rockabit

Coming back from holiday means getting back to work, in my case on my graduation project, which has been eating most or all of my time for a while now. The end, however, is approaching and look how nicely the electronics are coming along! And to think that when I started this I had hardly a clue about how to build this kind of stuff. I like making myself proud… ;D

I won’t go into detail about the exact ins and outs of my graduation project now, but it’s a research concerning physical responses to watching video footage. Experiments are scheduled to start at the 17th of this month, if I can just manage to get some more test subjects… Anyway, the end is drawing near, and when it is here, I’ll be a Master of Science! Yay!!!

After a door-to-airport journey of roughly 26 hours (Lima - Atlanta - New York - Amsterdam) in which we saw the sun come up twice, we arrived at Schiphol airport. Our holiday in Peru is over, now we have to get back to our daily routines.

I spent Monday celebrating my 27th birthday, mostly by relaxing in the sun. I’m trying to extend my holiday for as long as I can…

A lot of people are or have been very concerned about us, as we are in Peru now that a terrible earthquake has quite literally shook the country. To ease the concerns we can tell you that we are in no way harmed as we were far from the coast at the time it happened.

We have felt a bit of a tremor, but we were hiking the Inca trail to Machu Picchu at the time and were not aware of the magnitude of the disaster. Just two weeks ago we were in Pisco and Paracas and saw some of the things that are now totally destroyed. Scary…
Our thoughts are with everyone in the area of the disaster. Alonzo, we hope you´re okay…

For five days now, my girlfriend Sofie and me have been in Peru on holiday. We will be gone for a month in total and anyone who´s interested can follow our trip online at www.reisabit.com, photos and all.

Note: the website is in Dutch, I´m afraid…

Anyone who owns a Wii knows how much fun it is to create Mii characters. These are some of my designs:

Hitler, Lenin and Fidel…

Bert and Ernie, the Mythbusters…

and of course Paul sr. from American Chopper

Check out the new website started by Rick Companje: www.flexotic.nl

It contains thoughts, experiments, tutorials, components and other stuff, all concerning Flex. Keep an eye out for interesting stuff on this website.

These patterns I made with the l-system application from the previous post, just by experimenting with one rule and changing the angle of rotation! The rule was F -> F+F-F+F and apparently it gives a lot of spirograph-like effects. I also really like the last one, it looks like the pink panther (including the body)

As always, click the images to see them at full size.

I’ve made a small application in Flex to draw l-systems with.
The previous post explains what l-systems are exactly, but here are the rules again in short:

L-systems is a grammar describing the growth of plant-like structures. It is made up of simple drawing commands and rules how these change during growth. For example, you start out with the command ‘F’ meaning draw one unit. You add a rule that says ‘change F to F+F-F’ where ‘+’ and ‘-’ mean turn left and right, respectively, with a predefined angle. Then, as it grows, the sequence of commands grows longer and more complex, as every time each ‘F’ is replaced by ‘F+F-F’ until you end up with a long sequence of simple commands that make up a complex shape. Add branching with the ‘[' (start branch) and ']‘ (end branch) characters and you can quickly create nice plant structures.

Try out the application here. It’s a small first version with some limitations, such as a maximum amount of drawing commands to prevent slow processing times, the possibility to define only one rule, and the fact that it always starts out with ‘F’. You can define your own rule of how ‘F’ changes (using F, +, -, [ and ]), you can set the angle of rotation and the amount of iterations to define the complexity of the resulting shape. If responses are too slow, you can turn off ‘update realtime’ and hit the ‘go’ button to calculate your l-system.

The Interactive Morphogenesis project, which I made a while ago with Rick Companje and Irad Lee, has been accepted for the Areas of Conlu(x)ence conference in Rumania.

Areas of conflu(x)ence proposes an international debate on the relationship between art and technology in the present digital era, focusing on the impact of the new media in our lives.

The project has to do with l-systems, which are mostly used to model plant growth. As Wikipedia puts it:

An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a formal grammar (a set of rules and symbols) most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, but also able to model the morphology of a variety of organisms. L-systems can also be used to generate self-similar fractals such as iterated function systems.

To explain it in a bit more detail: take a string, say “F” and define a rule saying how this “F” changes, for example “F->F+F-F”. This has the effect that you can iterate over the string, each time replacing each “F” with “F+F-F”. After three iterations the string would have become “F+F-F+F+F-F-F+F-F+F+F-F+F+F-F-F+F-F-F+F-F+F+F-F-F+F-F”. Now imagine these different characters to represent drawing commands, where in this case F means draw a line in the current direction and + and - mean turn left or right by, say, 45 degrees. These few simple rules can lead to very complex and very beautiful structures being drawn, such as the famous Koch Curve, which is not exactly plant-shaped but does convey the complexity and beauty hidden within the simple grammar of l-systems:

We used this grammar to create a generative art piece which uses sound input to generate an l-system, visualize it, and convert it to sound output as well. We also customized it a bit to make it 3D and we let it move to environmental sounds as well. There’s an active demo where you can simulate the influence of sound by moving you mouse cursor to make the shape move. Also be sure to check out the website

(article in Dutch)

Noorderlicht Nieuws: Gekkotape overtreft gekkovoet
“Haartjes op de uiteinden van haartjes, dat blijkt het geheim van de gekkopoot. Daarmee kan de hagedis tegen muren op lopen en zelfs ondersteboven bijven hangen. Synthetische gekkopoottape met zulke haren-op-haren blijkt zelfs beter te plakken dan de gekko zelf.”
(lees het volledige artikel)

Geweldig! Ik kan niet wachten tot ik elke willekeurige wolkenkrabber kan beklimmen met mijn eigen gekkopak.