Author: Wentao Wang

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NOC – Final Project – Wentao Wang

Title: The “Black” hole

In my final project proposal, I mentioned that I was inspired by the black hole and intended to create my own visualization of a black hole. So for this project, I created a black hole that can be controlled by the users to attract the planets in the universe.

This is the “universe” I created

The big ellipse in the middle is the black hole. Since you cannot really see a black hole, so I made it white for visualizing it. The particles in the space are moving by themselves, here I use the autonomous concept. 

The color of the black hole and the planets are changing and blend mode is used here.

You can drag the bar and change different variables including attraction, the size of the attraction field, max steer force, friction, detection radius. Here are some examples.

Increase the attraction force

decrease the attraction force

after the explosion

the explosion is constructed in this way:

Here are some interactions I added in this project:

using key and mouse to control the moving of the black hole.

And if you want to see a further developed project with EEG brain wave interaction, you can visit this webpage and see the full documentation here:

IMA Capstone _ The Brain Artist _ Wentao Wang

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IMA Capstone _ The Brain Artist _ Wentao Wang

The Brain Artist – An artistic experiment with brain-computer interface

This is the Neurosky EEG headset I’m using. It will record the electromagnetic waves generated by your brain and separate out different components. The two sets of data I’m using are attention level and meditation level. The headset is connected to the computer via Bluetooth.

This is the original data transferred from the Bluetooth server.

data2

And this is the data I’m receiving for visualization.

data1

This is the home page. It contains instructions and links to the three different interactions with the brain wave.

The first project is to create a flower like image with controlling your mental state. The more you focus, the cursor will move more towards the center, and vice-versa. The more you relax, the color will be more greenish, and the less relax you are, the whiter it will be. You can also control the speed, the number and the thickness of the stroke. You can pause and save the image whenever you find it worth saving. 

This is the link to the video documentation:

 flower

These are some works I saved during user testing and presentation. 

The second project I call it Space. You can use your keyboard/mouse to control a planet/black hole to attract all the other small planets in the space. The more you concentrate, the attraction force will be greater. And the planet you are controlling will be redder. And when you lose attention, the planets you have attracted will escape away. 

This is the link to the video documentation:

space

The third project is more open and more likes an experiment. Your attention level will control the left, right movement of the cursor, and your meditation level will control the up, down movement. You can also manually change the speed, thickness of the painter. 

This is the link to the video documentation:

canvas

These are some works I saved during user testing and presentation:

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NOC – Week 10: Autonomous (Wentao)

This project consists of two components, the vehicles and the target. The vehicles are moving on their own, avoiding colliding to each other. The users can also activate debug mode.

the detect radius can be manipulated

The user can control the grey target by pressing the up/down/left/right arrow key. 

If you press the “a” key on the keyboard, the vehicles will start to “attack” the target. By moving the target around, you can lead the movement of the vehicles.

If you press the “s” key on the keyboard, you can see the attack zone of the vehicles. You can also change the size of the attack zone.

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NOC – Week 9: Spring (Wentao)

This week I mainly focused on the spring mechanism. I made two separate projects. The first one is more like a water sprinkler. When you drag the ellipse, different sizes of “water drops” will come out from the ellipse. 

The second is more of an experiment on three body movement connected by springs. you can manipulate the size of the ball, the length of the spring, and k value to play around with.

   

There is also a debug mode that could show the velocity of the three bodies.

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NOC – Midterm Project: Music Visualizer – Wentao Wang

Introduction

This is currently a prototype of a music visualizer. The musical data has not included yet, but different features of the music could be simulated by the control panel. DIfferent factors could be manipulated, including velocity, frequency, amplitude, etc. to represent different features in music.

Inspiration

My inspiration came from the current products of music visualizers. I found this video on youtube which fascinated me. How the particles moving on the screen according to the music inspired me with this project. 

Development 

    3 main parts of the project: rotating particles in the middle, sine wave shape moving at the bottom, after pressing the mouse, an object will appear at mouse position and fall down onto the moving wave.

basic setup

moving waves at the bottom

  • change how smooth the wave is by dragging the control bar
  • change the velocity of the rotation and the wave moving speed by dragging the control bar  video: smooth:velocity
  • adding and deleting rotating particle  

add:del

  • press the key “A” to add noise, press “space” key to remove noise

NOISE1

  • drag the control bar to change the amplitude and the frequency of the particle

 

noisevel1

noisefreq

  • after pressing the mouse key, an ellipse will appear at the mouse position, the object can feel gravity and fall down, then bounce onto the wave shape.

ball1

ball2

debug mode, the red line is showing the velocity of the ellipses

debug1

further improvement

when an object falls on to the wave shape, the ball only bounces back like it’s hitting on a regular edge. More physics should be added to better simulate balls falling on to the wave. 

the collision detection between ellipses and rectangles is not ideal.  

Add music to the project.