Design of Unusual Media

A physical computing box to detect the presence of magnetic darts to assist in the flow of a computer vision dart game.

Magnetic reed switches are positioned around a bolt post to add redundancy. The device is powered over USB and transmits changes in its state serially.

The final will feature RGB leds and no debugging doodads.

Testing out the new CV setup using blob detection example by stefanix for openframeworks

Testing out a bunch of reed switches Pingel hooked me up with.

Ported Robert Penner's elastic ease into processing.

Animated Embed and Source Code after the jump...  read more »

Robert Penner's Easing Equations have been built into Flash since version 6 or 7 as the Tween class (search your Flash directory for Tween.as). But before those days, we had to do things manually. Penners equations in Actionscript are available for download here, with a nice little application to visualize each one here. This is great for when you need to port tweening into a different language like Processing or Openframeworks...

Link

My bank cards have been erased. Oops!

Managed to get Theo Watson's Vector Field example up and running...

This is important as it will allow the digital creatures in my thesis game to stay within level boundaries that I define. The dart throws will modify the vector field, coaxing them to move out of bounds, which kills their asses.

In 2005, Gary Stasiuk gave a lecture at FITC about his Digital Creatures project. It was a fantastic learning experience, and one of my first introduction to thinking formally about Boids. Google helped me find the original presentation, which is full of lots of helpful algorithms that I'd like to integrate into my thesis game... like proper flocking, not just neighbor avoidance...

Digital Creatures Presentation

Vector fields are how I can get the little digital creatures in my game to avoid walls and darts more intelligently. While the gravitational algorithms I'm using are great, they are somewhat limited in terms of how I can get creatures to avoid complex objects.

Enter vector fields:

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