Kris Hauser's Website

Old Research

Modal analysis

This was research done under Prof. James O'Brien at UC Berkeley, involving modal analysis to perform real-time elastic deformations. There were a couple iterations of this work, starting from a simple demo for one of James' talks at Game Developers Conference 2002, ending up with a hybrid rigid-body/modal analysis simulator, detailed in a paper at Graphics Interface 2003. The project's webpage can be found here.

Also regarding modal analysis, we were hoping that modal analysis could calculate the frequencies of a computer model accurately enough to faithfully reproduce the tone made by a physical model when struck. This could have helped bell, chime, and musical instrument design by allowing the object to be sonically designed using something like a CAD tool. We found that the discretization of linear tetrahedral finite elements caused too great of an error to allow modal analysis to be used in such a tool. The convergence of the natural frequencies, with regard to discretization size, was poor. Very fine meshes (~80k tetrahedra) even for simple models weren't within 30Hz of the true values. (This is the only public record of this research -- ask me if you want to know more).

Inverse dynamics

Nonlinear skinning

Projects

I've also done a few side projects.

KrisLibrary

This is an object-oriented C++ library of assorted code that I've written over the years, mostly for research purposes. Since I have tried to put in every reusable piece of code I've written into this library, it touches a diverse set of areas: math, numerical methods, optimization, graphs, 3d math, geometry, OpenGL, meshing, statistics, and more. At some point I will make this available to the public.

Squiresoft

Squiresoft is my "video game company", created after me and a friend created the game Star Havoc after my high school computer science class. We then tried another project, the Duncan and Squire 3D Adventure Game Extravaganza (working title) but we realized that making a commercial-quality video game with only 2 people was a monumental task. So now I've embarked on another project that I'm really excited about. It's a set of libraries that should make the graphics side of game development a lot simpler, by separating the developer from the art content. Once I get this running (it should take a while, I can only work on it during my spare time), it should be fairly easy to write games -- or at least separate the developer from the tedious work of graphics programming. Our website can be found at http://www.squiresoftgames.com

Hoverboy Demo for the Playstation 2 EyeToy

This is a demo video game I created while I interned at Sony during the summer of 2003, which demonstrated facial motion capture from the EyeToy, a peripheral camera now out for the Playstation 2. This game was intended to show that head motion input can control a fast-paced video game, where the user zooms through space on a "hoverboard". I developed the game completely from scratch in a 2 month period. This was then demoed at the SIGGRAPH 2003 Emerging Technologies exhibit. A game with a similar premise and motivated by this work is already in the works for 2004.

Playstation 2 Elastic Deformation Libraries

I worked on these libraries at Sony during the summer of 2002, which were intended to allow developers to create elastically deformable objects, as well as simulate them in real-time using modal analysis (see the modal analysis research). It's conceivable that modal analysis could be used in future video games as a method of cheaply and stably simulating deformable objects, and this project may help push things forward.

PVK

Pirates, Vikings, and Knights, or PVK, was a Half-Life modification ("mod") intended to both warp space and time by putting three different groups of people together in a wacky, hack-and-slash, team-based game. A couple friends and I decided to put this together during my freshman year at Berkeley. I was the sole 3D artist, and put together lots of nice models, then eventually progressed to helping with the coding. It was a fun project and got a small cult following.

Other art projects

It's a little-known fact that I used to love the art side of computer graphics.

I did some art for a couple projects during high school (and earlier), mostly of some kind of space craft, because that's all we were really able to do well back then. Everything started out on a Star Wars plugin for the Mac game Escape Velocity, where I made quite a few dozen Star Wars models using Strata Studio (yuck...). Moving onto the PC and 3D Studio MAX, I did some modeling of ships from Star Control (this old DOS game), and some of the renderings can be found on this renderings page. They were used in the Star Control: Time Warp project and some Subspace ship sets (a PC network game). I guess they're pretty crude by today's standards. I also modeled all of the ships for Star Havoc (see Squiresoft above).

After this I grew tired of spacecraft and fully 3D games were getting popular, so I went into low-polygon character modeling, such as for PVK (see above). Recently, I've done character modeling once in a while for the Duncan and Squire thing, but that has petered off for now and I haven't done much art recently. It's a little sad, I really enjoy it when I do it, but it's hard for me to find the time.