http://oolong.co.uk/play adventures in generative art and fun mathematics Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:36:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Interactive animations need intuitive controls to make them easy to play with. Since they always have a bunch of parameters to control, dragging with the mouse always seems a bit clumsy. I figured that what's really wanted is a bank of sliders and buttons to play with, each controlling a parameter. ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/its-about-control The pattern traced out by Trochor is what you'd get if you took a pencil moving in ellipses, and used it to draw on a sheet of paper that's also moving in ellipses. It's a bit like a spirograph, but not constrained in quite the same ways. It's more like ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/trochor Processing is a language created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas of MIT, designed to make computer programming accessible to people who might imagine it will always be beyond their grasp. Processing makes it easy to create beautiful, interactive graphics. The principles of computer programming are surprisingly simple and powerful. They ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/whyprogram For those who might be interested in where all these pretty pictures and animations come from, I have recently written a piece about Processing, the open-source programming language that most of them are made in. Processing is designed to be easy to learn and quick for knocking up simple programs ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/processing Algorithmically distorting images is fun! Shimmia re-uses most of the maths and the code from Zoobie - both programs run through a grid of points, and for each one they pick a second point, displaced from the first by the interactions of waves. Zoobie then draws a semi-transparent triangle at ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/shimmia Snake Charmer is an applet closely based on Paul Friedlander's light sculptures, which use hanging ropes spun at varying speeds, combined with 'Chromastrobic' lights' (changing colour very quickly), to produce stunning visual effects. I recommend seeing the full-sized, physical ones if you ever get the chance, but I think there's ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/snake-charmer Resonata Squared is based on a stack of chains, each transmitting waves at a different speed, but all driven by the same driving frequency. The original Resonata is considerably more sophisticated in various ways, but really almost completely different. http://oolong.co.uk/play/resonata-squared Having finally looked up how to produce big images in processing, I've been having great fun digging up code I originally wrote more than a decade ago in POCO (the Autodesk Animator Pro variant of C), translating it into Processing and whipping up stills which are potentially big enough to ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/big-images Curlicor is a very simple toy. You basically control the steering wheel of the triangle. If you keep turning it you produce curlicue fractals. Click on the applet to toggle between mouse and keyboard control. Unlike most of my interactive animations, this one really requires interaction in order to do ... http://oolong.co.uk/play/hello-world