A demo of an RPG with “2.5D” graphics: 2D characters in a 3D environment, inspired by Pokemon Black & White and Earthbound 2. This is a is a proof of concept for the style: the character sprite images and 3D building models are borrowed from these games, but the programming, camera work, and rendering pipeline are all original. Controls: WASD keys to move Left and right arrow keys to rotate the camera This project was revived after I lost the source code long ago and recovered it by decompiling an extant Windows build with DevXUnityUnpacker and trying to match behavior to a screen capture....

I was inspired to do my own laser light show after seeing the fantastic Daft Punk, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson shows at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. These laser shows were shown in a pitch-black dome with booming music – hypnotic and gripping. To reproduce this, I cobbled together some hardware and electronics, and started soldering. Soon after, I realized that I’d need a few thousand dollars for more sophisticated equipment to render anything larger than an 8"x8" wall area....

I started this project when Pokemon Go had just come out, and was interested in returning to the older style Pokemon games, but backporting the new geolocation ideas and easy mobile internet connectivity for trades and battles. Controls: WASD keys to move Shift to run Space to interact, accept Enter to open the menu Esc to cancel, go back In this demo, I’ve reused assets and mimicked the Pokemon Red UI (perhaps too faithfully), with some differences....

Ishan Chatterjee and I produced an autonomous hors d’oeuvres waiter for our final project in Prof. Radhika Nagpal’s Autonomous Robot Systems class, using Turtlebot and ROS. Below, see the video of the robot in action, followed by the republished report, then the source on BitBucket. Enjoy! 🤖 Authors: Nicolas Chavez, Ishan Chatterjee Course: Harvard CS 189 Instructor: Professor Radhika Nagpal TFs: Michael Kester, Serena Booth Goals The original goal of our robot Triton at the “final project party” was to fulfill the food server role as well as the party photographer role....

My final project in Prof. Ruth Lingford’s animation class. I eschewed hand-drawing for a purely digital approach in Adobe Animate, and traded up for a more intense soundtrack: SBTRKT’s “Decemberist”. This short in particular reminds me how economical animators can get. Enjoy! 🍿...

Jackson Okuhn and I produced a wireless VR headset leveraging existing affordable devices for our ES50 (Intro to Electrical Engineering) final project. This was a fantastic EE learning opportunity: communication via embedded devices over a variety of protocols and programming environments. It also gave me a chance to exercise Computer Vision algorithms in a real-world and realtime scenario. Below, see a quick schematic and then the republished report. Enjoy!...

For my final project in CS 283 (Computer Vision) I decided to examine strategies for reconstructing the lighting conditions of a scene given an image, for the ultimate purpose of properly lighting AR objects in a “magic mirror” device. The write up is republished below, with a few changes to make the results clearer at a glance. Enjoy! Author: Nicolas Chavez Course: Harvard CS 283 Instructor: Professor Todd Zickler...

Download on iOS App Store A revamped version of the Jukeboxx iOS app! It comes with an OS X companion app that seamlessly links your iTunes music to Dropbox. With Jukeboxx V2, you can stream and download your music on demand, without blowing through your iPod/iPhone/iPad’s storage. Now Jukeboxx supports offline listening and gathers your whole collection properly, including playlists, albums and artists from iTunes. The app also richly displays album art from iTunes and artist artwork from Groove Music....

Microsoft Account for Android manages a user’s authentication and supports use with multi factor authentication methods. I worked on this app during my internsip at Microsoft, in the summer of 2015 in Seattle. My team of 3 interns worked on the Remote Connect feature, which lets users sign into smart devices with poor or no input using the Account app. A user would kick off an authentication process on their smart device (say a TV, or smart coffee machine) and complete the process in app by scanning a QR code displayed by the smart device....

A snippet from my final project in Prof. Paul Bush’s animation class. I return to my comic-drawing style here (albeit twisted for effect), inspired by Blood Orange’s “Uncle ACE”, and the 80’s Miami/Outrun theme. Special thanks to Sarah and Nicole for human figure reference. Enjoy! 🍿...