Some Random Dude is a blog by P.J. Onori that covers design & technology in the broadest sense possible.

Use Tumblr? If so, you may find Off Franklin useful.

Archive for the ‘Design Technology’ Category

Click on one of the items below to go to the post

Processing Motion Experiment – Meander

Posted on 30 March, 2008 at 11:32pm with 5 comments

Processing Experiment MeanderI have really fallen in love with Processing, but I had been had hit a bit of a plateau in terms of progress in the past month or so. I never really have spent too much time with algorithmic motion/drawing. When I jumped into Flash, I went straight towards the Tween class and never spent much time trying to work in the EnterFrame-loop based motion design. Because of this, learning how to work with Processing’s draw() loop has been a bit foreign and one can only find so many ways to implement sine/cosine motion treatments.

Luckily, I ran across the simply stunning work of Robert Hodgin who just happened to offer up his source code. After looking through one of his projects and banging away at it, I ended up learning a quite a bit on how motion can end up looking more organic and sporadic. This particular project used the noise() method as its basis for motion jittering. I had not even known such a method existed. After hacking up Robert’s source, I came up with some really interesting form experiments using Robert’s general motion concepts.

Read the rest of this post…

More Layout Organizers Developed

Posted on 5 February, 2008 at 11:24am with 12 comments

I am putting more work into my Layout Organizers project for various reasons. First, this code has already been quite helpful on a couple projects. Second, it is going to be worked in to a really cool open source Flex library. There are still a ton of features that need to be added and issues that need to be resolved, but progress is definitely being made. I spent time working on more primitive layout organizers that will be more helpful on everyday projects. The four new organizers are not anything fancy, but they will most likely be the most used out of all the ones I write.

Update: This code base has now been released under the name coordy. Read more.

You need the Flash Player to view this video.

I am also starting to wrap more base functionality into the layout organizers such as the swap positions – there are still a few bugs that need to be worked out with this feature, but it’s moving along. If you have any ideas or thoughts on how to improve this project, by all means, let me know.

Actionscript 3 Bitmap Segmentor (Source Code Included)

Posted on 22 January, 2008 at 6:00am with 15 comments

For quite some time now, I have been playing with breaking DisplayObjects into a grid to sample pixel data in order to create visualizations. I have spent time with this in both Actionscript and in Processing (see project). For Actionscript in particular though, I wanted to make the process cleaner and easier to implement. What has resulted is a slightly tangential project which ultimately makes sampling pixel data easier while offering a whole separate set of features. In its simplest form, the BitmapSegmentor allows you to take a DisplayObject’s bitmapData and break it into a grid of individual segments. These segments can then be used for various purposes, including pixel data sampling.
Read the rest of this post…

Actionscript 3 Layout Organizers Examples and Source Code

Posted on 7 January, 2008 at 6:00am with 23 comments

A while back, I posted a basic example of layout organizers and layout organizers applied to video. I kept talking about how cool I considered this idea to be, yet I had yet to truly explain the idea and (more importantly) the source code for people to download. I wanted to make sure the code was at a good spot before releasing it; I believe that is now the case. You will find examples, the basic gist on how it works and some possible reasons why layout organizers may just make your life easier.

Update: This code base has now been released under the name coordy. Read more.

Read the rest of this post…

A Drive Down California Street – A Real-Time Visualization Project

Posted on 11 December, 2007 at 6:09am with 4 comments

Drive Visualization

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I took a drive through San Francisco. With us, we brought two laptops that recorded the drive through their webcams. Using Processing, the webcam video data was analyzed and reinterpreted into abstract visualizations. This project was a test-run of a larger project myself and a few friends are working on, but I thought it would be fun to show you what has been done thus far.

The concept behind this project was to take ordinary scenes from everyday life and turn them into something that would look completely alien, yet familiar enough to have the faintest semblance of normality in order for the viewer to digest what they saw. The data stream was too great for the application to read/analyze/interpret/output in absolute real time, so the videos appear to be sped up due to dropped frames. The size of the objects were based on the brightness in the relative area of the video, the colors of each shape mirrors the general color in that portion of the video. The captures were taken at night which is the reason for the strong contrast and bright colors.
Read the rest of this post…

Highlighted Content

    No related posts.

Recent Posts