DAAPworks is hosted every year by the graduating senior class of designers at UC. Each major is responsible for their respective section of the building and the messy classrooms are transformed into slightly less messy galleries.

My part in all of this, other than moving 20 tables and at least a hundred desk chairs, was to organize the way finding signage around the building and campus to point people to the digital design classrooms. Hanging signage within the building wasn’t particularly allowed, so we aimed to keep everything really low key, the entire system was driven by QR codes and a dynamic website, ucdd11.com/m that would lead visitors through the building.

I have a tendency to make things way more difficult than they need to be… All for the sake of making something awesome, so I built a little mobile site based on our theme “More than Pixels”. We wanted the site to be super simple but fun, so I took our basic information and built a website that would react to the accelerometer in a phone and animate pixels falling around the screen based on the phone’s orientation. Despite the simplicity of the interaction, we all found ourselves sitting in front of our phones twisting them and tilting them for half a class period. Not reading any of the information presented on the site.

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The animation was pieced together from this javascript collision detection engine, and a mixture of ActionScript and hardware accelerometer data collection.

The most challenging part was to get it working simultaneously in the iOS and Android browsers. Mobile Safari allows you to read accelerometer data with javascript, really nifty, but pretty slow. Android doesn’t have this in browser as of this writing, so I loaded in a light weight swf that could read the data in ActionScript and then send it back out to the JavaScript particle engine.

It is still a little buggy, and I couldn’t even start to test it across Android phones, but it was a really fun challenge. There is nothing like a week and a 12 pack of Pepsi, surrounded by all kinds of mobile devices and lots and lots of code.

Check out the site on your phone, I hope it works.