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Excercise
Final ++
Implement a concept of your choice within one of the following areas:
Mobile Phone Software
Augmented Reality
Camera Input / Computer Vision
Generative Animation <----------------------------
Generative Music
Artificial Life
Immersive Software Environment
Information Visualization
Select a topic you have a strong personal interest in pursuing. Pour
your energy into the completing an excellent work before the end of the
quarter. Take this opportunity to push yourself both conceptually and
technically. You have the summer to rest at the end, so go for it.
Solution
"Manifest"
Online
applet version ... play with it now!
View images
Download full size applet (1.3 mb zip)
Notes: The original project was intended to be used with the tablet.
However the downloadable and online versions do not have this feature
enabled.
Abstract: Drawing toy that produces parameterized organisms. Procedural
animation allows the organisms to swim around in a virtual fluid environment
interacting with each other.
Documentation: After a good critique from Golan
Levin and Casey Reas,
I've toned down
my project to something more accomplishable within the three week period
I was given.
The project now interprets strokes made from a tablet pen. When a stroke
is completed (or closed into a loop) it manifests an organism based on
stroke length, speed, and pressure. While not exactly gesture recognition,
it was a quick and dirty solution to what otherwise might have been a
nightmare to develop (gesture recognition).
Procedural animation drives all of the creatures, including the physics
and kinematics. At the lowest level, physics runs everything from the
fluid simulation, masses, and springs. One level higher and you get the
autonomous motions of a creature such as articulation (moving the tail
in opposition of the head).
At the highest structure you get the behavior level, the "AI"
of the creature that drives them to go in particular directions, follow
certain targets, and do certain things with their bodies. Everything is
clamped down into a point of "interest", and the organism simply
follows that. The behavior routine simply directs this "interest",
and the rest of the body articulates itself. In addition, behaviors can
change due to their orientation or distance between themselves and other
organisms. I'll let you discover these behaviors yourself, since that's
half the fun of this project.
Each creature is custom-built, meaning art and programming for each creature
had to be construted individually.
The graphics are SVGs imported via a custom-built SVG importer I wrote
for this project. It really sucks, so I didn't release it. You wouldn't
want to use it anyway, it's really buggy. However, SVGs allowed me to
draw interesting shapes that can connect to other shapes with code. Also,
SVGs are a vector format so it allows me to zoom as far in or out as I
want without losing resolution, keep file sizes down to a minimum, and
it also allows me to do transforms and scales to them on the fly.
The art style drew inspiration from submerged microorganisms and presstube.
Future: Some things that I could improve include actually using
gesture recognition to develop even more interesting shapes (try drawing
a few loops to see what I mean). Writing a system that could morph in-between
SVG would also be very awesome, as well as importing SVG with mutiple
layers, or colors. I also learned a lot about behavior programming from
this project. Writing behavior directly into the creature class became
prohibitively difficult, so I should really think about a new way to do
behavior programming seperate from creature articulation. Finally, I want
to come up with a way to recycle the art more efficiently, so as to build
a large library of creatures really quickly. Perhaps a creature-constructor
interface? ...
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