I am a programmer with over ten years of experience creating software, firmware and graphics for projects in many different media including web apps, video installations and live performances.
I'm actively developing a VR astronomy experience called Up There, which allows users to explore a room-sized simulation of the Hipparcos catalog containing over 100k nearby stars. Each and every star is interactive, and reaching out and grabbing one will show data about its composition, what radio signals it might be receiving from Earth, and what exoplanets are suspected to be orbiting. Users can also filter the stars as a whole, isolating just the nearest, or hottest, or biggest stars at a time for easier exploration.
I am also working with the latest data releases coming from the ESA's Gaia satellite, which aims to vastly improve upon the volume and accuracy of the Hipparcos satellite active in the early 1990s. I developed a 3D visualization of about two million stars for the web and webVR called Gaia 3D. I also published an article called Torrenting The Galaxy with details about how I processed the data.
Our Galactic Neighborhood is the first project I published using the HYG database of star coordinates and velocity data. It visualizes 100,000 stars as they appear in 3D around the Earth, and you can swipe through time using a slider to see how the stars and constellations will look 50,000 years from now in either direction.
At Barbarian, I created performant websites and interactive work for global brands. Below are a few selected projects.
For a few years I worked as an independent contractor on web projects for Panoptic Communications, The Barbarian Group, CIDC, comedian Eugene Mirman and others. I also worked as a contractor installing network and video cable and building server racks for several editing studios in New York City.
After graduating from Temple University, I worked in a small web production shop in Philadelphia on projects for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, AIA Philadelphia and several other local design and architecture firms.
I earned my bachelor's degree in Film and Media Arts from Temple University in Philadelphia. During my time there, I focused on interactive media, installation work and performance. I worked with Professor Sarah Drury on eVokability, a performance piece made in collaboration with disabled artists that employed costumes with embedded sensors that measured performers' movements to drive live projections and sound. We later collaborated again on Violet Fire, a multimedia opera about Nikola Tesla, which played at the national theater in Belgrade and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
At Palmer & Dodge I performed hardware maintenance, network administration and server building over the summer for several years in high school. I learned a lot in a short time, and worked my way up from clearing printer jams to building custom linux servers over a few years while earning enough money to buy a used Saab 900 and a motorcycle.