PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Jae Yang

Dancing in Silence: Dust in Light

• Elevator Pitch

Dancing in Silence creates a view of flying dust in a single beam of light which comes in this dark room through a window. Dancing in Silence: Dust in Light aims to use strong visual contrast to make people feel the combination of quiet and noisy, which is also the state of life.

• Abstract

“A single ray of light comes into the darkness.” We tend to feel a quiet and serene atmosphere through this sentence. But if you try to immerse yourself in the scene, you’ll notice something you have not noticed in daily life. There is so much dust flying in the single beam of light. Those dust keeps moving in different tracks as the air currents are always changing, perhaps in a group that floats slowly by, or flying fast and almost in a straight line, or, maybe just randomly going to some direction alone. Even in this serene and peaceful environment there are still millions of moving dynamic things. The user can move the mouse to control the angle of the light and make this light rotate. But as the light moves, it’s not hard for us to see that in Dancing in Silence: The Dust in Light the dust doesn’t use the light as the boundary of the moving area, but moves across the entire canvas. Even though users can press F to turn off the light which can make the dust invisible, the dust is still there, just hidden in the darkness. Everything in the world is like this. There is no absolute silence or noise, but we usually don’t notice the “dust”. We just need the contrast of “light” and “darkness” if we want to make the “dust” visible.

• Reflection

  • Process: Design and Composition

When I am free I’d love to stay in the coach and observe the dust in light because I never see the dust until I’m totally free. They have never gone in the same way as before. So I searched this video that shows how dust moving. Thanks Leon for helping me find this video.

I also found this picture to help me think of the apperence of dust. Here the dust is colorful in the light. So I decided to make my dust colorful and the color would be changing to show the dust is shining.

I was supposed to make my dust more three-dimensional, refering to this post on Instagram. Apparently I was thinking too simple. It is very difficult to make the dust appear not cluttered but realistic at the same time. So I gave up after trying.

• • Process: Technical

I used OOPs and arrays to build my window and dust particles. I also used if() to set conditions that make me control the light. 

I was going to make the light (the yellow area) on the top, and let dust only appear in this area. But the light is changing so the boundary of this area is hard to write in code. So I changed the order. I made “darkness” using vertex on the top just like a covering. So it can hide all dust except the area left for light.

But devide my sketch into so many layers that on top of each outher makes me so confused. When I was making the blue area when light is off, I put it in wrong order that the dust is still visible. Thanks Carrot for helping me with the order and solved this problem.

I was also supposed to use frameRate to make the dust’s color change slow down, but I didn’t know what’s wrong and it just does not work. So I just ignore it and give up. If I can do it all over again, I will focus on this and the speed of dust since these make the sketch too noisy. 

• • Reflection and Future Development

    • Myself

I think generally I’ve done what I wanted to do. The final version didn’t change much from the original proposal. I payed much time and efforts in it. But I think I can still make more interactions and simplify my coding.

• • • Peer students, instructor and guest critics

On Interaction Day many classmates gave me suggestions of making more interactions, including moving the light and changing the color. Also there would be more things including furniture in the dark room to make it more like a “room”. After my presentation, Prof. Moon suggested me to slow down the flying dust bucause it makes users feel too noisy. I really agree with this and I would change that. 

• • • Future development

First I will slow down the dust according to Prof. Moon’s suggestion. To make my project richer and more interesting, I will add some furniture and some pets as well, which could moves avoid the light. I will also add more interactions and simplify my coding.