When I put the new version of this site online last month, I had to remove my portfolio work as a part of the transition to WordPress. This post serves to inform that I’ve finally got my first piece of portfolio work online! The project, “WiiSenter”, was created as my dissertation piece for my undergraduate degree in 2009. It is a proof-of-concept Windows application which was developed as an experiment into using gesture recognition to control things such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

It is written in C# using Visual Studio 2008, and was written as a loosely coupled set of libraries and brought together in a WinForms front end. The libraries are all separate individual DLL files, which allows their functionality (such as the matrix library, or Hidden Markov Model) to be used elsewhere.

I chose to release this project first for three reasons…

Firstly, it is still to date one of the hardest projects I ever done. Some of the concepts I ended up researching were completely new to me, and the mathematical algorithms were quite complicated. The mountainous technical challenge I was up against, and the massive amount of research I needed to look at in order to get the final product working made this a project that sits very close to my heart.

The second reason is that this project serves as an example of what I achieved at university. I’m proud of all the grades I achieved in my final year at university, but that I managed to get a grade in the 90th percentile for my final project, despite going 50% over the word limit, and doing a project that my mentor thought would be too complex (in hindsight, he was probably right).

The third reason is that when I wrote the report for my dissertation, I expressed my desire to make the code from this project available to all under an open-source licence. After two years sat dormant on my hard drive, I have released this under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike licence so that anyone looking to do similar work can benefit. The code isn’t fantastic (it was written to a strict timescale under pressure), but it works, and serves as a good starting point to anyone looking to work with Wii Remote devices or Hidden Markov Models in the .NET framework. I have no intention of maintaining the work at the current time for personal reasons, so the code is provided as-is without warranty, but if anyone, anywhere finds even a remote use for it, that is enough for me.

If you are interested in looking at the project and it’s code, you can get the dissertation report and/or the code from my portfolio pages.

Enjoy, and as always, Peace.