Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

Last Saturday I was part of the Baltimore Robot Fest. The event took place at the National Electronics Museum in Baltimore. All sorts of cool nerds came to share their robots. Make Magazine held a workshop, a ring was set up for battle bots, the Baltimore SDIY Group played some incredible electronic music, and many other fantastic groups brought great projects. The Museum was a great location for the event. Modern robotics and DIY projects were mixed in with WWII radar systems, ancient tube computers and even an Enigma cipher machine.

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This is a quick little audio visualizer I put together with Processing and the ESS Sound Library. The audio spectrum is analyzed with an FFT and spectrum bands are plotted as vertical bars. The Waveform is drawn over the bars in white, adding a lot of interest to the image. To create the fading effect of the object a transparent, white rectangle is drawn over the whole sketch instead of using a background. Previous frames are left on the screen and are slowly covered up by white.

To create an interesting color scheme each bar is colored based on its own height and its neighbors. Combined with the overlapping shapes a broad range of tones and hues is created.

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Continuing with clocks in ActionScript I created this slightly less abstract clock, loosely inspired by magnetic fields. I’m happy with the way it turned out. I plan to create a screen saver from this as well. If you’re interested it should be available soon. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts or criticisms.

I had a few little battles trying to get everything functioning. Some functions in Actionscript 3 use radians, namely the trigonometry functions, while other more basic functions use degrees. Having to switch frequently between the two tripped me up a few times. Another issue, not directly related to ActionScript, was dealing with the different number sets. Each dial object has an array of text objects. Some begin with zero, so they line up with the array indexes, while others start with one and throw everything off.

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I started working with this idea in Processing. I was playing with clocks and fractals and thought it would be funny to stack all the clock hands on each other. I’ve been working a fair amount in ActionScript and decided to rebuild the project in flash to make it a little more portable and improved the design quite a bit. Building clocks is interesting to me as it is a very basic form of data visualization. The data itself seems quite simple, but also practical. In this particular clock each time is represented by a particular shape.

My code is still a little messy, but I will probably post it after a little cleaning up. The whole applet is created with ActionScript 3. I’m still not friends with the flash interface. I have more fun building classes which can create graphics quickly with a few parameters. It’s just more fun that way. This piece will also (hopefully) be a screen saver soon along with a few other little flash projects I’m working on.

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