Saturday, 8 October 2011

Final Sound-Shape

In my application users are the weather.  It starts off as a beautiful sunny day with a bright blue sky.  You can then place clouds in the sky by clicking at the top of the screen.  As you keep clicking the weather will get progressively worse allowing users to worsen the weather as fast or slow as they like.  After a while it will start to rain, thunder will sound when clicked in the sky and the wind will pick up.  The rain comes from the mouse allowing users to interact with the rain, making patterns in the sky.  When the weather gets to it's worst a tornado will appear, changing in size depending on where the mouse is.  Throughout the whole application there is a cow standing in the grass.  This cow is rather tolerant of the weather and it's not until the user clicks once more after the tornado that it gets blown away with a loud "moo".  If the user wants to make the weather better they can right click at any time throughout the application.

Development

First attempt at storm:
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=41457
This was my first attempt at putting all the initial experiments together.  I quite like the sequence it has created.  You click at the top of the screen to place clouds.  These clouds get progressively darker until it starts to rain.  If you keep clicking thunder will sound when clicked in the sky and the wind will increase.  Then lastly a tornado will appear.

Development 1:
I really like the sequence of the previous application but when you reach the tornado I don't want the interaction to just end because users will get bored after they've done it once.  So I thought it might be nice if the user can move back and forward with the weather.  Once they get to the tornado they can keep right clicking and the weather will progressively get better.

I had a lot of problems with getting this to work.  It went nicely back through the application until it got to the very start where it kept coming up with the error that the array was out of bounds. This is why I can't upload these trials to open processing.  But while I was trying to get this to work I improved some other aspects of my application.

I thought the white background was too plain and needed to look more like the sky, therefore I made it blue.  This looked better but the clouds get progressively darker, so it didn't look right that the blue sky stayed blue.  Therefore I also made the sky get progressively darker the worse the storm gets.

The blue sky definitely made the application look more real but without any ground it still didn't look right.  I tried creating the ground in processing but this just looked too fake, so I added in a photo I took.

Original white background


Blue sky when the weather's at its best.

Grey sky when the weathers at it's worse.

I also don't like how the thunder clip is too long as it only plays every 10 or so seconds.  I don't want the thunder to play every click like I had previously as you're clicking too often but I made the thunder sound shorter.

Development 2:
I finally figured out how to make the application able to go backwards by right clicking without crashing at the end.  In this application you'll see the ground and blue sky makes the application look a lot more real and I tried out a few new sounds for the rain and wind.  I like the new wind sound as it's more pleasant to listen to than the previous one, but the rain sound doesn't match the rain visuals.

Development 3:
In the previous applications I only have the wind blowing one way, to the right.  To make the interaction more interesting I want to have it so that the wind can change direction.  I initially thought about adding in mouseDragged to make the wind change direction.  But users probably wouldn't be able to figure out easily that you can use this interaction.  Therefore I wanted the position of the mouse to change the wind direction.  When the mouse is in the centre of the screen, there will be no wind.  When it's over to the left, the wind will blow to the right and when to the right, it will blow left.  I think this makes my application a lot more interesting to interact with.




Development 4:
I definitely think having the wind change direction, because of the position of the mouse, works well.  But the way the sound changes from loud to nothing is too abrupt.  Therefore I won't have the wind stop when the mouse is in the centre of the screen.  I will just have it change direction depending on the side the mouse is on.

In my original concept I wanted to have a person that became unhappier as the storm got worse.  Instead in this application I thought it would be interesting to add in a cow.  The cow will stand there until the tornado starts, where it will be blown off the screen making a "moo" sound.

Start of application.

When the cow gets blown away.





I really like how this application has developed and am happy with this result therefore this will be my final interaction.


I couldn't seem to upload any of my applications to Open Processing other than the first one.

Sunday, 2 October 2011

Initial experiments

Thunder:
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=40212
In the experiment I wanted to the user to be able to create clouds and thunder.  You click up the top of the screen to place clouds.  The clouds will get darker the more you place them.  When they reach a certain darkness thunder will occur when you place a cloud.

Rain:
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=40218
In this application I was experimenting with rain.  I want the rain to follow the mouse but if you stop moving the mouse the rain will stop.


Tornado:
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=40281
Here I created a tornado, which increases and decreases in size depending on the height of the mouse.  At the moment I've just got the tornado sound playing when you click but I want the sound to get louder and quieter depending on the size of the tornado.


Rain and wind:
http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=41450
In this application I increased the velocity of the particles as you click.  I want it so that you can make it rain but as you keep clicking the wind will pick up and the wind sound will increase.  I think this will be a nice progression into the tornado.



Rain with help from Daniel Shiffman's Simple Particle System:

http://processing.org/learning/topics/simpleparticlesystem.html

Chosen Concept