How About A Nice Game Of Chess?

Week two, done. A tough week for me, being a non-coder by trade, but thankfully due to some excellent tuition and supremely understanding housemates I now have at least a basic understanding of the program and its capabilities. Although still rather bewildering in its complexities and nuances, I have come to appreciate the vast possibilities that Processing presents. If you can break an idea down into its base elements, it can be built. Keep it logical and it is achievable.

Following on from our Snake clone, our team of three chose to stick with the game format and try something a little more involved. The game itself played second fiddle to the technology, which this time saw the player attempt to navigate a sea of spheres each of which had been programmed to try to avoid both the player and each other (vectors and repulsion). The player was tasked to seek out one particular unmarked sphere (the 'mate'), which when found would become one with the player, increasing his size and affecting the vector attributes of the surrounding spheres. Not the most riveting game ever made, granted, but an interesting exercise nonetheless.

Thursday and Friday saw us move from working with live data to visualising pre-recorded data. Using the distance-sensing Arduino I recorded a night's worth of sleep, using the distance monitor to measure my movement. This data worked out to be over 22,000 values, each of which represented a second of my sleep. The group then used this data to produce visualisations of my night's sleep. Some of these visualisations included secondary data sources (ambient temperature, air moisture levels) and made use of some beautiful graphical techniques (3D rendering, advanced generative graphics), but a lot of these techniques were far beyond my basic grasp of the language. Instead I focused on array aesthetics, or the beauty of large quantities of information. My image consisted of all 22,284 values portrayed as individual spheres of differing sizes and colours dependant n the size of the value. These were broken down into rows of ten minute intervals giving a chronology to the overall image. Although simple, when printed at large scale the piece worked really well, allowing movement patterns to appear whilst also becoming almost overpowering when looked at up close.

There’s something I find very appealing about array aesthetics – the use of simple individual elements on mass to create something powerful is an interesting technique that I’d like to explore further.

A few images;