dave.special_topics

The latest build of my project.

Hold Space and blow.  Hit enter to move on to the next image. 

This is the software side of the hacked mouse image gallery. The hardware side has not yet been implemented.  When run in a browser, the processing program tends to lag.

Keys 1-8 control blow points. The ‘n’ key moves to the next image.

The concept for this project came from a brainstorming time in class. I was planning on creating something involving an air pump, and Justin Herrara suggested blowing sand or leaves off of an image. That is exactly what I’m doing.

In the hardware side, my original thought was to mount 4 wind sensors around a screen laying flat on the desk - one on each side. When the user blows at the screen, the sand will move away, revealing the image beneath. However, after further thought, I realized I can create a weather vane that is directly connected to one of the mouse axis.

It was a lot of work to get this thing working. First I tried to figure out the math by myself and got really frustrated. Eventually I found traer.physics, a physics library in which I could create particles with attraction. By giving each grain of sand a negative attraction to the wind origin, I was able to blow them away.

Implementing the images was fairly simple, although I spent lots of time creating a system that automatically collects all image files from a certain directory (as opposed to manually entering their names into an array). When I put the program together, I couldn’t get this system to work, so I went with the easy, traditional image array instead.

The next step is creating the wind sensors, and programming a bit more code to get them working.

Translating my Actionscript program into Processing was fairly painless.  Functions and syntax are fairly similar in both languages.  I did get stuck when I tried to draw something outside of the draw() and setup() functions, but I figured out the problem eventually.  I still don’t quite understand how drawing functions work, but I’ll figure it out with experience. 

 I would have liked to add a blur to the cursor to make it more visually appealing, but research indicates that only images can be blurred easily.  Also, an accurate mouse pointer shape would be difficult to achieve without an image, and I didn’t have time to figure out how to change the color/alpha of the image - so I stuck with a shape

My intent was to make this game so obvious that no explanation is required.  I’m not sure how well I achieved that goal. 

 In the game, the cursor gets appears as it gets closer to a hidden point.  When the point is found, it flashes, then moves to a different location.  Mouse input is used to detect proximity, not to determine the position of anything.

Initially I was going to make a box change color from hot(red) to cold(blue) based on the proximity to the hidden point.  I used to play “hot and cold” with my dad when I was young.  After much experimentation, I realized that subtle color changes difficult for the eye to detect. A transparency change is easier to see.