One year ago, I began porting a couple classes from Toxiclibs over to JavaScript. Now with 90 classes ported and several more nearly completed, Toxiclibsjs is beginning to take shape.

As of today, Toxiclibsjs is being built to the AMD API. It can be used with RequireJS, Node.js or the common way of a single global object as before. Being available in this manner means that not only is Toxiclibsjs available for the same uses as before, but now it can be used on the server-side and with desktop-based javascript programming environments such as Plask.

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It’s been four months since I initially started creating Toxiclibs.js a JavaScript version of toxiclibs. So far, over 65 ‘classes’ have been written. These classes cover a wide spectrum of functionality that I believe can be helpful on any web project.

There are currently 18 examples on the site, most of which have focused on being direct ports of the examples from Toxiclibs. Of these examples 14 use Processing.js, 1 uses Three.js, 1 uses Raphael.js, 1 uses Canvas’ 2D API and the other Canvas’ WebGL API. There also is an example using Gee committed by jonobr1. In the future I will be expanding on examples that help clarify the libraries JavaScript nature and independence.

The last 4 examples on the site demonstrate the newest package for Toxiclibs.js, VerletPhysics2D. This package is a light-weight physics engine that is simple to work with and runs well, the Attraction 2D example performs smoothly with 250 particles. VerletPhysics2D includes a base particle class, behaviors, constraints and springs. Behaviors (such as Gravity or Attraction/Repulsion), constraints, and springs are easily applied to the physics world as a whole or to individual particles. You can compare its use with the java documentation for physics2d. I am very excited to have completed this portion of the library, I feel that it fits a void that isn’t currently filled by other physics engines in JavaScript, so please download it and give it a try! And check the site for the new examples.

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I have initiated a new open-source project titled Toxiclibs.js. Toxiclibs.js is a JavaScript port of Karsten Schmidt‘s expansive toxiclibs library.
Contributed libraries are an excellent perk of using Processing, and to me there is no library that stands as strong as Karsten’s. Toxiclibs encapsulates a lot of the complexity involved with common computational design problems and has a very large scope of what it can accomplish.

A great deal of my work involves using HTML5′s canvas tag for generative design; much of the time with the help of Processing.js. Repeatedly, I have spent the time of stripping out references to toxiclibs to make my code work with PJS. I worked-around porting the library for some time because it felt like too large of a project to do by myself. Last week as I was working on a WebGL visualization, I decided it was worth it to port the Vec3D class, and couldn’t stop there. I decided that this has to be done, I badly want these libraries and there have got to be many others thinking the same thing. I encourage anyone interested to contribute to the project.

I am hosting my source at gitHub, http://github.com/hapticdata/toxiclibsjs, and I have prepared an intial round of examples that you can view at http://haptic-data.com/toxiclibsjs.

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My project, Indexical Architecture, commissioned by Northern Lights Foundation as part of the Art(ists) on the Verge 2 Fellowship is currently installed as a part of Minneapolis’ annual Spark Festival on display through October 3rd.
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In 2007 I completed a fun project that I call “Social Murmurs.” I recently had arrived home from living in Brooklyn for the summer and was interested in some of the behaviors I noticed from people around me while sitting in public; such as waiting for subway trains. Some people seemed shy or concerned when someone else sat next to them, while other people seemed irritated and upset. Commonly, couples sat next to each other; while strangers would place an empty seat between them. I found these efforts to control their personal space interesting. I wanted to force their inner thoughts to the surface and make people consider their responses.

While in New York, I had my first opportunity to work with an Arduino Microcontroller, already familiar with Processing I was really interested in how I could use an Arduino and some basic electronics to enhance my projects. That summer my friends at The Studio for Interactive Media and at Interaction Lab at RockwellGroup helped answer a lot of questions and really inspire me.

When I returned back to Minneapolis to finish up another semester at MCAD I found that I had to scale back my ideas, due to time allowed for execution and having only myself to rely on. At that point, using multiple capacitance sensors attached to a bench were a little out of my range, so I went digging.

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Located in the beautiful warehouse district of Minneapolis, Colle + McVoy is an integrated advertising agency. Founded on traditional media over 70 years ago, Colle + McVoy was quick to add digital capabilities and has gained a lot of notoriety for its interactive work.

To express our capabilities and make our space speak to what we do, we enhanced our existing plastic logotype with a hidden projector and camera. Mapping our projections to the space, we created sequences of illumination for the lettering and created a play between virtual and physical objects that responds to the activity of people in the space.

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There is a lot of noise on Twitter; we figured that out fast as our servers filled up with gigabytes of data (just text) the first day, while monitoring only a handful of popular terms. A few months ago, I began discussing this concept with Jason Striegel, we knew there was a need, especially for brands, to make sense of what is happening on Twitter, see what people are saying and how much they are saying it.
Our research phase discovered tools that had some of the similar objectives as us and we were shocked by their short-comings. The most annoying trend was the inability to give real metrics. Sites like Twitscoop plot your term with a near-meaningless scale of 1 to 5 on their “BuzzMeter,” and I was surprised by the complete UX #fail Radian6 developed, and charges a premium for. Note: this is not to say that Radian6 does not have good qualities. Their application’s scope is larger than that of Squawq and offers a lot of valuable information regarding a brand’s reputation in social media. More below.

It only takes minutes with Jason, for a seedling to turn into a giant beanstalk; and Squawq was born. Well, I guess there was all of the pain-staking work in the middle that made it a reality, a lot of which I was spared. A lot of hard work was done by Zara Gonzalez, Andrew Wetzel, Grant Eull, Andrew Charon, Braden Stadlman, Aaron Clark and Julie Kaloides and so many others. Thanks to their hard work, Squawq provides a lot of answers.

Squawq does a lot (soon it will do even more). It stores information about your terms so you can view its activity over a custom date range (most tools won’t show you past 3 days), it extracts common keywords, #tags and @authors associated with your terms, finds your most vocal authors (the people talking about your brand), and provides you with links mentioned in their tweets and more.

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At Colle + McVoy a lot of us are avid bikers. I commute by bike most days, as do many others. There are also about 15 agency bikes that remain in our space, and we ride them around to different conference rooms. We are serious about cycling, some of us in competition, some just for fun and all of us for its benefits to our environment.

We were given the opportunity to create a quick project that we could show to other groups that share our interests. We created a mural, using rear-projection and top-mounted camera. The camera sends activity information into a Flash application that triggers animations. We decided to show the many styles of cycling and have some fun with it! I worked on this project with Grant Eull and Barrett Haroldson.

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So Advertising Week will be ending tomorrow and I hadn’t mentioned our project for it, Twaugmented Reality. Our creative team got together a few weeks ago and was briefed that we would be creating a print advertisement for Ad Week. We decided this was a good opportunity to test the waters of augmented reality and have some fun with it. So our team created an augmented-reality site using fiducial-tracking (the type with the paper square) and I was the lead developer.

Printing our mark in the event program brings the users one step closer to experiencing the site; since there would be no need for them to print out a mark. Since Ad Week took place in New York and we are in Minneapolis, we wanted to connect the two. Holding the mark right-side-up shows you a Minneapolis sky-line and tweets relating to @collemcvoy, rotating the mark upside-down shrinks the Minneapolis sky-line and reveals a New York sky-line with tweets relating to Advertising Week. It was a pretty fun project to develop, It gave us a chance to learn more about flash-based augmented reality’s many limitations and of course using Papervision3D is always fun. Truly a fun labs-worthy project.
The video below is of my friend Andrew Charon demonstrating the piece. Be sure to visit the site at http://www.collemcvoy.com/big.

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Although I knew it was coming, it was still a bit of a shock to see Ramon-Lawrence Coleman from Minneapolis on Project Runway tonight. I was introduced to his work about a year ago when my good friend and fellow MCAD alumni, Travis Hall, was working on his website. I stepped in and coded some major components to the site including the galleries. It lead to a couple really nice stand-alone components that I have used in a lot projects since. I actually hadn’t seen the site since completed until tonight. I am very impressed with Ramon’s portfolio, it will be exciting to see him in this competition.

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