House of Cards

I just noticed that I got linked to from Create Digital Motion, a blog about digital video production and computer animation. Cheers guys! However, the post says that there is “more at [my] personal site” and.. well, there isn’t. Or wasn’t, until now.

The post is about Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video which has been getting a lot of coverage on t’interwebs this week. I’ll spare the technical details as you’re almost certainly familiar with them by now (if not, have a look at this post). My two attempts (so far) are below, along with a little info about how they were made. You can view both the videos in higher quality by clicking through to YouTube.

Continue reading House of Cards…

Mobile Cellular Automata

As a first project with Mobile Processing, I’ve written a really simple implementation of Conway’s Game of Life for Java (J2ME) mobile phones.

This is an extremely scruffy alpha version hacked together in a couple of hours, but it works. The initial configuration is a Gosper Glider Gun. You can pause the simulation using the softkey, and then use the arrow keys on the keypad to move a “cursor” around. Click the main select button to flip the cell under the cursor from on to off and back again. Then press the Resume softkey to start running again.

Download the .jar file here.
(either click this link with your phone’s browser or download on your computer and send to your phone).

Thanks to Nigel Crawley (who I met at BarCampBrighton2) for the inspiration!

Tadpoles

My latest project with Processing has been implementing a flocking algorithm based on Craig Reynolds’ “Boids” using the Traer Physics Library.

“Tadpoles” simulation

See the full article for more.

Continue reading Tadpoles…

Simple Turtle for Processing

I’ve been trying to implement some fractals with Processing recently, and I noticed that the Wikipedia page for the Koch Snowflake contained source code for generating the snowflake in the Logo language. This brought back memories of the Turtle robot we used to use in primary school - a large grey dome with wheels and a felt-tip pen placed in a hole in the top, which trundled around leaving lines on a large piece of paper spread out on the floor. This was (I think) my first contact with any sort of programming.

I decided to implement a basic Turtle for Processing. This is extremely simple - it can only drive forward and back, turn left or right through a specified angle and raise or lower its “pen”. But, combined with some simple programming routines and a bit of recursion, it can create some really nice patterns.

The Processing source code for the Turtle class can be found here: turtle.pde

A couple of examples using this class:

Donut Spiral - based on one of the examples of Logo on its Wikipedia page.

Koch Snowflake - this is based on the Logo source code found on the Wikipedia page for the Koch Snowflake. Click to zoom in on the fractal (Warning: I haven’t implemented any bounding for the zoom, so the fractal simply gets larger each time. The program will get slower to run the more times you click!)

Processing

I am really getting somewhat addicted to Processing. It’s like a sketchbook for programmers - it provides a framework for very easily drawing stuff on the screen and a nice little environment for writing code. It’s great for scientific and artificial life applications, and also for digital art. The very best examples of the latter application I’ve found are those at Jared Tarbell’s Gallery of Computation.

The latest thing I’ve created using Processing is a version of Conway’s Game Of Life which you can find at j4mie.org/misc/life. Have a tinker and let me know what you think.