The world (and word) of jaymz

I have finally gotten around to playing with processing – a java based set of libraries and functions for visual programming. It’s really a lot of fun. It’s great for doing quick and easy interactive visualizations. With minimum code you can start drawing simple geometric shapes and when you start throwing around a few sine curves and mouse co-ordinates you’d be surprised what can come out.

One thing I’ve always promised myself I’d code was a plasma effect. A stalwart of the 8-bit demoscene I’m not sure why it’s taken so long for me to get round to actually coding one from scratch. As you can guess, processing made it pretty straightforward. Here’s the result:

This plasma harks back to one of the first group assignments I had at university where we were given an FPGA and we had to load in a picture of Lena and do something with it. The plasma never materialised, instead we ended up doing a convolution kernel. I can remember we had around 2 weeks to do it (teams of 4 or 5) and write a little report. I wrote this in the space of an hour or two.

If you’ve never used it before and have always wanted to do a bit of abstract graphical programming I’d highly recommend it. The core keywords/methods are all pretty sensible and once you’ve worked through a few basic “sketches” the whole thing begins to gel easily and you start thinking less about the code and more about what you want to do on screen.

Here are a few images I’ve created via scanning each sampled point and matching it with others in the image within a threshold. A bezier line then connects the points.