Organic chemistry is the study of the structure and function of carbon-based molecules. These molecules have complex, three-dimensional structures that determine their functions. Ideally, students would do all their thinking and drawing in 3D. I led a team of Brown University students and researchers in developing a software project, ChemPad, whose purpose is to help organic chemistry students develop an understanding of the 3D structure of molecules and the skill of constructing a 3D mental model of a molecule that matches a 2D diagram. ChemPad fosters this understanding by allowing the student to sketch a 2D diagram and then to see and manipulate the 3D model described by the diagram.

How do trauma surgeons learn to handle critical injuries? Modern medical education is based on direct observation of more senior surgeons: "See one, do one, teach one." But trauma surgery is unplanned and unpredictable; how can doctors in training learn from procedures which take place when they're not present to directly observe? IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) Books is a prototype of a system to capture, annotate, and re-experience trauma surgeries. We combine point-cloud capture technology from UNC, tablet pc annotation software developed at Brown.

A team of painters, biologists, designers, and I created tools for understanding bat flight with scientific visualization in virtual reality. The image shown here is a detail from a painted specification by Janet Bruesselbach, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design; I built C++/OpenGL tools which implemented some of these features. The project's name, Tempus Fugit, means time flees, emphasizes one of our design goals: to provide exquisite control over simulation time.

To support poets and visual artists in the Brown University Cavewriting Workshop, I created a library for specifying spatial text as human-readable xml, rendering, animating, and interacting with the text. With my system, non-programmers can create interactive virtual reality pieces incorporating high-quality text, with fine control over the appearance of the text. Using FreeType2 and FTGL, I enable designers to switch at runtime between any truetype font and between 3D extruded text, flat polygonal text, and texture-mapped text with alpha-blending and full-screen antialiasing, at framerates exceeding 70 fps.

When my family stretched to include four generations all at once, I decided to create a book documenting our family's history. I collected images from old albums and used them as the basis for vector graphics, and created some illustrations from scratch.