Tangible Interaction

Processing: Interactive Simulation

A simulated sketch of a natural system environment by Julia, Alba, Miranda, and Miguel, who happens to be behind the camera.

(Students Julia, Alba, & Miranda speak to Professor Maxim about their formulated storyline of a natural system)

What's the story?

Before coding our processing sketch our team of four got together to brainstorm the natural system that we will be designing. We came up with as many ideas as we could think of for 10 minutes before narrowing down to one. As a group we decided to elaborate on the nature of an ant's life journey.

Originally we thought we would be using the wind as a natural force. Wind coming from the left direction will have different nature affects than the wind coming in from the right. This idea quickly transformed into something new.

We came up with a natural environment of rain and how its nourishment contributes to the growth of plants and vegetation. After the rain stops, food then grows.

The purple oval represents the aerial view of an ant hill. The green and red dots represents fruit grown from trees after the rain stops. Ants will come out of the dark space to get food. Once the ant eats the food it will then multiply.

To represent an ants life cycle we wanted to incorporate a foot attempting to stomp the school of ants. Many ants will squirm back to their ant hill while others will rest in peace. RIP ants.

THE END.

(Don't worry Julia's got it!)

Coding Ants

Exploring all options in order to tell our story through a visual of processing we briefly spoke to Professor Maxim about creating shapes to imprint a stomping foot and explain our group's next steps.

The team successfully achieved a natural force of rain by using PVectors. Next we created a circle to represent the top of an ant hill. Simultaneously we were working on another design to create fruit growing on grass from the nourishing rain. We knew this had to be characterized randomly. Once we were successful at the two, we would be merging the code.

Here's the successful merge. . .

Although our code is starting to follow along with our outlined story, we felt stuck. We were determined to figure out how to multiply ants after eating the fruit. We were inspired by Professor's OOP basics sketch to populate more ants after they seem to eat the fruit.

We were able to successfully code in a school of ants in search of food, but unfortunately the ants are missing their target, the fruit!

With the help of our Professor our team was able target the ants to its desired food by changing its conditional statements. With the scope of the project our code became very intricate, leaving the ants to multiply once food was eaten but this occurred in ant hill. Our desired location was for the ants to multiply at food. Our collaboration helped each designer to learn more about arrays and customizing conditionals to trigger exact event.