Beautiful Accident: Ghosts

I was coding in a tail made out of circles from 2 to 0.1 radius (was trying to make them look like sperm since I think the new game name will be Fertile Ground), when all of a sudden, the boids came out looking like ghosts. Having two body segments that have connective tissue looks extremely expressive, and pulls the feeling away from single-celled organisms. Trying to figure out a game narrative that takes a critical look at conception. Something to do with intelligent design?

The offending chunk of code after the jump:

The trick: I used

5.0f

instead of

TRAIL_LENGTH

(which is defined as 15)…

	for(int i=TAIL_LENGTH-1;i>=0;i--){
		glPushMatrix();
			glTranslatef(tail[i].x,tail[i].y,0);
				ofCircle(0,0,2.1f-(float)i/5.0f*2);
		glPopMatrix();
	}

Dart Game Prototype

The current Dart Game software in openframeworks.

list of features and outstanding things after the jump.

Features

  • Gravitational Emergent Behavior (based on Steadman Particle Drawing Tool)
  • Infrared Computer Vision Detection (from live & recorded video)
  • Quad Warping of incoming video for camera/projection alignment
  • Vector Field levels generated from Grayscale Images
  • Win-state detection

Outstanding things to do include:

  • Integration of Motion History Dart detection
  • Two-way serial communication with the dartbox prototype.
  • Weighting of Motion History Detection with Piezo Vibration Sensor
  • Integration of Craig Reynolds-style flocking algorithm (ofw demo)
  • A million other things I can’t think of at the moment

Flocking Algorithms…

Ported Daniel Shiffman‘s Processing implementation of Craig Reynold‘s Boids program into openframeworks.

Dartbox Prototype

A physical computing box to detect the presence of magnetic darts to assist in the flow of a computer vision dart game.

Magnetic reed switches are positioned around a bolt post to add redundancy. The device is powered over USB and transmits changes in its state serially.

The final will feature RGB leds and no debugging doodads.

More on Flickr.

Computer Vision Setup

Testing out the new CV setup using blob detection example by stefanix for openframeworks

Reed Switch Testing

Testing out a bunch of reed switches Pingel hooked me up with.

Elastic Easing in Processing


Ported Robert Penner’s elastic ease into processing.

Animated Embed and Source Code after the jump…



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Source code: elastic

Built with Processing

Easy-peasy

Robert Penner’s Easing Equations have been built into Flash since version 6 or 7 as the Tween class (search your Flash directory for Tween.as). But before those days, we had to do things manually. Penners equations in Actionscript are available for download here, with a nice little application to visualize each one here. This is great for when you need to port tweening into a different language like Processing or Openframeworks

Link

The Dangers of Working with Rare-Earth Magnets

My bank cards have been erased. Oops!

Thesis Game user test