This is a selection of the things I have accomplished in my four years of working in the MDC. I also give tutorials on software (such as Photoshop and Flash), help professors with anything related to technology, including converting old records to CD, editing movies, scanning slides, personal websites and software walkthroughs. I have worked on setting the Digital Asset Management standards on campus and instructing departments on how to follow (or in some cases, break) those standards. I am also working on a Residential Hall tour and designing the layout for the ContentDM image database, which will be used campus-wide.
St. Olaf Virtual Tour
I started working in the MDC the summer before college. With my co-worker, Anton, we cread a virtual tour of St. Olaf. Anton had created a very simple tour, but we thought it could grow into something big. With our creative energies and our teamwork, the tour did become big. At the time, it was one of the best tours in the country. Anton had experience shooting 720-degree QTVRs (like being in a big sphere), so he taught me how to do that. I mainly worked on the flash map and website content while Anton shot most of the QTVRs, though we helped each other out a lot. We spent a lot of time experimenting with Flash and ActionScript because neither of us had much experience doing Flash programming. We created several mockups and everything fell into place. We created a very simple version of the map, and once this was created, we knew we had enough experience to create the final map.
While Anton and I did most of the work, we had several people helping us and testing the website. Also, others contributed to the write-ups of the buildings.
We are currently working on a tour of the Residential Halls, which will have interactive floor plans and QTVRs of rooms for each hall. While I was abroad, a team of students made a virtual tour of campus using SketchUp for Google's Build Your Campus in 3D challenge. While we did not win, we are currently looking at ways we can revamp the current tour to incorporate these 3D models.
Visit the virtual tour »
Liberal Arts in Times of War
These are a few examples from a series of posters for the 2007-2008 college theme: Liberal Arts in Times of War. More events were continuously being added, so the first poster has too much text.
Logos
The first image is the logo for the OleCard — the ID card on campus. I copied a lion I found on an old St. Olaf Pause glass, but I ended up recreating it so the image didn't look curved from the glass. I had to completely recreate the hand to make it look like the lion was holding the OleCard.
The second image is the logo I designed for IIT (of which the MDC is a division). The third is a logo for a national chess tournament at St. Olaf. I took pictures of the pieces, masked them in Photoshop and made a virtual chessboard with reflections. I could have done a better job with the perspective, but I like how it distorts perceptions.
NITLE IDEAS Database
Professor Kucera started an Asian image database at St. Olaf called "Asian Takeout." This project expanded into making the IDEAS database for NITLE, the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. I did much of the design work for this database as well as figured out the inner-workings of ContentDM.
Anaglyphs
I spent quite a bit of time sophomore year making and researching anaglyphs along with Anton. The first image is our test image, where we have many objects at different depths. With this, we can control the pop-out effect of the images based on the the displacement of the left and right image. Right now the image is set to have the maximum pop-out effect.
The second image is something I created for the "Perceptions in Digital Reality" event (Anton did the spherical work for this image). This event showcased the three-dimensional projection room on campus and demonstrations created by students in Professor Hall-Holt's class. Doing this work with Professor Hall-Holt led me to do stereo vision research with him.
