Using a Polar heart rate band and a small node app I wrote using noble, I created a real-time heart rate overlay including the current heart rate and a streaming line graph built using D3. The heart icon pulses and increases in speed as the heart rate increases. This can be added as a source to OBS or XSplit to showcase a streamer's heart rate as they encounter tense or exciting moments in a game (or other media). In the future I hope to play with heart rate (and other biometrics, maybe galvanic skin response next) as a real-time input into a VR app.
Check out a short video of the stream in action here and the source code here. If you want to check out the original proof of concept which just juxtaposes a heart rate graph with gameplay capture, you can find that here.
In my current role at Vox Media, I am the front-end engineer on our Data Engineering team. We have a number of applications focused on understanding the success of our content (including written stories, video, podcasts, etc) across a variety of platforms, including the social distribution of the content. My responsibilities include building out the front-end for these applications, including being the primary JavaScript programmer on the team.
During a 2-day Vox Media hackathon in 2016, I put together a quick proof-of-concept for visualizing the success of stories on social networks using WebGL and the metaphor of a solar system. Each story is a planet and its moons represent the story being shared on Facebook and Twitter. The size of the moons coorelates to the engagement on the social posts.
When Vox.com initially launched they invested editorially in the idea of explaining the news, and the CardStacks product was the manifestation of that editorial strategy. During a hack-week to kickstart the development of the site, Blake Thomson (another Vox engineer) and I built out the responsive Backbone front-end for the CardStacks product. I worked on quickly building a high-fidelity prototype of the user interface and transitions to nail down the look and feel while Blake figured out how we would populate the content. The product has now undergone numerous revisions but in a few short days we were able to go from a vague concept to a complete editorial product. You can read more about the vox.com launch here.
During 2013 and 2014 I served as a Product Manager and Front-end Engineer for a dedicated Polygon team and our first project was to collaborate with editorial, video, and sales on the reviews for the PS4 and Xbox One. These pieces were highly acclaimed and held the throne as the top traffic-generating content Polygon for quite some time. They also inspired a few blog posts on mimicking the animation style. See the PS4 Review here and the Xbox One Review here.
I was one of a number of engineers on the launch team for Polygon.com and stayed on as the sole front-end developer after the launch to continue to iterate on the site. I was responsible for multiple parts of the site, including (but certainly not limited to) multiple iterations of the nav, article page, features hub, and of course many of the easter eggs.