Lecture on Tuesday: introducing new project - transformation.
Task:
Explore the topic transformation. Your ingredients are sound, visuals and interaction. Develop a logical concept on how those ingredients can relate to each other. Desing an interactive application that reacts to your mouse movement in Processing, size 500x500 pixels.
Hand-in:
For presentation, please always bring files on USB as well.
1. Final zip file consisting of the exported applet. Please upload it onto you openprocessing account and onto the classroom at openprocessing.org heading "transformation" and link them to blog. State they are final files and put in R-drive in hand in folder.
2. Online workbook: your dsdn142 blog and openprocessing sketches
1-04-11
5-04-11
Worked on the basis for the layout, drawing in the ellipses and lines. After working through my transformation I worked on looking for ideas to involve mouse interaction (that does not use mouse click).
The monsters that were posted on the blog gave me some idea of what I saw trying to search for. On openprocessing.org I found an application that involved the mouse simply being dragged across the screen (no clicking). I quite liked this application because the ellipses being produced faded away into the background giving it a sense of 3D space and the simple pleasure of just moving the mouse and seeing how the gravity affects the ellipses was something I wanted to focus on.
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=9398 - TEST INTERACTION
Referring back to the lecture where Ben Jack was explaining control vs interaction, this piece of interaction is really a simple design but it makes it that much more interesting; because it does not capture our attention anymore if we figure out the trick behind what a component does. For example, if you found out that clicking on a red button will make the screen dissolve into colours, after a few more clicks you begin to understand and therefore there is nothing further to explore [reference from Ben Jack's lecture].
6-04-11 to 8-04-11
Over the next few days I searched through openprocessing.org and continued looking at the types of mouse interactions. In my results most of them used mouse click a lot which seemed to be the norm.
The ones above where the ones I found that used mouseDragged which was more interesting that simply clicking.
11-04-11 to 14-04-11
Looked at different sounds from a site that I've become familiar with http://josh.agarrado.net/music/anime/ to decide on a piece to use in my application. While doing this I spoke to my tutor about copyright and he suggested that I use other sounds that are free as a precaution therefore I am considering using free sounds on the internet or composing my own sounds.
Over the break
I plan to compose my own sound (or use copyright-free ones on the web) and analyse that test interaction code to try and cause collisions to my application with the mouse. The other part is to incorporate the sound into my code and actually get it to work; after, I will work on the next visuals which are placing blocks of rectangles about the scene to imitate the sheet music and work on developing those rectangles into images.
Lastly the interaction with the mouse that causes lines to spill vertically to the edges of the application for a more "transformed" effect.
18-04-11 to 23-04-11
- I found a piece of music from http://free-loops.com/2811-xylophone.html, a xylophone piece that was really cute and simple, so listening by ear, I tried to make the same music listening by ear.
- Went through quite a few websites and a lot of downloading to find a piece of software that played back the music I took down but NoteWorthy Composer 2 did the job.
- Worked through coding the rectangle bars and used some code from the open processing reference website (ball collisions) for two days.
- The next few days I had to figure out how to make the sounds for the music. I emailed my tutor and he suggested me to make separate note sounds. Here I got the idea to alter my original idea; I decided that I would have the rectangle bars represent each note so that when the mouse moved over it, the mouse would produce the sound. When the mouse moves over each bar, then at the end it would create the sound piece. This I figured would be a much better interaction, because instead of limiting it to just the sound being played repetitively, the user can play around with the sounds and make up their own tunes.
- Thursday: I went to a mini-tutorial to get help with how to get the sounds to play ONLY when my mouse comes into contact with the rectangles. After that, I looked at "Developing Movement and Interaction. Waterfall" by Alex McDougal. I copied the code, and played around with it to fry to understand it. When I had mucked around with the code enough I made a further change to my transformation. I rather like the "Developing Movement and Interaction. Waterfall". The lines falling down really appealed to me so I incorporated something similar into my one, I reduced the gravity time, and changed them to thinner lines. In the end these lines would fall underneath where the rectangle bars are located.
- The following two days I continued to work on placing the sounds in and coded in the alignment for each bar so that it played a sound only when the mouse moved over them.
27-04-11 Saturday:
Today, I worked on a morphologic box to create a light wall paper background that would raise the aesthetics a little.
27-04-11 Wednesday:
I finished up the coding for the sounds and the lines running down.
28-04-11 to 29-04-11:
After making a background (ideas generated from my morphologic box) I finally finished my transformation project.
28-04-11 to 29-04-11:
After making a background (ideas generated from my morphologic box) I finally finished my transformation project.
