Every so often I like to indulge in some navel-gazing. I have a bunch of old images and videos of my Processing projects lying about, so I’ll load them up in chronological order to see how my projects have changed over time. This is interesting to me for what might seem like an odd reason: I have very few ideas.

I marvel at many things. The amount of my time I spend procrastinating on the internet exposes me to a lot of fantastic work, and whenever I venture out into nature I invariably come back humbled. Yet while these things often motivate me, they rarely inspire me. Ideas tend to pop into my head rarely, without rhyme nor reason, so each one that shows up I’ll milk for all it’s worth.

Let me give you an idea of what I’m talking about: I’ve been using Processing for a little over three years now, and in that time, I’ve had about five good ideas, which have produced about eight projects that I’m not embarrassed to show people. That’s a rate of a little under two ideas and three un-embarrassing projects per year. Furthermore, I consider almost none of those projects “done.” (Incidentally, I have even fewer basic techniques than projects or ideas, but that’s a topic for a future post).

Here’s a concrete example: I first had the idea for Loxodromes in the fall of 2008, and in the roughly eighteen months since it’s grown into two visualizers. There were a couple of roughly month-long periods where I stopped working on them completely, due to school, but this has been one of my main Processing projects for a pretty long time. I’d say that on average, I put in about five to ten hours a week on my Processing projects, so this has probably seen somewhere close to 250 hours of work on it.

Let’s take a look at how it’s evolved, starting from the beginning.

Primordial

What prompted Loxodromes was seeing a basic ordinary differential equation solver my friend had whipped together. He tested it out by plugging in the formula for circular motion, and soon had a bunch of little white arcs carving their way across his screen. I liked the effect, and naturally, my inclination was to knock it up a dimension. Since I know little about differential equations, I implemented it by converting spherical coordinates to cartesian. After trying a few things, I happened to come up with loxodromes accidentally, and liking the shape, I committed to it.

Eukaryotic

The line effect was cool, but there wasn’t a whole lot going on, and the screen was mostly black. I tried making the lines thicker, but it didn’t do a whole lot to increase the visual complexity. Eventually I hit upon the idea of turning the lines into flat ribbons that tapered and faded down their length.

Prokaryotic

This is a variation I ended up scrapping. At first I thought it was a big improvement, since it’s more complex than when all the loxodromes have the same radius. After a while, I decided that the effect is more visual noise than anything—in the end, the coherence that comes from having all the loxodromes appear to share the same sphere is better.

Animalian

I’ve finally succumbed to my usual habits and tied audio into this thing. I like how the loxodromes are uncovered when the bass beat runs down their length. Unfortunately the bands of equal brightness (that come from not interpolating the FFT values) is kind of ugly, and it’s kind of boring without colors.

Chordatean

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. Adding colors and smooth interpolation along the loxodromes really spiced it up.

I’ve switched to using textured quad strips for the loxodromes, in order to get better anti-aliasing along the boundaries (my graphics card only supports 2x anti-aliasing). Unfortunately this has the side effect of creating an unsightly dark outline when one of the loxodromes overlaps another.

The glow on some of the loxodromes looks pretty good when they’re off to the side, but I don’t like how you can tell they’re just a textured plane when they move to the center of the screen. While they behave nicely when there’s a good beat going, if there’s no strong rhythm in the bass channels of the FFT, then they often just stick on full brightness for a couple of seconds, which looks odd and destroys the sense that the behavior is linked to the audio.

Vertebratean

Unsurprisingly, textures are much more interesting than flat colors. I’m pretty much happy with the appearance of the loxodromes now.

The glow is a different matter. Adding texture to the lines makes it harder to see how the glow is flat when it passes over the middle, but they still just look a bit boring, especially now that the loxodromes have an interesting texture.

Craniatean

Substituting the globes for particles (thanks, flight404!) really kicked this up a notch. I’m really satisfied with the visual portion of it now.

However, the behaviors a little bit off. Since the audio starts at one end of the loxodrome, the period where a given event in the audio starts to have maximum visual effect is delayed about a quarter second. The particles are a little more responsive, but there’s still about a 2-3 frame (66-100 ms) delay, which is definitely noticeable.

I do, though, have an idea for remedying this. I’ll be working on it for the next week or so, and posting an update about it shortly thereafter.