November 15th, 2007 | e15, sketches | 1 Comment »
It’s been a busy couple of weeks with class projects, but I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on E15, too. Last week Tak helped me finish up some of the navigation code for E15, so now we can move through the 3D environment with six degrees of freedom — and I can focus on more visual work.
I wrote a script that uses text to draw a 2D image from a file. As I was developing and testing the script, I used an image of some orchids and repeated the same text for every pixel in the image:
Using the same text for every "pixel" created the uniform effect in the above image, but using a different string for every pixel made the texture a little more varied. To try this out, I used some strings generated from my del.icio.us bookmarks, although it wasn’t quite enough data to fill out the whole image:
And a view from inside the 3D image, where there’s lots of illegible text:
I know, there’s not really a relationship between the orchid picture and my del.icio.us links. I’ll probably try out a few more sketches that relate the image and data a little better, but this’ll probably end up just being a little aesthetic exercise.
October 24th, 2007 | e-mail, google | 2 Comments »
This was all over tech news headlines today, but Google is finally supporting IMAP for Gmail. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons — first, it means that I can finally back up all the e-mail I’ve sent over the last couple years or so since I started using Gmail. I love Gmail, and I can’t imagine going back to an email client with less support for viewing e-mail threads, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with all that personal data living only on Google’s servers. The other reason I’m excited about this is that it opens up some new possibilities for me to play with visualizing e-mail again. When I was working on Emdash I used my MIT e-mail account for testing, so I was missing over a year’s worth of sent messages. Now that I can access those messages easily with an IMAP interface, I have some data I can use to start working on visualizing two-way e-mail communication. And I can use E15 to do it. I’m psyched.
October 20th, 2007 | class, mas863 | 1 Comment »
Made using the Modela in the Media Lab machine shop, and of course a soldering iron:
They don’t do too much other than transmit "hello world" over a serial connection. Today I’ll be writing a little code to get the larger board to blink an LED and respond to button presses, exciting I know. We’re using an ATTiny45 processor which has a different instruction set than the chip we used in the microcontroller lab I took last year, but hopefully it won’t be too different.
October 8th, 2007 | e15, research | No Comments »
Last week we put up a blog for E15, and today I wrote my first post about some work I’ve been doing with images from Wikipedia. I was struggling to come up with some interesting paths to use for laying out images & text, when I found a good Wikipedia page with a list of different types of curves. The page didn’t have any images, though, so I wrote a script to find the related images and lay them out in E15. The results look nice so far, and I’ll be playing more with the same data this week.
