Monthly Archives: February 2012

Ultimate Chocolate Cake Application [HCI]

As part of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) module at university. I was required to develop and implement a digital learning application for a specific target audience (ages 10-14) to obtain information and hopefully learn from their experience by using the tool. The particular assignment I was given required me to digitise the BBC GoodFood Ultimate Chocolate Cake recipe. We where told that we could develop the assignment in whichever coding environment that we wanted. Known for its worldwide accessibility and in order to expand my application knowledge, I chose to learn and develop using Adobe Flash CS6 along with Actionscript 3.0.

Ultimate Chocolate Cake App

Ultimate Chocolate Cake App

Ultimate Chocolate Cake application features

  • Introductory screen providing a brief overview of the application and the information required to carry out the cake baking process.
  • Subtle 2D kitchen design chosen with a 3D depth of field ‘feel’.
  • Images/objects within the kitchen environment where custom created so custom created using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks to provide a consistent design throughout (without clashing images from different sources).
  • A clip art styling was chosen with solid black outlining to represent an objects shape, and colour filled respectively.
  • Text names applied to objects with comparable appearance e.g. plain flour, self raising flour.
  • Four colour coded shelves with items methodically placed in the order they are required.
  • Click, drag and drop functionality implementation to enhance interaction.
  • Optional help feature – provides written instruction and neon glow around the required items if the user requires assistance.
  • Scene updates as the user successfully completes a task and removes unrequired items.
  • Multiple application error prevention techniques applied to stop the user making mistakes.
  • Animations implemented throughout the system to provide a more feature rich visual application, to retain the user’s attention and to keep them visually involved.
  • Optional back feature allows the user to return to the previous step opposed to having to manually restart the application.
  • Full screen manipulation – specific tasks enlarge to the centre of the screen and fade the background.

You can test the full screen version of the application here or test the minimised version below.

Call of Duty: MW3 Video Game Guide

A requirement for the ‘Multimedia Portfolio’ optional module during my final year at university was to create a new piece of work or begin a new project and then present it on a purpose built portfolio alongside two other pieces of work.

The multimedia portfolio that I developed can be located here.

To represent my new piece of work, I decided to make a WordPress based blog  containing video guides and game play walkthroughs for ‘Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 3’ (CoD:MW3), which was conveniently released when the project requirements were listed.

  • Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 3, released 8th November 2011.
  • Fraps video recording software purchased to capture high resolution, uncompressed, lossless game footage.
  • CoD:MW3 ‘campaign mode’ mode was played through on Veteran difficulty to suit a larger target audience.
  • Game played on the highest most difficult setting to enable viewers the worst case scenario solution.
  • Additional ‘special ops mode’ and ‘hidden Intel location’ videos where recorded to help players with all game elements.
  • Over 600GB of raw video footage was recorded.
  • Adobe After Effects CS5.5 was used throughout the editing process; unrequired game footage was stripped from the videos, personal watermarks with university student numbers were implemented to protect video integrity.
  • Videos encoded and rendered to 720p resolution with QuickTime .MOV codec and .x264 compression to reduce file size, but maintain visual quality.
  • YouTube account setup with university login user id (see links).
  • Videos uploaded to YouTube, playlists created, annotated and public ‘visibility’ applied.
  • WordPress website created, videos embedded into blog post format and tagged/categorised accordingly.
Adobe After Effects Project

Adobe After Effects Project

The videos have unintentionally proven to be incredibly popular with the YouTube community, gaining over 20,000 views in just under 2 months from the original upload date.

Viewers have openly shared comments on the videos, which has made the effort which was put into this large project worthwhile.

Links:
Modern Warfare 3 WordPress Website
N0226460 Youtube Channel
Youtube Playlist 1
Youtube Playlist 2
Youtube Playlist 3
Multimedia Portfolio [Now archived/out of date]

UPDATE – January 2013
54 YouTube subscribers
95,000 video views.