Development:

To develop the ideas behind our project, we intend to build upon a previous project, “The Ecoid Project”, we created within this module. Our original project used a few of the Ecoids and created a static environment for them to be displayed.

Our expansion on the initial project will first of all improve and fix bugs we had first time round. Then we hope to change some of the Ecoid outcomes. One instance is that instead of the temperature affecting the ‘shaking’ of the Ecoid, it will become a hotspot and “attract” the colder Ecoids, like them “huddling for warmth”.

Another expansion will be to give the Ecoid’s some kind of AI system allowing them to interact with one another and allowing them to continue “growing” the longer they are producing similar results.

We wish to explore the use of live feeds, Processing and data visualisations to ultimately produce something that can be used to display the health of all of the Ecoids in a way that is visually interesting to both people that are working on the project analysing the data and to strangers to the project.

After discussing which directions we would like the second version of this project we brainstormed ideas and came up with the following notes:

Plan of Work:

Production Timetable; plan of work and time scale for developing and completing the project.

Output:

The foreseen end result of the project is that we will have a visualisation that displays the Ecoid data sets in a biologically influenced manner. It should act as a semi-simulative visualisation that acts upon the ecoid ‘cells’ to create a visualisation ‘ecosystem’. The visualisation should be able to make people think about the data gathered differently from simple statistics.

-          The anticipated outcome of our project is that we have a visualisation that can be used as a tool to analyse the data gathered via RSS feeds from the Ecoids for the use of developers and interested onlookers.

-          It will also act as an educational tool for the schools that some of the Ecoids will be placed to show the development or patterns of the eco system around.

-          It can also be useful to people interested in eco science and would like to see the information in a way better suited to more visual learners, using colours and shapes rather than numbers and symbols.

Criteria:

We will produce a sophisticated visualisation of the data gathered from the Ecoid project that DAT is currently undertaking. It will display data in a new way that will simulate the data in its own self-contained eco-system which will allow the Ecoids to take on “life” and interact with each other. While on face value this project will appear to be just a visualisation, it will be in fact a simulation of the data as if they had organic characteristics. It is a large improvement on a previous session in which we created a very basic version of this.

We will be using our technical skills to display the information using the RSS feeds from the Ecoids that will be/have been deployed around the South West and inputting them into Processing, using several additional libraries to enhance both its look, performance and ability. Our conceptual skills will be present as we are using the data as I mentioned previously as a biologically inspired and influenced simulation designed to give the data more life and hopefully make the information easier to analyse.

References:

The Blind Watchmaker:

http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/mirror/biomorph/

Spore Prototypes (Net City, Cell Culture):

http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

Lindenmayer System:

http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e28_3/lsys.html

http://www.erase.net/projects/l-systems/

Processing Libraries:

http://mrfeinberg.com/peasycam/

http://ekeneijeoma.com/processing/ijeomamotion/

http://www.leebyron.com/else/shapetween/#

http://www.looksgood.de/libraries/Ani/

http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/controlP5/#examples

Visual Material:

The Ecoid Project 1.0:

The Blind Watchmaker:

L Systems:

Now, ecoids are small devices that collect weather and environment data using XBEES from around North Devon and part of a DAT project lead by Lee Nutbean. We saw a project created by Simon that visualised each ecoid on seperate visualisations, so we decided to visualise all of them on one screen. Mike Philips seemed to like the idea as it could potentially be something he could use, rather than the more physical projects other students were doing.

Although the data was from visualising weather data, the word 'Ecoid' sounded like something biological and so we took that inspiration to make each ecoid look like a cell. The humidity affected the size of the ecoids, the light levels affected the glow around them, temperature the proximity to the center of the screen and the stretch value would make the background bubble move around more.

http://thelockwood.co.uk/ecoid/EcoidVis.zip

We were asked to create a machine that could detect if someone was in love or not and split into groups and each given tools to do this. Unfortunately we were given an Automagraph, a device made from two glass pains laid horizontally with three brass bearings in between. The user needed to rest their hand on it and were shown objects that represented something.

To try and measure 'happiness' as a trial run, I put my hand on the Automagraph while Sam showed me a presentation he put together of all the things he thought made me happy. To show my hand movement, a graphics tablet was attached with the pen attached to the end so we could measure how my hand moved.

The results seemed to prove that I moved when I was happy, however subconsciously I may have moved to see if the device would work or not.

Afterwards we were set to combine technologies to make one Love Machine. Unfortunately the group as a whole decided that the newer technologies would be much better so we really didn't have much to contribute in the discussion..

I explained my process, how I entered in the values and played it. It took a while and a little of me pointing out some of the notes but most people seemed to get it in the end. Here is my final project:

http://thelockwood.co.uk/superstition/dan lockwood.rar

After many a Google search I found an add on for MaxMSP called Cycling '74 which allowed me to enter notes from an .xml feed.

I quickly regretted my 'braveness' as I remembered that I had neither any musical talent or the ability to read music. I managed to find some sheet music to Stevie Wonder's Superstition and decided that it was going to be the song I will re-represent.

I then worked out from the notation  the notes themselves, how long the note went on for and the pitch of the note which took many, many hours.

Its interface was very object orientated, which suited me as I dislike coding heavy programs.

We were given the first session to have a play with the program and were given a crash course in its functionality. The example included patches to run midi, audio, video, Arduino and make_controller.

When we did, we started work on mapping our faces to it and creating a 'Mount DATmore'. We got the faces done and were reading to continue however when we wanted to work on it at home, we discovered we didn't have the software we needed to use it and that we exported it wrong.

For the presentation, we explained our situation and we then used the uni computers to show him what we would have done.

Due to the difficulty of this task, I may rethink my final project.

As it turns out using the Kinect with 3DS Max is really difficult to use. We all tried to get it to work, but none of us had any idea how to get it to work. Eventually, with a lot of help, we got somewhere but didn't have an idea.

We decided on a feed that we thought would be cool, one based on earthquake data and went with a familiar program to run it in, Flash.

After a week, we came back with an interesting visualisation of square shaped blocks in a 'box' that shaked around according to the earthquake data using a physics engine to simulate it.

You can also download our app here:

http://thelockwood.co.uk/KKP/FoodScannAR+.apk