AirPage

A visual IDE for manipulating dynamic program ASTs (which generate programs). Using Flow-Based Programming (FBP) visually, we built an entire workspace and IDE that itself is composed of the flow graph that it represents, allowing users to manipulate programs visually. This technical deep dive shows how ASTs can be manipulated under the hood.

Related Software

L-System City

Dan incorporated his interest in structural engineering and architectural visualization into his procedural city builder asset that he created while working for Side Effects Software. On their behalf, Dan taught a seminar involving CG Architecture at ACM SIGGRAPH's 34th annual computer graphics conference. Dan's algorithmic method for the generation of procedural urban environments was demonstrated to Pixar Animation Studios.

proceduralarchitecturevisualization

3DAet

A visual editor CMS that Dan Lynch taught himself MySQL and PHP to build in 2006. The name "3DAet" comes from Dan simultaneously teaching at the Academy of Entertainment Technology (AET) while working at Side Effects Software (SESI). Originally asked by his manager Aliza to fix some "help files" at SESI, Dan realized the HTML and CSS could be managed procedurally. Inspired by his work with Flow-Based Programming at SESI, he built a custom CMS to search and manage his 3D artwork, which evolved into a full visual website editor that served the Houdini community for about a decade.

Coolir

A cross-platform publishing idea that Dan applied to Y Combinator for in 2011. This project came just before he started famo.us in 2012.

publishingcross-platform

RoombaWriter

UC Berkeley EECS 149: Embedded Systems final project. The project's goal is to build a plotting robot. Along the way, we discovered through simulation that generating the path that a robot must traverse for a given drawing is not obvious. Many interesting geometric and algorithmic problems have been solved, and have been applied to this project. To abstract these algorithms, we have built a paired system connected through a bluetooth network that provides a graphical user interface. This interface allows users to simply draw line segments on the screen as in any conventional drawing program, and then sends a series of commands as a byte stream to the robot. The robot parses these commands until an end of transmission character is received, and then begins plotting. The mechanism for plotting involves a linear actuator that raises a metal hinge attached to a piece of chalk or a pen, which allows full control for where lines are needed.

roboticsembedded systemsvisualization

Graphics Exploration and Creation Engine

A consolidated system that enables people to (re-)design interactive graphics in a collaborative, creative workspace. This system is novel compared to previous systems because users can explore and author graphical content with the ability to re-use and re-design projects created by other users, hence, encouraging an example-centric model for authorship. The question is whether or not this system catalyzes the design process, which is two fold: does the system help people create content that they would previously not have, or, does it help them create content faster than they would have previously? To test the system a number of studies were done ranging from in-person studies on UC Berkeley campus to deployment on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Users were directed to a website with a series of specific tasks that walked them through the user interface and taught basic concepts for authoring content. After initial tutorials, users were asked to take what they learned to create projects based on a list of requirements. User studies showed that this system is not only usable, but also its collaborative model is definitely successful and encourages creativity. For robustness, the platform is composed of four parts: the database, the servers, the tracker, and the client. Using the MySQL C API, a MySQL interface integrates with the server. The server handles the MySQL database connections, TCP/IP socket connections, and contains all cached files. The server communicates directly with the client. The server is started by the tracker, and maintains a connection so that a new server is spawned when a server goes down. The tracker's job is also to connect clients with a random server from the set of servers so that on average the load is evenly distributed.

Graphicscollaborativecrowdsourcing