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Research Post

Research Post – Ben Fry

The Eyeo talk that I watched was about the new computational language called Processing, and Ben Fry and Cassey Reas were the developers of this software. Ben Fry is an American expert in data visualization. In his Eyeo talk about Processing, I learned that Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment(IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design committee with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer  programming in a visual context. I think this language is very similar to p5js that we are using in class, and indeed in the talk, Fry had said that Processing is a combination of Java and C++, but it is more forgiving than C++; meanwhile, Processing also contains many libraries, which provides an easier experience for its users when coding. Therefore, Processing is being used widely among schools and universities all over the world. In his demonstration, the processing software allowed him to write code that does the similar thing that p5js can do as well, such as making an ellipse and then making it track the path that the mouse was passing through. This language is also capable of turning the data being gathered from real life into visual representations. In the demonstration, Fry presented the code that can track the flight of planes than turned the data being gathered into a graph for examples.

Fry had also presented that by using Processing, people can even print things out on different materials directly from codes. In one of the examples, the knitting machines were printing the clothes with the specified pattern directly from codes.When illustrating the animation part that Processing can do, Fry also showed an example of flying birds and the “monster” generator, and I thought these two were sort of similar to the generator project that we are having in class now.

I especially liked the bird one better, because it looked very real, and I also really want to know how they made the bird look like it was flying while still having the right perspective such as having a bigger size when close to the screen, and a smaller size when further away from the screen.