MAPS & JOURNEYS: Testing Out Interactivity
After deciding that i'd like to try out making an interactive piece of art, the main advice that i got was to dig in to programming on my own, as for the time being that would be my only way of doing something like this.
Searching for an easy to use programming language was not easy, but in the past i had used something called "Quartz Composer" for a short amount of time.
Quartz Composer is a node-based visual programming language by Apple that does not require coding knowlege. You basically have to connect values through effects in a flowchart.
After downloading the SDK, and looking at examples i tried myself to create something.
The first thing was to determine a source to drive things... the only thing i had available that could generate a single value that i could use to drive something else was my microphone. Searching in the quartz composer library of nodes i found a node that converted sound in to numeric values.
After that i used some of the build in textures and renderers to create a particle system and two sun flares, one red and one green, and then used the following values to drive the animation:
Audio Amplitude > Particles per Second
Bass Amplitude > Red Ring Opacity
Treble Amplitude > Green Ring Opacity
Time > Ring Animation
Also i used some basic math to re-scale the values so that the visuals looked right.
Here is how the project looked after all of the above:
The pink node at the top left is the sound being converted to numbers. The small black nodes are math, the big black nodes are texture generators (a glow sphere for the particles, and the ring textures) and the blue nodes are renders like the particles or an image node.
And this is what the final composition looks like when an audio track is fed in to the input:
Concluding, i feel like i could somehow use Quartz to quickly create some basic interactivity... Also this was quite fun to make and i now feel a bit more comfortable with the software.
Searching for an easy to use programming language was not easy, but in the past i had used something called "Quartz Composer" for a short amount of time.
Quartz Composer is a node-based visual programming language by Apple that does not require coding knowlege. You basically have to connect values through effects in a flowchart.
After downloading the SDK, and looking at examples i tried myself to create something.
The first thing was to determine a source to drive things... the only thing i had available that could generate a single value that i could use to drive something else was my microphone. Searching in the quartz composer library of nodes i found a node that converted sound in to numeric values.
After that i used some of the build in textures and renderers to create a particle system and two sun flares, one red and one green, and then used the following values to drive the animation:
Audio Amplitude > Particles per Second
Bass Amplitude > Red Ring Opacity
Treble Amplitude > Green Ring Opacity
Time > Ring Animation
Also i used some basic math to re-scale the values so that the visuals looked right.
Here is how the project looked after all of the above:
And this is what the final composition looks like when an audio track is fed in to the input:
Concluding, i feel like i could somehow use Quartz to quickly create some basic interactivity... Also this was quite fun to make and i now feel a bit more comfortable with the software.
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