Working on now, coming soon!
Playable Pieces of Projects
Some projects and parts of projects that you can still play with... :)
Swarming Creatures (macro scale)
Two flavours of creating via swarming creatures. In the first, the creatures try to create a structure and you try to stop them. That you'll loose I like to think illustrates the fact that creativity is an unstoppable force. The second is a different view on the same process. Less static, more about motion over time. Here the creatures leave behind faint traces that build into a web and your guiding influence becomes more visible.
Many organic creatures have a swarming or flocking behaviour. It arises very simply from the creatures having similar behaviour and responding to each other and is close to some of the fundamental forces of nature. This project gives a chance to play with the behaviour and create via swarming creatures.
In one version the creatures like to build a hive or nest. They search for food and when they find it, they go back add a new triangle to the structure. You can influence this by placing obstacles they like to avoid and/or chasing them away with the mouse pointer. Because creativity isn't hard, its inevitable, unstoppable and unavoidable :)
In the second alternative its the paths the creatures take over time that becomes gradually visible. The influence you exert becomes much more apparent as an average over time...
Slight aside #1 - this is a view on a macro scale, where its possible to see every creature individually. Some swarms are of microscopic creatures - there's another project covering that :)
Slight aside #2 - it's not really practical to test the demos on every platform, or even give comprehensive instructions for that matter! Also these do take quite a bit of computational power. Some mobile devices may struggle a little!..
Cryptographic Flowers and alternative Turing tests....
This is a bit of a mix of things - one part is about bringing something of a hand drawn quality to a machine made thing. The idea of the Turning Test is pretty familiar these days, but is it a slightly limited concept? What if, for example, you couldn't tell the difference between a machine drawing and a human drawing? Would that be a type of passing a more specific kind of Turning test? This little bit of code isn't that ambitious, but it does make me think that it wouldn't really be very hard to achieve, if that was your aim!
Its also about cryptography and the nature of data. Anything you communicate, anything you sense is data and data can be interpreted in any way you like. This flower uses the cryptography that Bitcoin is based on to turn whatever you type into the box into flowers. The original used a microphone and a stethoscope to turn the sound of your heart into flowers for the workshop Little Robot Heartbeats... Now that was good fun :)
To try it out, just type anything into the text box... :)
We made Cryptographic Stethoscopes (thought of that name just now), and other things, in the Little Robot Heartbeats blended online / real life workshop :)