Creative Technology introduced me to the world of programming and programming languages. So far I have only learned how to program in Java using a compiler called Processing. Processing is a handy tool to write programs with visual outputs. The learning curve was fairly steep and we went from drawing a character in Processing to making a piece of artwork interactive.

Ironman Screensaver

On the left is a screen-shot of the Ironman figures bouncing around the screen. I had added an additional function so that when a user pressed any key on the keyboard, repulsor trails appeared next to his palms and the repulsor sound affect from the movie was played.

Joan Miro interactive painting

Our Final programming assignment for the first module was to make an abstract painting by an artist interactive. I chose a work by Joan Miro which depicts a humanoid figure in the moonlight. I divided the painting into four parts and if the mouse hovered in the top left of the picture, the background remained the original blue, bottom left became green, top right became red and bottom right became yellow. The color of the star changed like a disco light when hovered over it. The moon vibrated like a speaker when a key was pressed and when the key 'm' was pressed then music started playing. If the mouse hovered over one of the creature's eyes then an 'ow' sound was played and if the mouse hovered over one of the creatures legs then it animated them like it was running.

Random Walker

I programmed a walker that walked around in a grid. The program kept track of which cells were visited and assigned a new color with a varying alpha to each visited cell.

Algorithms End Assignment

For our final assignment in module 4 for programming, we had to incorporate particle systems, flocking behaviour, a mass spring damper system and randomness into our program. We made a game where you had to click on the enemy who moved around the screen randomly. When the mouse was clicked a batarang (projectile) was thrown in the direction of the enemy. If the enemy was hit, blood particles would spew from him as can be seen in the picture. The flowers moved in as if there was a breeze in the field and if the flowers were hit with a batarang by mistake, a swarm of bees would emerge and displaying flocking behaviour as they moved around the screen.

Interactive Game in C++

In the 6th module, we were given an end assignment to interface an input device with an application that used a search algorithm. Our group created a 3D motion controller using an accelerometer and an arduino and used it to control the character Zelda, in a simplified version of the Legend of Zelda game that we coded ourselves.