Tomorrow Evening » Processing

Particle Play

Colin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:17:06 +0000

First stages of my first personal iPhone/iPad App.

Red circles are touch points.
Double tap to change from creating gravitational fields to adding particles.

Originally written in Processing, Particle Play has been converted to C++ using OpenGL and openFrameworks.

iPhone to Desktop

Colin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 05:15:16 +0000

Firstly, you're going to need Processing, TUIO, and MSARemote. Once you're all set, go ahead and run this. The comments should be very straight forward in introducing using the Processing TUIO API. I decided not to do a video tutorial on this for many reasons, mostly because watching someone code is pretty boring.

Physics and Multitouch

Colin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:31:04 +0000

I've been reading a lot about multi-touch with Flash within the past year and, needless to say, was excited when Adobe announced that CS5 will enable multi-touch directly through Flash. I have a lot of questions about how that willl work and like other API's if it'll be as easy to plug in hardware devices (ie. iPhone, Wii Remotes, etc).
Over the past two weeks I've been doing some tests with TUIO and MSARemote. I wanted to test with Processing because I've been having some tracking problems with Flash (still trying to figure out why it's so jumpy) and Processing is a lot faster.

Also, I've been working on creating a new portfolio site and while brainstorming for it, I decided to do a few physics tests to try Gravity and Repulsion techniques.

As you can see above, the bouncy balls was my first physics test. In that image, I have 12 balls bouncing around, with the yellow ball being what I was dragging with my mouse.

Physics Test 1 w/ Multitouch from Colin Duffy on Vimeo.

Here you can see I implemented TUIO into my project and can control multiple balls with my fingers over my iPhone. I also added a debug mode (turning on and off through double-tapping the iPhone screen) which you can see here. I used TUIO's sample code to display the trail of each finger's movement.

Physics Test 2 w/ Multitouch from Colin Duffy on Vimeo.

This next test involved a gravitational pull with particles that repel off one another. As you can see from the second image, I implemented multi-touch to add points from more than one direction. There's still a few things I'd like to do with this that I'll continue to work on.

Webcam with processing

Colin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:41:02 +0000

So apparently bringing a webcam into processing is not as easy as I thought.

I run Windows Vista at home and Mac OS X at work so I tested at both places. I feel slightly retarded for not seeing this before, but this is on the processing docs page:

Because Apple only supports QuickTime on Mac OS and Windows, other platforms (such as Linux) are not able to use the video library.

You also need video driver software for translating from the proprietary format of your video source into commonly used video functions. You can get this software from the makers of the video hardware.

If you are using a Windows operating system, you will also need a video driver that translates from your hardware to the video functions used by QuickTime. This software may be included in the software provided by the maker of your hardware, or you can download the software. Search for "vdig" using an online search engine to find the software. There's more information about this below...

I finally got the webcam running in both locations today, so later on when I get a chance I plan on converting my AS3 motion detection class to processing. I plan on trying to implement Z space into this project and maybe exaggerating that depth through audio wavelengths... More to come!

Processing Pixel Swarm

Colin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:00:04 +0000

This version of pixel swarm attracts pixels based off the distance (Pythagorean Theorem) between the points and the mouse. I've added gravity and dampening to it so that the pixels bounce around the mouse movement.

In this version of Pixel Swarm I reversed the velocity of the pixels so that instead of adding it's current position to where the mouse was, I subtracted it, giving it this magnifying feeling. I also removed the gravity field so that it's more bouncey and animated. Both versions of the Pixel Swarm in processing display 2,500 movable pixels. The first displaying in a grid and the second using the Logarithmic Sprial. I also changed how the pixels were written. The first was displayed through drawing a rectangle:

noStroke ();
fill (#FFFFFF);
rect (sx, sy, 1, 1);

The second written:

point (sx, sy);

Processing handles drawing points a lot faster than drawing rectangles. The downside to this is that you can't (as far as I know) change the color of the points in processing.
Last, but not least, I added a rectangle under each iteration of the draw function. This gave me control so that the previous point coordinates would echo and visually fade the other pixels out.