Author: Ahmed Salem

Final Project Post

Most of you live in NYC and hopefully and none of you have to commute long distances.My project had a simple goal. To display the most popular subway lines and their stations in the Borough of Manhattan and to show at least one train object going along the subway lines.I used longitude and latitude coordinate from google maps as a reference for each stop but in the real world these coordinates are almost identical so I had to shift them drastically in my program. My initial goal was to pull in data from the MTA and to set up the train speeds and positions.I was going to use higher level Object Orientated Programming such as Inheritance and polymorphism and maybe a data structure such as a doubly linked list to store the stops.However, from the Professors comments I looked at my project and realized that I wont be able to finish this in a week.So I decided to write raw code, using nothing but the built in types to create my program from the ground up. I went through many different design implementations when working on my code. Looking back now there are probably ways I could have optimized my code to make it look better and less clunky and less hard coded for the most part. I was greeting really frustrated that I never got the display to work properly and that is really the only thing I would like to fix in this version hopefully. I was going to use a library class called Tracer but I didn’t understand how to implement that library so I asked the professor for some help on how to do it with out the tracer class. This class has taught me a lot of how to use code to visualize things in the real world. Im not the most artistic person so although art that was created by code has its own purpose its just something I don’t want to pursue. I’m more of a functional programmer who enjoys making code that can be used as tools and optimize peoples days. My plans for this moving foreword is to begin development on an app that will map the subway stops and stations in real time so people can know exactly where their trains are. I would obviously have to know more about processing and graphical programming but I have an alpha version. I would also like to teach my self OpenFrameWorks because C++ is the language I prefer but I definitely am going to take the Java class because Java kicked my ass with this project so time to kick back.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/546054

https://onlinegdb.com/BkyBrr2Tf

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Fkiwz10AaB6M5kS2zv5tJ8I6_u7GTR3y

The second link is data processing code written in C++ its only source code. The third link is the entire solution with the text files and implementation files. You would a C++ IDE and text editor if you would like to compile the the code and see the output.

Final Project

For my final project, I want to model a live visualization of the MTA, with as many subway lines and live feeds as possible. I’m gonna use the MTA aoi and the Google Transit API to set up this live animation. But I don’t want to use Subway carts to model the subway. I was thinking of using something more interesting, and what would I use? DRAGONS, duh. What else it would it be. Unfortunately I have not found a dragon template written in processing where I could start adding functionality to it and using the APIs to model the Dragons movement. If I cant use Dragons, then I’ll probably end up using some other extravagant 3D shape. I want my sketch to model the MTA as closely as possible including all the delays and traffic information that comes with it.

Library

The Seriously.js library seems pretty cool. I used to be a big movie gu (until college) and I was always amazed about how they do the effects of. I knew there was something called an editing bay where the producers and editors would lock themselves up for months to edit a hours of footage and condense it to 1 to 3 hours. They probably use some really expensive and high tech software to edit these videos which I don’t know have any experience in. But I have experience in coding and this library allows you to add effects to live or prerecorded videos through code.

Data, not Data

This was definitely one of the tougher assignments me for me especially because I couldn’t make it to class on Friday. So I watched the video series the professor posted and read some documentation and got to work looking for an API that had  a lot of data and was based on something that was practical to display visually. I got access to an API that contained basic data from all the worlds countries like, name, population, rank, and percent global contribution.  Below is the link to my sketch.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/529279

Chapters 10 and 11

After reading these chapters, I’ve been reminded about one of the most important concepts of coding, algorithms.  I’m not the most visually creative person, so sometimes my processing sketches could be very one dimensional and not very impressive. But after reading this, I am going to try to implement my sketches in a more algorithmic style and have the algorithm behave based on user interaction.

Research Project- 1993

As I was going through the research options on the website, I was having a hard time finding something that was simple enough for me to explain while also being a pretty cool subject to talk about. I don’t really like anything that has to do with really abstract art or something that “peaks into the soul”. I just find things like that to be uninteresting. So after a few minutes of going through the topics I found a topic that was simple and related to my favorite place on this planet, NYC.

Recalling 1993, is a project done by Droga5 and the New Museum, in 2013, to celebrate 20 years since 1993.  The project allowed people to call a certain number from any of 5000 payphones in Manhattan and the caller could hear the voices of people from 1993.  The voices people were hearing were adjusted to fit the neighborhood the caller was on down to even the street.

When we think of interacting with the past, mediums that come to mind are things like pictures, journals, videos, and maybe a voice recording.  Here we have an example of interacting with the past people of New York City through a payphone. These people would talk about many things, from regular conversation, to the crimes they were experiencing since 1993 was the second most violent year on record since 1990. Hearing someones voice about a past experience gave a more human touch because hearing a voice is a lot more human then just reading an article or an eye witness account.

In a video I watched one of the recordings was a man saying his name and that had just graduated NYU and was looking for work. It was kind of surreal to hear someone from 25 years ago actually speak and say something that I could see myself saying.

I will be presenting a power point in class for more information and video.

https://droga5.com/work/recalling-1993/

Droga5’s ‘Recalling 1993’ Project Turns NYC Pay Phones Into Geo-Located Time Capsules

Midterm Project

It was fun to finally come up with code that I want to write and think about on my own rather then being told what to code. My original idea was to create a disco ball and every time the user would press a  key it would play a different beat or instrumental. So I downloaded instrumentals from some of my favorite songs and some from like really poppy or disco type songs.  I made a vector of strings containing the names of the songs and every time the user clicked a key it would play a different song. I quickly realized that processing may not be able to handle 5 minute tracks stop and starting randomly and my computer crashed and the sketch wasn’t moving very smoothly. So I switched over to two second piano notes and changed my code to have the disco ball spin, change color, and play a different piano notes every time the user pressed a key. I even added like an EDM background change every time a key was pressed. I wanted to mess with the lighting so I could give the disco ball a depth illusion. So I found a function called pointLight() that let me add that effect . I kept the code for the longer instrumentals just because  the sound matched with the image better. There are even these dots that orbit the sphere and change color every time the user presses a key. I originally wanted to color to change based on the type of note or song playing but color-sound relations proved to be very difficult.  I tried uploading a  screen recording of my animation to YouTube but for some reason my screen recording would never convert to mp4 format. So ill just being showing a video of my animation in class and what different kind of notes and songs I have attached to it.

Code on GitHub

https://gist.github.com/coder2310/fa8794cb465f44bbd9d5b8223e048f1f

 

Midterm 1

I’ve written and dealt with classes before, in Python and C++. The syntax for Java isn’t to different but I was putting curly braces in places I wouldn’t have thought I needed to. I kept getting an error with my the curly braces in my class so I commented it out and just manually generated the object I wanted to create in the set up and draw functions. I kind of want to recreate something similar to a wall of disco balls. I’m gonna need a lot more practice with the 3D render and user interaction.  The way user interaction maybe implemented is that every time the user clicks the screen, a different disco beat will play and the disco balls will change colors.  We haven’t learned how to incorporate audio yet but I’ll Just watch a video and read the documentation about how to do so.

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/512813

Animation

For my animation I wanted to incorporate loops so It could look more dynamic when it compiled. This wasn’t to bad because I just built off of the code we did in class and played around with the number and and other built in functions of processing until I got something I enjoyed watching. My animation is supposed to represent anticipation because of the way the program fades out the background every time the circles make a move. It gives the viewer a sense of when things are acting normal and when they are about to act up.

 

https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/509233