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Hendrik

I'm a CS PhD student in Data Science and Digital Humanities at the University of Bremen.

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Projects

Columbia

Columbia is a music composition aid for the iPad that focuses on harmony. The music composition aid is based on templates derived from an analysis of a set of pop songs regarding their chord progressions.

Columbia was developed for my Bachelor's thesis which yields feedback on advantages, disadvantages, usability problems and suggested improvements of a non-mimicking digital musical interface with an integrated music composition aid. The interface and the music composition aid were evaluated in a Thinking-aloud study with six users and analysed with a qualitative approach according to Mayring.

Technologies: Objective-C - Github.

Blind Tennis

In Blind Tennis the user can't see the ball, but only hear it. He or she has to use his or her ears and wits to find out where the ball is and where it is moving. The longer the user plays, the more of the field is hidden by a curtain.

Technologies: Objective-C, Cocos2D - After more than 116000 downloads in one year, I open-sourced Blind Tennis on Github.

WILD & TAME

WILD & TAME is a combination of a spherical robot with personality and a buttonless, formable controller. We observed that when users interact with technology, they have a tendency to attribute human features to non-human artifacts. People talk about how their computer had a bad day or how evil their printer is.

With WILD & TAME we tried to play with this attribution and design this interaction. The player has to explore the personality and mood of the spherical robot. He or she uses the controller to either calm or thrill the robot.

The inner life of the robot is expressed through surface animations on the robot, its behavior and its heart-rate (which can be sensed through vibrations in the controller).

This was part of the Bachelor's project SpiDEx at the University of Bremen. Our goal was to research the possibilities of tangibles in a gaming context. In collaboration with Julian Hespenheide, Felix Heibeck, Michele Krüger and Wiebke Roetman.

Technologies: Arduino, Processing.

REI1440Project

The REI1440Project is a photo-sharing site with a minute-by-minute timeline. The goal is to fill every minute with photos that represent outdoor activities.

I worked on this project as a Junior Interactive Developer for resn in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I was responsible for the file upload, the Facebook import, the Google Maps integration, the social sharing and the analytics tracking.

Technologies: HTML, Javascript, Backbone, Ruby on Rails

Visit the REI1440Project.

firecracker

firecracker is a Boston-based startup founded by Harvard medical students to help students and professionals prepare for their MCAT and USMLE medical exams. I designed and developed their mobile quiz interface.

I was responsible for the Javascript frontend as well as the Ruby on Rails backend. I implemented a sophisticated and fast AJAX caching model.

Technologies: HTML5, Javascript, Jasmine, Ruby On Rails, MongoDB.

Visit firecracker

Duck in a box

A browser game where the user plays a fire-breathing duck. A simple scrolling game that features rich animations. In collaboration with Sarina Walter.

Technologies: HTML5, Canvas, Cocos2d-HTML5.

Hades

Hades is a game based on space sound interaction. Players move freely in a certain space and use echolocation to find out where the other characters and places are.

The game is inspired by the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As Orpheus leads Eurydice from the Underworld back to the land of the living, he was instructed not to look at her. He feared Hades was tricking him so at the last second he looked for Eurydice and thus lost her.

In our game, the players are told by the ghost of Eurydice that there are souls that have been wrongly cast down into the Underworld as a part of Hades' plan to recruit more minions. The player has to lead these souls out of the Underworld. In order to be sure that they won't end like Orpheus, Eurydice will "blind" the players, making it so that they can only use sound to gather the innocent souls and lead them to the exit of the underworld.

The interface for players is based on motion detection which we implemented using a Microsoft Kinect. In our research we also tried to implement the game with four webcams and OpenCV blob detection. This worked to some extend, but it is harder to set up, the space is more limited and it is more likely to lose track. In collaboration with Peter Molinaro and Kathy Yuen.

Technologies: Processing, Kinect, OpenCV.