Multimedia Authoring – Week 09
Code Development
Finally, the first element of my sketch is behaving itself. The RSS feeds are now appearing one beneath the other, and moving steadily down the page. This was a lot more difficult than I had first expected, and completed in no small part with the help of my good friend, Paul Jebanasam (coding extraordinaire)…
With the first hurdle out of the way, I was hoping that the rest would come a little easier. Not so.
As part of my pitch, I wanted the user to be an abstracted image of themselves: a silhouette. The plan was that this silhouette would attract the particles once there wasn’t a certain level of movement. Pretty quickly, I realised that my project is attempting to combine a lot of different libraries and therefore will likely run into a lot of different problems down the track.
So instead of using a silhouette, I have started trying to combine openCV’s face recognition with the traer.physics bouncy balls. I think this will be a better combination, because the face recognition should already give me an x and y coordinate, rather than trying to find the silhouette pixels from the entire screen.
As a final note, because the final assessment due for this subject one week after everything else, I’ve found I really put this off a lot more than I should. Certainly as a novice coder, it’s important that I continue chipping away at the project and getting feedback from the tutor. Much like learning a spoken language, it’s important that I regularly put myself into the environment of code, so that it starts to become second nature. Particularly as I want to continue down this path, I need to spend as much time with Processing as I can, and hopefully in the same way that HTML and CSS began to ‘make sense’, I expect that Processing’s version of Java will (soon?) do the same.