Zachary T. Zimmerman

About

Hi, I'm Zachary. I study Computer Science at Cornell University and will graduate from the Engineering school in May 2017. My interests include virtual reality, game design, and computer graphics — but also art, music, and design. I'm a member of the Cornell Glee Club, Cornell's premier all-male choral ensemble, as well as the Cornell Chai Notes, a popular A Cappella group on campus.

Interests

  • Art

    Lettering, typography, graphic design, sketching, logo design, woodworking, and cardboard construction.

  • Music

    Choral music, A Cappella, barbershop, arranging, beatboxing, and overtone singing.

  • Tech

    Virtual and augmented reality, game design, UX Design, computer graphics, and data visualization.

  • Fun

    Bodyboarding, Unicycling, playing Settlers of Catan, and solving Rubik's cubes.

Résumé

The summer of 2016 I will intern at Microsoft Studios working on HoloLens. I worked at Google on AdWords the summer of 2015. The summer before, I worked at Bloomberg making charts and data visualizations, going on to work part-time in the fall. I got my start as a web developer for V.I.A. Vintage Intelligence Agency.

For more information in a printable form, here's my résumé. And if you like the look of my template, the LaTeX class file is freely available on GitHub.

Projects

Over the years, I have worked on quite a few projects. Check out my video games The Butterfly Effect and Impulse, music visualizer A♯, hardware hack coding dome, and many more.

  • The Butterfly Effect

    The Butterfly Effect logo

    Watch the intro video and play the game for yourself

    You are the chaos butterfly, a force of change. Your mission is to fly through space time and open the divergence points in order to shift the world line. The Invariants, enemies of change, are after you. Evade them at all costs!

  • Convo

    Convo project poster

    Try out the prototype for yourself

    Convo is an accessibility application for persons with hearing loss aimed at providing amplification and transcription of multiple sound sources across a network of devices to facilitate easier group conversations.

  • Impulse

    Impulse banner showing the character reaching for a glowing pink orb

    Watch the promo video or play the game for yourself

    Impulse is an action platformer game where you play a character who has the unique ability to create shockwaves that can propel objects away from you, and consequently knock you in the opposite direction.

  • A♯: Music Visualizer

    Watch the promo video or view the code on GitHub

    A♯ (A Sharp) is a Music Visualizer that attempts to truly visualize music, rather than just accompany it.

  • Horcrux: Distributed Data Repository

    horcrux logo

    View the code on GitHub

    Horcrux is a data repository that leverages existing free cloud storage systems such as Dropbox and Google Drive to achieve larger total storage space, all while distributing parts of each file securely among each service so no one storage system has all of your important data. This was a hackathon project for Big Red Hacks 2014, it was supposed to work but OAuth took so long that we couldn't finish. C'est la vie...

  • Cardboard Geodesic Dome

    View the hackathon submission

    This was a fun project that I decided to do during Big Red Hacks, to provide a place to code and sleep in during the weekend hackathon. Because my team's project ended up going so horribly, I ended up submitting the dome as a hardware hack — I was much more proud of it than I was of our real submission.

    Although the dome didn't end up winning any prizes, everyone I talked to was really interested in it and found it to be quite amusing. My favorite part of it all was when I ended up presenting the project to the guys from Oracle who were in charge of judging the hardware category. They kept asking me about what my plans were for improving it, and didn't want to believe that it's just a shell of cardboard I made to live in for two days.

  • Sleepy Bob: Winner of the Cornell Google Game Jam

    Bob flying through the air towards his bed

    Play the game or view the code on GitHub

    Sleepy Bob is a parallax sidescrolling game with dreamy graphics and lifelike ragdoll physics.

    Bob is sleepwalking and he needs your help! The goal is to navigate him to the bed without waking him up. Bob starts waking up if you shake him too much, or if he hits the objects around him.

    Built in less than 24 hours, Sleepy Bob utilizes libraries such as Box2D.js and jQuery, and is deployed with a Flask (python) backend.

  • Poem Generator: Presented at Google, NY

    A generated poem inspired by Edgar Alan Poe

    Try generating your own poem or view the code on GitHub

    Poem Generator is an online tool for creating computer-generated poems, as well as a social platform for sharing these poems with the community. With Poem Generator, users can generate sonnets, haikus, free-verse, and rhyming poems — or poems in the style of famous poets like Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. The most recently generated poems are automatically displayed on the site's home page, and users can even share their poems via facebook. So sign up, log in, and get started!

    Poem Generator is powered by Flask, MongoDB, and NLTK. The poem generation engine uses NLTK as a rhyming library and syllable counter, and implements Markov chaining on a corpus of text to emulate various poets' styles.

  • Sounds of the Streets

    Choosing a location of strawberry fields plays the song Strawberry Fields by the Beatles

    Listen to your location's playlist or view the code on GitHub

    Sounds of the Streets is an inventive way of discovering new songs. Have you ever been in a famous location and wanted to hear the songs written about it? Or maybe you're on a road trip and want to listen to a playlist about the areas you pass through. Sounds of the Streets does all of this for you, and more. Input a location, whether it be your current GPS or Wifi-determined location, or one you search for manually, and Sounds of the Streets will find the popular songs relating to that area. It works by determining the nearest relevant landmark, street, state, or country, and finding songs referencing that place in the title. Then it finds the music video on YouTube and starts playing it for you.

    Built with the Google Maps, YouTube, and Last.fm APIs, as well as Flask for a python backend.

  • StuyDash

    A dashboard showing the current time, weather, weekly schedule, and news

    Check out the dashboard or view the code on GitHub

    StuyDash is a dashboard web application with everything a Stuyvesant High School student needs to know about his or her day. From the bell schedule widget to the weather, StuyDash knows it all.

    StuyDash works by screen-scraping the confusing and unappealing Stuyvesant website and displaying the useful stuff in an intuitive way. StuyDash's main feature is a widget that intelligently displays the correct bell schedule for the day, giving a quick and easy view of what period it is at the moment. It also incorporates recent school news and the current weather. On top of this, StuyDash features links to the most necessary and useful outside websites for quick access to even more information.

    There's more? StuyDash is even more accessible, providing a 24-hour automated hotline that users can call to get the most recent information. In addition, users can text queries to StuyDash and get the day's info all while they commute to school.

    The StuyDash website uses Flask for a python backend, and is made beautiful with jQuery animations and CSS. The StuyDash text and phone interface is powered by Twilio.

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