Oh, good. I'm glad you're interested too.

Welcome to my interactive projects page. I like building things with simple methods. The interactive environment shell I'm using here allows you to create a virtual environment with simple and inexpensive technologies. If you have a digital camera, and understand basic HTML, you can jump right in to building your own interactive project.

See my interactive projects

Download the SqrlShell_IP shell to build your own project

Why I do what I do.

 I a fan of doing it ALTAP (as low tech as possible - not to be confused with the software company, Altap). Of course that probably sounds a bit contradictory considering I'm talking about making interactive environments which rely on multiple technologies. What I mean by ALTAP is that often I see interactive projects that are more a showcase of the cutting-edge technologies than they are explorations into creativity. Being on the cutting-edge is fine and all. But there is lots to do yet with the well-established technologies we have available to us. The whole AJAX / DHTML craze is a good example of what I mean. The term AJAX certainly brought cohesion to a collection of methods which before were very loosely assembled. And DHTML is a nice term to describes using various scripting techniques  for making a web-page interactive ("dynamic"). But these things were not, in and of themselves, new inventions. AJAX and DHTML are terms that describe a collection of tricks available to developers to create a more rich user experience. Google has a tendency to make very good use of simple methods (very ALTAP).

So SqrlShell_IP is a set of scripts that allow you to throw together an interactive project without purchasing any fancy software. It runs in your standard web-browser which is great 'cause you can very simply put your project up on the web by just uploading it to a server. The way you build interactive projects with SqrlShell_IP is to start with a set of images (digital photos, etc.). To create the "hot spots" in the image (the areas that are clickable), you use any program that allows you to make image maps (like OpenOffice, or MapEdit) -- I eventually plan to add a image-map tool to SqrlShell_IP. The hot-spots then can be used to issue commands to SqrlShell_IP -- like "goto('bedroom')". Really all you need for the most basic project is one HTML file (which contains the image map) per image that you have. The image is what the user sees for that scene, the HTML file makes the spots that they can click.