Charles Doomany- InfoVis: Final Post
Digital Flora
This project acquires realtime environmental data (ambient light and temperature) from several distinct geographic locations and uses the data as a parameter for driving the recursive growth of a virtual tree. Each tree serves as a visual indicator of the environmental conditions of their respective geographic location. When the optimal conditions are met for plant growth (~7000 lumens/ 18.3 °C) the animation displays a fully matured tree at its last stage of recursion.
I used Pachube to acquire the data and Processing to generate the tree animation.
Ideas for Improvement:
• Add more parameters for influencing growth ( ex: daily rainfall, soil pH, etc.)
• Increase the resolution of growth (currently only ten levels of recursive depth)
• Growth variation is not observable over short periods of time, but is only apparent over long term seasonal environmental changes
• Current animation appears fairly static, there is an opportunity to add more dynamic and transient animated elements that correspond with environmental conditions
• An ideal version of the program would have multiple instances of the animation running simultaneously, this would make it possible to compare environmental data from various geographic locations easily
• A viewable history of the realtime animation would be an interesting feature for accessing and observing environmental patterns
• More experience with recursively generated form and some aspects of OOP would certainly have helped me reach my initial goal
Hi Charles – here are the comments from the PiratePads:
emergence is a great theme/concept
pachube — how do you pronounce that?
http://www.jimcampbell.tv/portfolio/miscellaneous_references/formula.swf
Really detailed process.
This is quite attractive.
i like the long period and slow response to the data collection. Could it be made more interesting for a viewer that will only look at this for a brief period? – http://www.theowatson.com/site_docs/work.php?id=41
I like the trees, but don’t quite understand how you used the data.
Is there a way that this could start to talk about polution and climate change. perhaps comparing current data to past recordings of temperature.
Interesting choice to use Pachube. Nice.
Don’t different locales have different optimal conditions? You have plant growth at 7000/18, but there are other places whose plants have different optimal conditions.
You need more parameters for a tree than just the number of levels of recursion. Also , what about dynamic behaviors like “wind”
You mention that the I need a stronger statement about the audience of this project — who is this for and what are they trying to understand about the world. Maybe the interesting thing about pachube is the social use of it — not so much the temperature data itself. Otherwise: ask a simple question, get a simple answer.
Very pretty images. Why do some of them fall over on one side?