Study 8! This study was an evolution of my major project from assignment 3. The major issue with the submitted project for that assignment, Particle Playground V1.0, was that there was very limited user interaction with the piece. I attempted to solve that in various ways but ultimately ended coming up short of what I was hoping to achieve.

I had hoped on using the optical flow of the user’s webcam to move particles in a field, similar to tides, with particles ebbing and flowing around the user’s movement. This proved to be much too complex for Max’s somewhat low-level visual programming system, and would probably be more suited to other software such as Touch Designer which use a more high-level system. While Max has its benefits, it is not as intuitive for some of the more complex tasks.

Instead of the optical flow system outlined above, I compromised by using the optical flow point tracking system included in the cv.jit libraries. From this, I could select any point, track it, then parse it’s xy data through to the particle system’s force fields. This allowed me to add some level of visual control, albeit much more control than was presented in the first version of this project.

I believe that through the creation of this project I learnt the importance of iterative working, constantly improving a project until you have a result you are happy with. I also learnt the importance of backing up your projects with multiple versions, after my final version got corrupted and I had to recreate the whole project from V1.0 again.

 

Download the Max Patch here.