Experiments & Prototypes

A grab bag of demos, bots & builds, designed and built by Alec Kunkel, design technologist.

  • Role: Creative Technologist
  • Year: 2018–2022
  • Category: Experiments

The stuff that didn’t need its own page but was too fun to leave out: finance games, StyleGAN art, Generate an Ape, Gordon RamsAI, AR filters, Three.js demos, the laser-cut Boxcade, and the portfolios that came before this one.

Services

Web & Games
NGPF finance games, Netflex, Hot Pizza Date, The Worst House on the Internet, Camera Offset Project
AI / ML
StyleGAN art, Generate an Ape, Gordon RamsAI, ML Eyes, Gunlock bot
3D, AR & Physical
AR filters, Three.js demos, Unreal Engine slices, The Boxcade

StyleGAN Art (AI / ML)

A short run of StyleGAN experiments. I trained each model on different source material (patterns, classical art, and so on) and then dug through the output for the frames worth keeping.

Generate an Ape (Experiment · AI / ML · Web)

I like the DeFi community, but the Bored Ape Yacht Club, where people spend fortunes on pictures of apes, was too easy a target. So I scraped the whole BAYC collection, trained a StyleGAN on it, and put up Generate an Ape: unlimited apes, free.

NGPF Finance Games (Client · Web / Games)

Next Gen Personal Finance teaches students about money. I helped build a series of browser games, each about one idea, like investing or starting a business. One of them, Build Your Stax, simulates 20 years of investing.

Netflex (Experiment · Web)

Gyms were closed and everyone was watching Tiger King, so a few of us at McKinney made a browser extension that gives you a workout whenever you put on your favorite show.

Camera Offset Project (Experiment · Web · Climate)

After a year of back-to-back video calls, a few coworkers and I were over it. Turns out switching your camera off cuts a call’s CO2 emissions by 96%, which was all the excuse we needed. Download a thumbnail, make it your profile picture, and save the world.

Gordon RamsAI (Experiment · AI / ML)

When OpenAI released GPT-2, I trained it on Gordon Ramsay’s meanest quotes. Then I trained a food-recognition model that can tell 50 dishes apart, so it knows exactly what it’s insulting.

Gunlock Bot (Experiment · Twitter Bot · Node)

Gary the Gunlock is a Node.js bot that reads people’s tweets, text and images both, to figure out whether a post is about gun safety. If it is, Gary replies and suggests they pick up a gun lock.

The Boxcade (Experiment · Fusion · 3D Design)

I love coding, but it’s nice to make something you can actually hold. I taught myself Fusion, modeled an arcade cabinet, laser-cut it out of cardboard, and put it together by hand.

Unreal Engine Slices (3D · Real-time)

Small vertical slices in Unreal Engine, each one made to try out a mechanic, a mood, or a lighting setup.

ML Eyes (Experiment · AI / ML)

My excuse to actually use TensorFlow.js on something: a machine-vision toy that watches you back.

Hot Pizza Date (Client · Web)

Tinder, but for pizza. We built it overnight after a Little Caesars tweet.

The Worst House on the Internet (Experiment · Web)

For spooky season 2021, I helped launch a site where you could trick-or-treat online and get a terrible treat, like a dying meme or a photo of Alec Baldwin signed by a different guy named Alec. (Yes, we actually mailed them out.)

Three.js Demos (WebGL · Real-time 3D)

A pile of real-time 3D experiments in the browser (shaders, particles, camera tricks) that I used to learn the GPU one demo at a time.

AR Filters (Client · AR · Snapchat & Instagram)

AR is what got me into creative technology in the first place. I built these face filters for Little Caesars, Pampers, Sherwin-Williams, Samsung, and others in Spark AR and Lens Studio, and they’re how I learned the basics of programming and 3D.

Tags: Experiment, AI/ML, Three.js, AR, Games