WildGarden is a software application for making visual compositions in real time by invoking and manipulating algorithmically generated elements. The project is being designed, developed, and used by Lev Kanter for his BFA thesis at Parsons. Read more →
It’s final
ish because the actual show is not for another month. WildGarden is basically at a stage right now where the software can be pushed around in the code to produce fairly rich and flexible ranges of synthetic digital visual stuff. However, interaction via the Wiimote is still sluggish and occasionally buggy. The focus of my work in the next month has to be shaping and refining the application’s user interface.
I managed to make some significantly more complex-looking forms (i.e. the big blue thing and the big green thing) last night by using 2000 particles (usually I’m using somewhere from 500 to 800) and enabling trail deposits. As each particle travels around, it registers where it has been in an array and then I render both a representation of the particles themselves (as small black dots) and all the trail points (as blue/green dots respectively). The effect was a happy accident. The problem with this implementation is that it’s obviously mega, mega expensive and slow. Definitely bad programming! The frame rate dropped from 30fps (which is slow to begin with, but I’m okay with that for now) to 6fps, which is pretty horrible in a used-by-a-user context. That said, I liked the end result and have no objection specifically invoking this slow memory-sucking process to achieve it.
The second image — that looks like a swarm of black insects — is also more particles than usual, but without the trails and with larger particles.