I highly recommending trying the program for yourself: link
Note: some antivirus software complains about this. It is not a virus.
In 87kb, Peter Sotesz creates self balancing automatons whose sole purpose is to knock each other over. The game is complete with breakable walls and secret mode. I chose this as for my Looking Outwards because I think it’s a great demonstration of entities behaving according to rules within a prescribed universe, in this case, blocky ‘people’ attempting to push each other to the ground, with the universe following the rules of Newtonian physics.
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I don’t know where these anthropomorphic but alient “sculptures” fit on the uncanny valley chart. It seems to be on another dimension. And I love these delicate and vulnerable and disturbing spirits… Look at a few photos here and be sure to check Mark Jenkins‘ website .
Another approach to text visualization see from TEI10. Coinciding with the idea rasied in critique today, this visualization retains the context…though the words are not very eligible.
It is interesting piece of display, because it has two folds of information as viewers zoom in and out. The application on demo allows users to draw on tablet with strips of type, the size and color of which changes with the force on stylus.
Daniel Hirchmann’s Art Engine is a painting simulator made with processing. Among many other properties, it allows you to control the brushes size and opacity, as well as the effect of gravity on the paint. However, the most interesting component of the project is that you do not actually control the brush–the app reads in live video from a webcam and simulates the artistic process of creating a painting. Back in highschool I was really interested in the digital painting style, but over the years the style became so widespread that I lost interest in it. Now there’s apparently an algorithm that can paint digitally for you, and expressively to boot.
HacKey is a tool that seems to have been built by a last.fm employee that looks for patterns in your favorite songs. That’s fancytalk for saying it finds the key that you seem to like the most.
Its an interesting tool. I’m assuming that last.fm has popular songs on their server that they can use for this kind of tool, which is interesting in itself. I tried my profile, and due to my obscure and foreign taste in music, I got no results. It got to a certain song and just froze up. However, I put in a friend’s profile and actually managed to see what this thing can do (which is what the screenshot is above).
They’re using the Raphael Library to animate the pie chart, and then I’m not sure how they’re analyzing the song key, but it looks like thats Javascript too. As it reaches the end of the library, the background color darkens to black, at which point its done. It tells you what key you like the most, and the prominence of major or minor in that key, which is interesting.
Programming music analysis tools is something I’ve never done, so this is really intriguing for me. I didn’t really know this kind of stuff was possible. But, the more you know!
It took me a while to find something that’s actually a simulation.
DigitalDawn, a light reactive window blind inspired by photosynthesis
DigitalDawn is a digital window blind that simulates photosynthesis by reacting to the amount of ambient light there is in a room and growing a viney flower pattern in response. The more light, the faster the digital plant grows and evolves. The brightness of the plant itself is also affected by the amount of light in the room. What interested me about this project was that instead of just being some simulation of some natural process that sits on a computer screen, this simulation is actually out in the world, indirectly interacting with people. The creators of the project said that they were interested in exploring how something like this can have an impact on people’s sense of well-being. In addition, this simulation is also responding to an actual environment, rather than just a few pre-programmed forces in the code.
I found this project mentioned on futurefeeder. It’s from 2001 and seems to be relatively well known but I thought it was really interesting so I wanted to post it here. This is by Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno and they’re playing with magnetic fluid or “ferrofluid”. It’s essentially some sort of oil or water that has had ferromagnetic metal powder dissolved in it- allowing the magnetic field to produce some very striking forms. I’m not sure if this is technically a simulation project, but it’s in the same arena. They’re controlling the forms that the fluid take electronically which responds to the noise in the room. The paper found here describes how they pulled this off. It also describes the forces that are needed to produce specific shapes such as a “jellyfish” shape. It would be interesting to try to the behaviours of this fluid and apply it to a physics system in a program- essentially simulate what is going on here. Since the video is a live demo, we don’t have any sort of interactivity to the project– it would be great to see this live and have controls that would allow us to tweak the controls and see what the shapes morph into when different amounts of current are added to it.
There is a “master” photographer who took photos at the moment of smashing like the picture above,(the photo was taken by a amateur hobbyist) I do not remember his name for now. I was thinking that those photos are interesting because this moment happens very quick so this picture is not what we are able to view easily with our eyes and it makes this so special.
Anyways, i found the video that some program renders the “smashing” quite nicely and I am thinking that maybe, it will never easy but simulating water splash like the video below could be so cool for the next project. Will it be so hard to make it happen? Enjoy the video!
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