Tobias Toft

First post in a long time! Last week and this week has been all about computational design. I assume you all know what computational design is, but for the guy who accidentally got in here while searching for pictures of the Pope riding a chopper, i’ll try to explain it anyway:

Computational design is basically when you use a computational approach to design something. It can be everything from physical products to pure aesthetics (e.g. this fuzzy thing called art). It is often used in the field of “information visualization”, where you use computational methods to visualize information graphically to give an overview of e.g. large or complex amounts of data. This is where computers come in handy, as computational design often includes a lot of math and calculations. A classical example of computational graphics is the visualization of Mandelbrot sets. Mandelbrot sets are practically impossible to draw by hand because of their complexity, but for computers it is a piece of cake.

Mandelbrot sets would not be funny to draw by hand

My task for this week is to visualize and present data that we (my group consisting of an american, an indian, an italian, a korean and two danes) have collected by strapping a WiiRemote to people’s hands and heads while they do the common greeting of their home country. Meaning that the danish guy is shaking hands, the italian girl is kissing cheeks, the indian guy is bowing and so on. I’m not really sure how to do it yet, but I have an idea of visualizing the accelerometer data in a way that will show the similarities of the different greetings. On friday we will be exhibiting the results of these two weeks, with both static and interactive stuff to look at and try out.

We use Processing to gather and visualize the data. It is quite easy to get started with Processing – especially if you know a little bit of programming (especially Java) beforehand. I did some small programs in Processing last week, before starting the greetings-project. One of my first sketches was an interactive clock, with three trees growing according to the current time of the day. The trees are generated by using recursive mathematical functions (mostly vectors as in linear algebra) spiced up with a bit of randomness, giving an almost infinite number of different kinds of trees.

The partly interactive Tree Clock

By the way, the trees also react to the sound in the room, so if you shout at them, they will shiver.

Another thing I have been doing is a graphics filter, based on the work of Craig T. MacKenzie, that maps pixels in an image and draw lines between them. The result is not as beautiful as Craig’s PixelPath images, but at least I learned a lot about processing images and handling large amounts of data.

A close-up image of a patio heater used for testing my code

The filter approximately half way through processing the image above

The final result

If you’re interested in seeing some really nice computational art, take a look at Alex Dragulescu’s work or just search Google for “computational art”.

Oh yeah, and for the guy who was looking for that “Pope on a chopper”-image. Here it is:

The Pope on a chopper

If you want more Pope-images, go here.

Tags: ciid, fourth week, processing, third week

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 14:05 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.