Programming

Since 2015, I’ve worked on a variety of research projects that I’d retrospectively say were all related to the future of augmented reality, and particularly head mounted displays for augmented reality. I’ve recently started shifting my research focus to a new area, so I figured this would be a good time to post a retrospective of what I’ve done and what I feel I’ve learned over these last 3 years.

I’ve recently been spending a lot of my time working on projects based on the G3D Innovation Engine by Morgan McGuire. I personally learned how to program using unix development tools, so I’m used to using the command line for everything, and Makefiles are the build tool I’m most comfortable with. G3D, being a research game engine, primarily for graphics research, has had to focus on Windows-based development for a number of years now.

In the past few weeks, I decided to spend some of my spare time trying out some new methods for game development. In particular, I thought it would be good to come up with something that would allow me to easily create a networked game for multiple players, and would give me a chance to learn something new. I decided to look into javascript frameworks, and there were a wide variety out there.

I’ve often wanted to be able to make animated gifs of things. I have also been interested in simple programmatic video editing from time to time, particularly for animating a series of still frames from images rendered by my graphics architecture simulations. Today on reddit, I came across this blog post that describes a sequence of ways to use the MoviePy library to generate animated gifs. It looks like exactly the kind of solution I want since I like to use python whenever possible for simple things.

Today I came across a blog post from a developer who describes a project he worked on that failed spectacularly. This project was a web database query to sort real estate brokers for an insurance company. If you want to see the results of the project in the way the original author intended, then you should visit the link above. It turns out that the insurance company provides the contact info of real estate brokers solely to collect a referral fee for that service.