Some Random Dude

Some Random Dude is a blog by P.J. Onori that covers design & technology in the broadest sense possible.

Archive for the ‘Design Technology’ Category

Click on one of the items below to go to the post

Processing Motion Experiment – Wandering Blossoms

I truly am loving how I can take a piece of code and begin to have it exist in various mediums. This experiment was actually posted to my Vimeo account quite a while ago, but I wanted to output this project as a vector piece as well. I actually think my previous project would be ended up as a good candidate for vector output as well – I may go back and add that at a later time. This project was just another test on playing with motion preceding my knowledge of the noise() method. Looking back, a similar look in motion could have been achieved with far fewer lines of code. Nonetheless, I think the final result ended up being quite nice.

I hope to continue to have the time to post these projects. I feel as though I am (slowly) getting a grasp on how this whole Processing thing works. My goal is to cross-pollinate any future Processing projects with Flash/Flex projects. I have a few ideas on how that may just happen.

Wandering Blossoms from P.J. Onori on Vimeo.

Processing Motion Experiment – Meander

I have really fallen in love with Processing, but I had been had hit a bit of a plateau in terms of progress in the past month or so. I never really have spent too much time with algorithmic motion/drawing. When I jumped into Flash, I went straight towards the Tween class and never spent much time trying to work in the EnterFrame-loop based motion design. Because of this, learning how to work with Processing’s draw() loop has been a bit foreign and one can only find so many ways to implement sine/cosine motion treatments.

Luckily, I ran across the simply stunning work of Robert Hodgin who just happened to offer up his source code. After looking through one of his projects and banging away at it, I ended up learning a quite a bit on how motion can end up looking more organic and sporadic. This particular project used the noise() method as its basis for motion jittering. I had not even known such a method existed. After hacking up Robert’s source, I came up with some really interesting form experiments using Robert’s general motion concepts.

Read On…

Actionscript 3 Bitmap Segmentor (Source Code Included)

For quite some time now, I have been playing with breaking DisplayObjects into a grid to sample pixel data in order to create visualizations. I have spent time with this in both Actionscript and in Processing (see project). For Actionscript in particular though, I wanted to make the process cleaner and easier to implement. What has resulted is a slightly tangential project which ultimately makes sampling pixel data easier while offering a whole separate set of features. In its simplest form, the BitmapSegmentor allows you to take a DisplayObject’s bitmapData and break it into a grid of individual segments. These segments can then be used for various purposes, including pixel data sampling.
Read On…

Actionscript 3 Layout Organizers Examples and Source Code

A while back, I posted a basic example of layout organizers and layout organizers applied to video. I kept talking about how cool I considered this idea to be, yet I had yet to truly explain the idea and (more importantly) the source code for people to download. I wanted to make sure the code was at a good spot before releasing it; I believe that is now the case. You will find examples, the basic gist on how it works and some possible reasons why layout organizers may just make your life easier.

Update: This code base has now been released under the name coordy. Read more.

Read On…

A Drive Down California Street – A Real-Time Visualization Project

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I took a drive through San Francisco. With us, we brought two laptops that recorded the drive through their webcams. Using Processing, the webcam video data was analyzed and reinterpreted into abstract visualizations. This project was a test-run of a larger project myself and a few friends are working on, but I thought it would be fun to show you what has been done thus far.

The concept behind this project was to take ordinary scenes from everyday life and turn them into something that would look completely alien, yet familiar enough to have the faintest semblance of normality in order for the viewer to digest what they saw. The data stream was too great for the application to read/analyze/interpret/output in absolute real time, so the videos appear to be sped up due to dropped frames. The size of the objects were based on the brightness in the relative area of the video, the colors of each shape mirrors the general color in that portion of the video. The captures were taken at night which is the reason for the strong contrast and bright colors. Read On…