Current Events:

 

the past
And so we enter the present explorations of my life.

I'm currently a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The program that I'm currently engaged in is within the Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Obligatory website: University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Obligatory website: Electronic Visualization Laboratory. 

A little about the location: Chicago is a wonderful town to visit, but as the saying goes "I wouldn't want to live here". Chicago is nothing like New York City. Some would say that this is an attractive quality. I tend to disagree. I find that Chicago doesn't have the energy that New York does. Walking down the street in New York, you feel like there's an electricity in the air. There's a feeling of things to do, places to go, people to see. Here, I think that it's much more toned down, relaxed a bit. Maybe too much. Chicago maybe Sinatra's kind of town, but for me, it's New York.

Now don't get me wrong, Chicago is not all that bad. I've made some really good friends here, and I've had the chance to do a number of different things. However, in terms of comparison, there's no better environment than the New York City environment.

I didn't always feel this way. In fact, I looked to Chicago as an escape from the monotony of everyday life in a New York suburb. I wasn't doing much, with my degree at that point. I had a job working as a sales assistant at the local Champs Sports outlet, and a morning job as a part-time Graphic Designer for the Journal News (a countywide newspaper). The two jobs paid well, but, I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. I felt as if I had been let down by my degree. I needed more experience, a better portfolio, a richer resume. What was I going to do?

I went looking for internships, but most companies usually have those given out by the spring of the year they want to pick someone up. I didn't want to chance myself not getting one also. I then decided that it was time to go back to school. I didn't know which one, though. I went browsing around the web and found a couple that I thought would suit my interests in computer animation. I then spoke to my undergraduate professor and got some more opinions. Eventually I narrowed my choice to UIC, Ohio State, and Oregon. When I got rejected by Ohio State and Oregon, I decided that UIC was going to be my choice. It was a fairly easy decision.

The lab here does a lot of work in an area commercialy known as Virtual Reality. I don't find myself trained enough to explain at great depths what VR is, but for the lay-man, VR can be disguised as such: an artificial environment (usually generated by a computer) in which a user experiences sensory stimuli (sights and sounds). In this environment, the user usually has control over the space through an external interface that controls aspects such as navigation. The environment actually simulates "real space" and fools the eye into believing that the space is reality. It's really all an illusion; a trick using mirrors, to put it.

My interest in this realm is fairly minimal. In fact it's almost non-existent save for a project that I recently collaborated on.

Obligatory link: http://www.evl.uic.edu/mariar/MFA/MITOLOGIES.

The odd thing is that, I've actually gotten myself into another Virtual Reality project. There isn't too much about this project that I can talk about except that I'm going to be modeling the environment, and i'm responsible for it's look. Who knows what this means.

Okay, so now that you know a little about me, you'll probably want to see some work that i've done in the past and currently in the present. For that, you'll need to click here.

the present
the future
the links