Carianne’s and my final project focused on making a processing program that could actually represent a game of volleyball. We each focused and worked on different parts on our own and then brought them together in class. I worked on the mechanics of the ball and how it was effected by gravity, the hand, and how it would interact with the environment. It took awhile for me to look up, understand, and write the equations for gravity and make it look real. It also took awhile to have the hand variable keep track of the speed that it was going and impart it onto the ball when it touched the edge of it. Carianne focused on the net, background, and how the ball would interact with objects. When we brought the two together we then added a set of state machines to allow it to keep track of score, position, and even begin to play with serving and playing the game.
Author Archives: miketobey
Final Exercise: Moving Cubes
For the final exercise I took the basic outline and recreated and modified the example we made in class. I created a wider arrange of colors for each of the shapes and varied the sizes of the cubes. Along with this I modified the starting speed and the angular speed allowing them to head off in any direction. Lastly I introduced the mouse functionality of the program using the left and right click of the mouse. If no button is pressed the cubes will just continually bounce around the screen as they normally do. If, however, the left mouse button is clicked all the shapes will ease themselves towards the mouse and stop. If the right mouse button is pressed they will move apart more quickly as they speed up faster towards the edges.
Project Idea: Interactive Node War
My first ideas for the final project was to continue on with my room controller idea and have my project be about utility and have it serve a function that was very technical. After some thought though and reworking some of my initial ideas I decided to change what I wanted my project to be. I wanted to still have some sense of utility or rather a technical aspect to it, but I wanted it to focus on expanding it and the interaction between the systems and making it into a game.
So my idea for my project is that there a few nodes, or input points, that are located in different places and that all interact with each other. These nodes each have a set number of cubes, color, etc. that can only exist in one node at a time. Now people can call them to another node, but it then steals it from the node it was at. Sort of link in the game Tentacle wars where you have to send out your own objects in the node to attack another and take it over.
Assignment 4: Mouse interactivity
I modified the base in class program, with some help from others as I got caught up on the language and programing a few times, to meet what the TODO list said to do. In the actual assignment itself I added another layer of parsing which gave me the ability to generate different sized triangles. I then used this to create another series of random ranged triangles based on the points gather from the new information. I then made it so when a person clicks the left mouse button, anywhere on the screen, it would run the program and generate the triangles, and when someone right clicks the program restarts and clears the data.
After finishing the input side I began to mess around with the class function and what I could do to it. I found it boring that the shapes only went to one side of the screen and added some additional parameters allowing them to move in all directions. I added another set of parameters after that allowing me to generate random colors for each triangle, this one required some help from others as at first mine were only grey scaled. Lastly I moved on to changing the update me function to allow and change these results each time the program was called. The final product can be seen in the slide show below going from start, a series of left clicks, and finally a right click.
Assignment 3.5: Interactive XML
I managed to add the ability for the mouse to interact with the boxes, by changing their color, but it still isn’t tied to their location. The left click turns the boxes white while the right click turns them into a dark grey. I tried to add a function that made it detect where the mouse was, and it did, so that if it was pressing the range it would only change that box. That only worked on a single point and didn’t even change the box it was on. If anyone has any suggestions or advice as to what might be wrong with it in terms of selecting a box that would be helpful.
Assignment 3: XML
This is my attempt at assignment 3 and creating a series of boxes, with labels, from an XML document. Each box has a series of variables that determine where on the screen it will be in relation to the others. They always have a boundary of pixels around them so they won’t touch and an offset to make the text in the center of the box. Each box in the XML document has another set of boxes and list of variables that are suppose to happen when it is clicked, to give it another set of objects. I currently haven’t added the mouse interactivity to the program as I don’t quite know how to make it select just a single area. Below is an image of what the program looks like:
If you have any thoughts, comments, or help it would be greatly appreciated.
Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate
Robots can fly themselves and cooperate, without any help from humans. If you had any doubt about this claim check out this video and see it for yourself. Though it might be a different type of programming to allow these robots to fly and navigate without human help, it shows the power that programming can have. That it allows robots to construct a, small, building from a set of inputs; fly in formations; and do things, on their own, that would normally take multiple people to do. Overall it was a very interesting video that was fun to watch, and if you are a fan of the James Bond movies you should at least check out the end.
Click to get to the video: Here
Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
An interesting TED talk that talks about where we have been and where we are going as we move towards the future. Talks about how as we more further in terms of technology we gain access to more energy, more resources, and the integration of more technology into our devices. What was the most interesting to me, and for the class, was the creating of the challenge to make an app for the cellphone that acted better then a board of doctors. Overall this was a great video and I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it, you check it out.
Click to get to the video: Here
Concrete-Jet Robot
Fun little video about an idea for the ability for a house to be prefabricated and then constructed using a robot. That the designs could be drawn up the same way we use the CMC and laser cutter to create a whole house. It shows the potential of machines and robots in not only making objects at a small scale, but of making houses and what this might be applied to. That if we can make houses and other small buildings this could potentially become a way to erect an entire building. I found it interesting and I hope you find it interesting too.
Fun little link
One of my friends pointed me to this link of a fun little interactive piece of dot art online. I found it interesting and mildly inspiration for how people can make art and programs that interact and change with how the user moves their mouse over it. The final shape is set, but the lead up and discovering of guessing what it is was fun enough that I wanted to share it. Here is the link to the site: LINK
Also as a note be careful as it doesn’t seem to like Internet Explorer, according to one of my other friends. As a challenge see how long it takes you to guess the image. I hope it can be as fun and inspirational for you as it was for me, and remember don’t spoil the image by posting what it is, let others find out and discover it.
arch 430 | networked technologies 