfect project to include topics meaningful for both degrees. I have been working on this project during the last entire academic year of 2014-2015 and it has been definitely one of the best experiences of my life. It was the first time I was living by myself and La Jolla is such an incredibly beautiful place, as well as UCSD.

Next there is a video summarizing some of the demos we conducted to test the software I did:

Stacky Project

Stacky is an interactive game I devised and developed for the final project of the 'Interactive Systems' class I did with professor Narcís Parés. This was done using the openFrameworks toolkit and the ofxKinectCommonBridge and ofxBox2D addons. The game's concept is actually pretty simple: You are a “stacker” that has to stack a pile of boxes in your hands, one pile on each hand. These boxes are falling from the top of the screen and the idea is to stack them and make the piles as higher as possible.

Audiovisual works

This quarter I took a subject called "Audiovisual Production Laboratory" that was about the study of all the processes involved in the creation of audiovisual works. We had to deliver different assignments but there were two I decided to upload in Youtube. Both works were shot using the P2 HD Panasonic Camera AG-HPX171 and we used Final Cut for the post production.

In one of these assignments we had to do an adaptation of an existing movie script, for which we chose to do a scene from 'Inglorious Basterds' by Quentin Tarantino (spanish version). We assigned the different roles between the people in my group and I got to do the lead role actor, Hans Landa. I enjoyed doing my acting role but I don't agree with what the script made me say! I was also involved very much in the postproduction part since I already had experience on this. 

Graphics Pipeline

Hello again! Last week I had to deliver the second lab of the graphics subject I mentioned in the last post and as I already said, this lab was about creating a two-dimensional image from a three-dimensional coordinates space of an object (graphics pipeline). 

We had to program this from scratch in C++ and these are the stages we had to follow:

Seam Carving algorithm for Content-Aware Image Resizing

This semester I'm doing a subject in 3D graphics at the university and so far it's been very interesting! The contents of the course are based on the '3D computer graphics' book from Alan Watt and the professor, Marcelo Bertalmio, is really experienced on the field.

Last week as practical work we had to implement the Seam Carving algorithm for Content-Aware Image resizing using C++, from scratch. They gave us a month for the deadline to deliver our code and the report, but we couldn't get to work until the last day due to other assignments.

Original Image with vertical seams drawn (500 x 500 pixels)

Demo Reel

I finally decided to make a demo reel of some of the 3D modeling works I have done so far. Although I don't have many... this is the result!