
Open Source Cinema | Open Source Actor
Concept Last week I wrote in length (and discussed in class) about how the VR experience typically lacks an emotional anchor / proxy, and therefore fails to suspend user's disbelief of the experience. I drew a comparison with low-fi Youtube vlogs, which don't have high production value but the emotional experience is well anchored by the personalities. So this week, to facilitate the creation of more compelling characters within a VR experience (instead of high-res environmen

ICM | Final Project | Taylor Swift Deep Dive
Final project can be viewed here. Taylor Swift - Deep Dive is a 5-part visualizations of Taylor Swift's body of work. It is also a part of a larger study on fandom culture (to be released soon). The final website page was made using wix, with iframes of different 5 p5.js sketches. Part 1. Musicality For this chart, all of Taylor Swift's singles are mapped according to their genres, year released, keys, beats per minute (BPM), and peak chart position in the US. Part of the cha

ICM | Week 8 | Music Videos' Color Palettes
This week's assignment is brought to you by gazillion of artists / visualizers who made posters from the colors used in various movies (e.g. this guy). I wanted to do the same, taking the averages of colors in a frame and put them in a row. To get the average, I recursively add the R, G, B values into separate variables, and later count the average by dividing the totals by video.height * video.width. for (let cx = 0; cx < video.width; cx ++) {
for (let cy = 0; cy < vide

ICM | Week 7 | Who's the most mention-worthy pop queen?
Finding the data I knew I wanted to do something lighthearted, particularly on the topic of pop culture (I'm kind of obsessed with pop culture). After watching Shiffman's video on NYT API, I went to NYTimes API page, and did some browsing on what data I could get and make sense of. They have lots of data to work on, but I decided to use "Article Search" API and measure "word count" to (subjectively) measure the "mention-worthiness" of some pop queens over the course of the de

Visualizing My Personal Space (Part 2)
Read part 1 here. Getting Sensors on My Body I made the visualization program, now it was time to getting the actual data (i.e. placing sensors on my body). I already had some IR distance sensors from my theremin project, but I decided to buy ultrasonic sensors instead since they: (1) have a range from 2-400cm, and (2) give a value that can be readily converted into cm's. The sensors had to be on my body so my dear roommate sewed a pouch/necklace thing to hold my sensors and

Visualizing My Personal Space (Part 1)
For PComp's mid-term, I pitched an idea about visualizing the amount of personal space I get throughout the day (disclaimer: most of the time I highly value my personal space). Distance sensors I wear on my body will periodically measure the distance I have from things (aka my personal space). Then using Arduino, I will log these data and feed it into a visualizing program that I make on P5. Here is how I made it, broken into few parts because, boy, it was such a headache mak
PComp & ICM | Pinching Game
This week, I learned serial communication from PComp, so I decided to combine ICM & PComp homework together. I wanted to know how I can make P5 receive 02 or more inputs from Arduino, since in class we only learned how to receive one stream of input using Serial.println from Arduino. My idea was to cut up the string received from Arduino into different strings and save them into different variables in P5. I wired my board with a pot and an FSR, and uploaded the following code

ICM | Week 3 | Kaleidoscope
This week is the pair assignment, and the requirement is to create repetition with variation. After brainstorming with my buddy, Ryan Grippi, we decided on making a kaleidoscope, because it repeats itself, has variations, and it looks pretty. We divided the assignment like so: I was to work on drawing the kaleidoscope algorithmically. Ryan to work on the user interface for tweaking the kaleidoscope. To compile, Ryan would use the variables I created in his interface functions

ICM | Week 2 **Updated
Assignment for Week 2 I call this Apple-Watch Doomsday Counter. How I Made It Quick recap: The original sketch was based on this icon created by a couple illustrators based in Ukraine. Very cute, but was quite challenging because of I had to be very exact with the organic lines. What I did in week 1: Previous post on how I did it. Initially, I made this for the assignment. In summary, I broke the animation into 3 parts: 1) Rotating planet & orbit The planet surface rotates us