todd

Semester Proposals

OK, here are a few ideas for what I might like to do this semester:

1: Something Anaglyph
I’ve been experimenting with anaglyph, the “poor man’s stereography", and find myself as interested in its inherent limitations as its strengths. I’m working on a few ideas for games, fairly simple ones, that use hijacked anaglyphic techniques. Right now I’m looking at how far I can get with a piece that only uses silhouettes, the only depth cue being stereoscopic (and perhaps some parallax). Some of the animations and backgrounds I’ve been toying have had some interesting results, and I think that a very engaging, dynamic atmosphere could be expressed using this and other anaglyph techniques.
I’d either use Director or OpenGL towards this end, both show promise.

2: Grow Yer Own Enviornment
The moment I heard the two phrases “Artificial Life” and “Architecture” together I immediately had associations similar to “Peanut Butter” and “Chocolate”. Some sites I’ve found on the web seem to have also associated these different but possibly symbiotic ideas in a few different ways; I myself am curious to see if, given a set of initial constraints and variables, a computer could create an engaging place for a user to explore. The interior of buildings, or terrain, or cities (such as “create a random 2 square miles of the Inland Empire”) could all be interesting…the major problems would involve avoidance of blatant repetition, as well as generating something interesting enough for a person to want to explore.

3. Oscilloscope Terrain
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m still interested in its implications. For those who just entered the blog: If you set the WinAmp oscilloscope to “expand” and “fade out”, as the waveforms change and leave behind afterimages, it looks for all the world the surface of a planet. Fine, even waveforms resemble rolling hills, shouting and complex sums end up looking like desert badlands. My idea is to have a psuedogeological map generated by the sound or musical piece of one’s choice…it would be a matter of transcoding the sound data into a heightmap, using a library like OpenGL (my current plane of action). Ultimately I’d want to texture map the resulting geometry to make it look as much like an actual landscape as I can. The whole thing may end up resembling a Michel Gondry/Chemical Brothers video.
Oh, I originally mentioned this in relation with the projection system in the ZML…the added immersion could prove very effective.

I've a few more ideas, but these are the one's I've been able to write out the most coherently (you can imagine what the others are like, then). I'll be posting some other ideas as well, although these would be for a longer-term project.