May 17th, 2007
Portfolio
These are projects I worked on for companies and my Master’s thesis, a list of personal projects is available here.
Master’s Thesis
Title
Supporting Smart Entity behavior across virtual environment platforms
More and more, 3D virtual environments are used to deliver a rich user experience on the computer screen. Universities are offering virtual tours around the campus, shops are using virtual stores and social networking applications let you shake virtual hands with friends nearby or far away.
From a virtual world designer’s point of view however, creation of content can be a repetitive and time-consuming task. Furthermore, the semantics of virtual entities are often hard-coded in the virtual environments, hindering reuse and interoperability.
In this thesis, a method is presented that allows adding semantics to a 3D entity and that allows invocation of the inherent behavior of these entities on different platforms.
Virtual entities that in addition to their geometric representation, also contain data on their semantics have been called smart entities. These semantics can state properties of the entity in question and can describe what the user can do with an entity and how these actions are to be performed. They can also contain more information on the entity, by providing links to related resources or even media content.
By decoupling these semantics from the virtual environment application, designers can reuse existing entities and port them to different platforms, while maintaining the semantics of the entity.
An authoring tool is presented that supports the creation of Smart Entities and a proof of concept VE player extension (for XNA) is discussed that takes advantage of the presented techniques.
Technologies
- XNA 3.0, C#, Winforms, Google O3D
- XML
- Reflection
- Webservices
You can download my thesis here (110 pages, 3MB)
Ordina Knowledge Management Application (OKMA)
Company
Ordina NV
Description
The main goal of this project was to supply Ordina’s employees with resources (urls,
books, webcasts, …) so they can easily obtain study material for every (IT related)
topic. These resources can be rated and employees can manage their personal knowledge
of these topics. The project itself is built using a Service Oriented architecture
so it can later on be deployed to a SharePoint environment (or other). The front-end
of the application is an ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax enabled web application.
Technologies
- C#, ASP.NET 2.0 + Msft. Ajax Framework 1.0
- Webservices
- C# Console applications
- Visual Studio 2005
- Msft. Excel 2003 VBA Forms
- Msft. SQL Server 2005 (T-SQL Stored Procedures)
- Msft. SQL Server Reporting Services
You can download my internship report here!
Interactive Course Player
Company
Ordina NV
Description
The Interactive Course Player is a side project we received during our internship.
It’s an ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax Enabled Web application which can be used to view online
courses. These courses consist of a couple of lesson and each lesson has a video
file that will be shown. During playback, rich text is automaticly loaded that accompanies
the events in the video. This entire application is fully XML configurable and uses
ASP.NET 2.0 Themes to customize look & feel.
Technologies
- C#, ASP.NET 2.0 + Msft. Ajax Framework 1.0
- Visual Studio 2005
- Javascript
- XML & XSD schemas
Stock & order management application
Company
HERTO NV
Description
During the summer break I worked at Herto NV which is a manufacturer of rice biscuits
(you can never have enough of those!). My task was to completely reengineer an existing
Msft. Access VBA Application. Here are some of the application’s features:
- Inventarisation of stock items
- Items check in/out
- Creation and management of orders
- Wait list system per supplier
- Supplier price management
- Various reports for bookkeeping
Analysis
- End-user interviews
- Usecases
- Scenarios
- Extensive testing
Technologies
Sidenote: This is the typical application you’d write using ASP.NET (I would…), but the client insisted on using VBA.
- Msft. Access 2003 Forms
- VBA (Visual Basic)
Quality Control Management Application
Company
HERTO NV
Description
This is an Msft. Access VBA application that is used to track and trace anomalities in their products (rice cakes). Since this is a very specific problem domain, extensive analysis was required (usecases, scenario’s,…). Some features:
- Administration/user section
- Reporting
- User friendly GUI design
Analysis
- End-user interviews
- Usecases
- Scenarios
- Extensive testing
Technologies
Sidenote: This is the typical application you’d write using ASP.NET (I would…), but the client insisted on using VBA.
- Msft. Access 2003 Forms
- VBA (Visual Basic)