Category: Nature of Code

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NOC: Midterm Project Concept Presentation – Jingyi Zhu

Link to Google Slides

My idea for my midterm project is based on the method of gravitational slingshot. This method depends on the gravity of planets to assist space probes in flying into interplanetary and interstellar space with less fuel.

I am interested in simulating a star system and the creating multiple trajectories by launching space probes in the system. The project will mainly utilize the concept of gravitation and collision. 

I would like to add an interactive aspect to it by allowing the users to create the star system by setting parameters as well as to launch space probes from different planets.

The challenges I might encounter are understanding the physics and switching reference frames.

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NOC – Week 6: Too Much Goo – Tiger Tian

Date: 03-22-2019

Click here to visit on p5 Web Editor

Since I’ve always wanted to learn to implement collision in p5, I made this with what we just learned about collision. The layout is simple, with a transparent bowl at the lower half of the canvas and a rainbow-colored stripe at the top. If you move your mouse to the rainbow-colored stripe at the top, it expands a little bit so you can pick a color, and the circle below indicates the color you’ve picked.

Then you can start adding goo to the bowl by simply clicking! The goo dropping to the bowl is the core part of this assignment, as it requires some trick to make it collide with the bowl – which is a half-circle in shape. It’s basically the same thing as making two balls collide, the only difference being the relationship between distance and radii – in this case, the radius of the outer circle equals the sum of the inner circle radius and the distance from one center to the other. Collision also happens between any two of the goo balls you create, though it’s not exactly collision, but some kind of sticky effect.

When too many goo balls are added to the bowl, all of them disappear! I added this feature after I realized too many of them resulted greatly in frame rate dropping.