Looking Outwards 2

BitTorrent Visualization

The visualizer can be found here. I found this project by Chris Lee at processingjs.org/exhibition. I immediately admired it because it found a way to demonstrate a complex idea using simple and easy to understand animations. It also manages to look quite interesting and flow smoothly between different modes. For instance the addition or removal of a seed or peer flows smoothly when readjusting the circle and continues to move the “data” bubbles between the seed and peers. It also uses color very well. Not only does it look nice because of the bright rainbow of colors that are used, but the colors also manage to represent separate parts of the data, thus allowing it to more precisely demonstrate how BitTorrents work. It is interesting to me further because it finds a concrete way to demonstrate the operation of a complex system using a simple animation with little to no textual information. I often find that diagrams for systems I am shown use too much text and little to no color and leave most people confused because they simply can’t keep all that textual information in their head when looking at the whole diagram.

Interactive wall with Kinect

I felt that while this demo was interesting, it could have been better executed. The jittering 2D physics (Box2D for oF by the looks of it) in the demo left the demo feeling broken. It seemed that whenever the user touched the screen a new solid was added that left the system throwing things around because an impossible state was reached. It would have looked better if when the user touched the screen that area was held by the user. Then the user would be able to throw, slide, or pick up things and the simple physics wouldn’t have looked broken. However, the demo did show that the addition of a user experience adds a lot to a simple demo. This demo was made by Biopus Studio which after further reseach appears to have many much more interesting interactive electronic art pieces.

My Life Aquatic

http://mylifeaquatic.herokuapp.com/

This surprised me simply because of the amount of time that I spent having this fish collect food. This simple application manages to make you forget that it is an just a simple game by calming you with music while you gently steer a fish around to keep it alive. I like it because it uses sound and smooth animation together well with a very smooth style. The interactive aquarium was developed by Sunah Suh and David Leibovic and the koi which were used were designed by nardove. Nardove has the following quote on his/her website which I appreciated.

do { enjoy(); } while( coding == play );