Implicit Surface Design Studio
Summer 2024
I've got a new coding project brewing! My joint interest in math (esp. geometry), design, and computer graphics have led me down many wikipedia rabbitholes related to implicit field-driven representations of solid volumes. Via signed distance functions, it's possible to represent nearly any surface, even of infinite complexity, using closed-form functional expressions - a solution that solves many of the issues with polygonal surface representations, but introduces a host of new and exciting mathematical challenges. I'm interested in the engineering & aesthethic implications of this area, and so I've started work on Imp 3D (short for 'implicit'), an online design space for exploring implicit surfaces. Hopefully, more documentation and examples to come soon!
RaysDog The Robot
March 2023
During a quiet moment of my makerspace TA office hours, an idea struck for a new project. I started tinkering with a Raspberry Pi, a mobile phone charger, and some scrounged parts, and wound up creating a robot! The robot, known around Duke as "Ray's Dog", runs a python Flask server over campus wifi. It's equipped with a livestreaming camera, an LCD display for custom messages/ faces, and two bidirectional two motors. He likes hanging out on the BC plaza, couriering messages to friends and weaving through tables and chairs. Thanks to his web-based UI, anyone on a campus network can control him via raysdog.wireless.duke.edu (if school's in session and he isn't taking a nap, that is). Ray's Dog was invited to participate in Duke's Innovation Co-Lab Makerfair 2023 - he made a ton of new friends, and got some great recommendations for new features! Check out his GitHub repository!
I Won at HackMIT!
October 2022
HackMIT 2022 was a blast. I flew to Boston and almost immediately got to work brainstorming project ideas with my three-person team (myself, and two CMU computer science students). Our team connected over a shared love at the intersection of design and tech, and we landed on an idea to create an open-ended video game loosely inspired by Shel Silverstein's 'The Giving Tree' – we called our game Roots. The game's premise is simple: as a tree, decide whether to grow roots or branches as the forest environment around you symbiotically responds and adapts. To survive storms, your tree must have a strong root structure, yet growing branches is how you make a habitat for your fellow forest friends. I concentrated on designing and building our 3d assets in Blender, and my teammates architected the game mechanics in Unity. For our game's unique concept and visual style, as well as its themes of connectness and selflessness, our team was the sole winner of the Meta Metaverse Challenge, and each of us was awarded a pair of RayBans Stories. Roots Project Demo Page
Low-Cost Phototherapy Machine
Summer 2022
During DukeEngage Uganda, I lived and collaborated with Biomedical students at Makerere University, to create novel engineering solutions for local healthcare related challenges. The program prioritizes well-scoped, high-impact problems using techniques that are suited for a low-income environments. To become better-informed about community needs, my team traveled to hospitals throughout Kampala, conducting ethnographic research by interviewing healthcare workers and observing current systems in place. After witnessing jaundiced newborns in overcrowded lightboxes, my team designed and built a low-cost phototherapy machine. Our functioning prototype was presented to medical staff at local hospitals and was assembled with materials totaling approximately 20% the cost of comparable industry solutions. Its electronics include recycled medical-grade LEDs and a locally etched PCB board. We also designed the hardware to be manufactured and assembled by local tradesmen, including window, furniture, and coffin makers. Our project was presented at Ugandan Safe Motherhood Conference, Health Promotion Conference Uganda, and Uganda Pediatrician Conference 2022 Link to the full poster 📃
Realms - EdTech Startup
May 2022
I started an education technology company called Realms with two Duke MBA students, and incubated it under Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship. The goal of Realms is to make Zoom classrooms more engaging: the app collects live comprehension feedback from students and uses it to identify challenge areas and offer at-a-glance course feedback for professors. Continuing my project from HackDuke 2021, I led development on front and back-end systems for the app, including an interactive HTML interface and cloud-hosted database. Throughout the development process I learned how to set up a massively scalable NodeJS server on AWS, how to integrate database structures with MongoDB, and how to integrate the entire platform as an OAuth Zoom app. During development of a functioning prototype, Realms was pitched to several universities - including UNC, Duke, and NC State - drawing widespread interest and feedback. Realms About Page
Digital Sculpting Reimagined
December 2021
I've long been interested in computer graphics and digital sculpture. In ARTSVIS 198 - Experimental Interface Design, I had the chance to imagine a new way of experiencing sculpture through a digital lens. My project, dubbed 'Sculpture 2.0', envisioned a way to generate 3d objects using a combination of VR, hand-tracking, and AI. To create a demonstration of my concept, I drew mock-ups and created a side-by-side video of the product demo. Check out a demonstration of a sculpture timelapse as a 3D environmental overlay, and see this demo of the proposed hand-tracking sculpture features.
Underwater Seaweed Roomba
September 2021
For my first-year engineering design course, I spent eight months programming a dead-reckoning motion tracking algorithm for undersea rovers. Off the coast of Chile, seaweed farmers face danger by diving to cut and collect seaweed stalks. Creating a robot for this operation is challenged by the lack of visibility underwater. To solve this challenge, my team was tasked with developing a dead-reckoning orientation system informed by the motion of the ROV's wheels. I examined how sand drift, encoder imprecision, and sea currents affect the accuracy of localization, and my code is currently in use by coastal farms in Chile for tracking remotely operated seaweed harvesting robots. Check out a video of our prototype rover and tracking system here, and check out my GitHub repository.
Digital Art Restoration
July 2021
Early in the Fall 2020 semester, I joined a new virtual undergraduate research team, mentored by Dr. Ingrid Daubechies, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering. In a collaboration between the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) and Duke Math Department, our challenge was to develop algorithms and user interfaces in MATLAB to detect and repair cracks in digital photographs of 12th-century Jacopino frescos, and restore colors based on mathematical sampling. Over 11 months, I had two roles: first, I developed linear-algebra based algorithm for surface anomaly detection in digital photographs. The algorithm would "inpaint", or correct, the areas of the paintings that had been scratched or blemished. Secondly, I used my background in computer graphics to enable a virtual exhibit of paintings that feature gold leaf backings; the reflective, glinting nature of these artworks didn't come across in photographs, so I spearheaded an effort to render them in a way that would enable future VR exhibits that shift dynamically based on the user's perspective.
Making This Website
⭐ Ongoing ⭐
Updated July 2024: Part of the reason for making this site is to improve my web development skills. Ray.red was originally hosted on an AWS webserver with a Elastic Beanstalk instance, with a code pipeline that populated an S3 bucket with updates to my Github repo. Nowadays, I've realized that a dynamic site is totally overkill (until someday I decide to add a login page and microtransactions). The site is still written with a NodeJS backend, but within in a Vite environment which simplifies my development/build process. As for frontend, I populate the site with images & blog posts using EJS templates and Bootstrap for styling & components. The /docs folder of the repository is hosted statically using Github pages.
-CEWDnZqE.jpg)
-iWoXSxgv.png)
-DRwG7Lj2.png)
