This project coordinates the movement of the Photon Sprite, a virtual reality character that will be integrated into the UW Virtual Brain Project, a research project in the Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Photon Sprite's goal is to guide users, especially youth and children, through a virtual environment and call attention to important features in the environment.
Here it is in action (you will need to download it to view for now):
A state machine is a collection of code that coordinates an object by transitioning it through a series of states. In this case, the states correspond to different ways the sprite can move (e.g. flying towards a target or hovering above the user's hand). In , each color represents a different state.
I'm grateful for the mentorship from Simon Smith and Ross Tredinnick, and my collaboration with Kudirat Alimi, who developed the particle effects for the Photon Sprite. My summer research was made possible by the Women in Science and Engineering learning community at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Here were some of the tutorials I used to build this project:
- The State Design Pattern
- Infallible Code's tutorials on State Machines and Finite State Machines