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:
Since I already had experience with openFrameworks I decided to use this toolkit to develop the tool, that I named CREA (which means 'create' in spanish and catalan). OpenFrameworks and the open source community have been essential to fulfill this project and because of that, I decided to upload the whole project in GitHub under an open source license: https://github.com/fabiaserra/crea
In the repository there is also a pdf file containing the full report of the project (Design and implementation of an interactive graphics system), where I give all the details on how I developed the tool and describe the algorithms behind it.
I also made a screencast explaining how to use the user interface of the tool:
Last week I presented the project to my university and since then I am a graduate student in Computer Science and Audiovisual Systems Engineering!