Sam Brenner Portfolio

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• Be the Monster

  Be the Monster lets children bring their drawings to life. After drawing a monster on a sheet of paper, the image is captured and a participant can control it with his or her own body.

  I built this using Microsoft's Kinect for Windows SDK. The image detection uses the GRATF library with additional image manipulation help from Atalasoft's DotImage SDK.

  

• Federal Stimulus Breakdown

  To show where money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (better known as the stimulus package) went, I created this print that shows the distribution of funds in the form of a Sankey diagram.

  For the print, I wrote a program in Processing that consumes an XML file and generates proportionately-sized branches based on how the funding broke down. The source code is available for download here.

  

• Cosby Sweater Music Generator

  Odd looking sweaters making odd sounding music. Using a few LEDs and a photoresistor, I created a color sensor which, when pointed at a colorful sweater, would change the pitch of a note based on the hue of the clothing. The color sensor, an effects pedal and a speaker were all built into a poncho and worn over Cosby's finest.

  

• Reporter Cover

  A cover I designed for the special crowdsourcing issue of Reporter, RIT's school magazine. My cover was ninth in a series of 27, in which designers would pass off their files to the next to be reworked and reinterpreted. Read the full explanation here.

  

• Cats, Guns, Teens

  Using issues of Cat Fancy, Teen Vogue and a rotating cast of hunting magazines, I make collages that explore the dynamic relationship between fashion, violence and kitty cats. The collection is available on Tumblr.

  

Online

• TwitShit

  Frustrated with the frequent and odiferous leavings of my roommate's cat, I rigged up a litterbox to tweet every time the cat used it to relieve himself. What I saw as a breakthrough in passive aggression was viewed mostly as a novelty, and my nostrils continued to suffer. Though the project is no longer active, the archive of his regularity is available on Twitter.

  I built this using a flex sensor attached to an Arduino (attached to a litterbox). The Tweeting was handled by JTwitter in Processing.

  

• OPEN Forum

  For my largest scale project to date, I worked with a team to rebuild American Express's small business portal. In addition to building portions of the site from scratch in .NET 4, I was also responsible for reskinning the site's older, .NET 3-based sections. View the site here.

  

• SuperMolder

  The Old Navy SuperMolder was one part of the three-stage search for Old Navy's newest SuperModelquin. In this stage of the competition, users were asked to build themselves as a SuperModelquin, giving them the choice of over 2,000 facial features and clothing options. I was a Flash developer on this project. The site is no longer live.

  

• Sign and Race with Tony Stewart

  Burger King let fans of Tony Stewart, the NASCAR driver, place their signatures on his hood for the July 3rd race at Daytona. All submitted signatures were arranged to form a giant Burger King logo and made searchable via the site before the whole decal was printed out and applied to Tony's hood. I was a Flash developer for this project. The site is no longer live.

  

• The Booty Reader

  The Booty Reader asks users to take pictures of their posterior (clothed, of course) and analyzes the image to determine which pair of Old Navy jeans will fit best. I was responsible for writing the booty analysis code, which looped through the pixels of the submitted images looking for patterns that suggest certain booty types. The site won a silver 2010 Young Gun award in the Digital Campaign and Fashion categories. The site is no longer live.

  

• Energy Independence Calculator

  A project from my senior year at RIT, the Energy Independence Calculator tells you your potential monthly savings by switching to wind and solar power. Users can drag and drop various sizes of solar panels and wind generators on to their house. Then, based on location, the site analyzes your area's average windspeed, amount of sunlight and cost of energy before outputting your savings. Unfortunately, due to changes in the Yahoo weather API, I had to take the site down for now.

  

Experiments

• Tag Team

  Tag Team is a collaborative storymaking tool that I built to learn NodeJS. It pairs users who want to draw with users who want to write, and lets them craft their story in real time. It is a work in progress, but you can see it here.

  

• Spirograph

  I thought it would be fun to try and recreate a Spirograph in Processing. As it turns out these shapes have a name - hypotrochoids - and a formula, which I found on Wolfram Mathworld. The code is available on GitHub.

  

• Penrose Triangles

  The Penrose Triangle is an impossible object in the real world, but fortunately not in Processing. In lieu of trying to figure out an algorithm, I just figured out where every point would be based on your mouse's position (which determines the size of the triangle and the thickness of the beams), which resulted in some less-than-concise code. You can get the source here.

  

About Me