Some of this is copy and pasted from the email I sent last spring, but anyway, here’s my two project ideas:

• Expanding on the research that I have been doing with Forrest, I hope to make a 3D rhythm game that just uses two Raspberry Pi infrared (NoIR) cameras as well as one infrared sensor on the tip of a wand for the cameras to detect. The basic gameplay is that at certain points in the music, the game will indicate where the wand needs to be placed in 3D space and calculate score based on the distance between the intended position and the actual position of the wand. If I have to compare this to any other rhythm game out there, it would be osu!, since the wand would effectively be treated as a mouse cursor for the game to interact with, and the gameplay would look similar, but without the mouse clicking.In terms of development, I may start with one camera and a 2D game for ease of programming and a simpler user interface, and then transition to 3D afterwards using algorithms already discussed with Forrest and Jim Rogers to get coordinates in 3D space using the two cameras. If all of this goes well, I may add a second sensor and a second wand, so that either one person can control both wands for added difficulty, or two people can control one wand each for competitive or cooperative play. My goal for this is to make a game that is relatively cheap on hardware compared to the hardware of most other rhythm games out there, and potentially teach players the gestural motions of a conductor or any other possible motions. For now, the player won’t be in direct control the music, but that may be a feature that can be implemented farther into the future, as part of the game or in a separate DAW application such as Ableton Live.

• I would like to learn more about data compression and the algorithms that go into it, especially in the context of compressing media files such as music, images, and video, and the difference in algorithms when using lossy or lossless compression. If there is an algorithm that can perform better (in terms of either running time or resulting file size) than what existing file formats currently provide, I can write a program that can compress files using said algorithm (either into a new file format or to improve an existing algorithm) using the new algorithm(s). If the compression is lossless, I can also decompress the compressed files back to their original state as well.