Oolong’s Playground

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 the second point, whereas Shimmia draws a pixel at the first point which gets its colour from second point in an image. The relation between them is quite a lot like the one between caustics and refracted images, though the mathematical analogy is not exact.

Click and drag inside the applet with either mouse button (or, if you only have one, with and with the closest thing you have to a Ctrl button) to change the frequency and amplitude of the waves. Drag with shift held down to change their speed.

For now the image is just this one I took of some leaves, but I figure I’ll see if I can pull pictures from Flickr later.