Interested in pushing the interactivity of my Processing work a little further I decided to create a little piece which responds in a more interesting way to mouse movements.
The sketch has an array of vertical bars across the screen. When the mouse is moved (or clicked) waves are created that move along the array and bounce off the walls. The speed, direction, and distance of the mouse motion effect the pool differently simply because of the way the set of waves created overlap.
Slow movements create small ripples, moving your mouse along with a wave makes it grow, and moving the mouse around quickly creates complex noise. The waves still don’t bounce off the edges perfectly, but it usually works pretty well.
A second version of the script creates waves with a different shape, but is otherwise similar. In the first version, the waves were shaped to replicate water ripples and the overall area of the bars stays about the same. In this second version, the waves form large bulges. The wave shape creates a different texture and motion and changes the interaction.
