I was interested in how to convey emotion by manipulating simple connected lines or dots in patterns.
I ended up building two things: one is a very rough drawing tool that manipulates tree structures, the other controls a group of dots.
To say that these programs as they stand now convey emotion is not true. I ended up thinking a lot about what tools someone would need to do this.
The tree program allows users to add and delete branches and to move them around. There are then a couple pre-programmed behaviors.
These are not as interesting as I would like because they are imposed from without the structure, e.g. the nodes that form the branches aren't
really passing any information or effecting each other.
The node program is more rudimentary, it simply has 6 preset behaviors that the user can cycle through. This program treats each dots as an cyclic attractor
that attracts and repels the other nodes. The behavior is a result of the aggregate behavior of each individual and is thus closer to what I want conceptually.
There is a whole lot more to say about this than I can here. There are alot of things I will do differently in the next version (nesting classes being tantamount)
as the way I linked nodes in the tree together along a single arraylist was a pain for adding, subtracting or passing information.
Come talk to me if you are interested by this!
jeff
| links to final | TREE NODES NODEBURST |