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Title: Live Control of Emergent Behaviours

• Appropriate Courses: COMP6703 (eSci), COMP8770 (eSci), COMP8780 (HCC)

• Orientation: implementation
• Status: proposition
• Supervisor(s)/Client: Clem Baker-Finch
• Research Area(s): Generative art, Human-centred computing
• Technical Difficulty Level: low
• Conceptual Difficulty Level: low

Description

Perlin Noise, Steering Behaviours, various Cellular Automata, among others, are algorithms that are popular with graphic designers, new media artists, games developers, and animators. Such algorithms are the foundation of what is generally known as generative art.

Steering behaviours such as flocking arise from a "flock" of "boids" all responding to their environment in a pre-determined manner, with respect to various parameters that determine their response. For example, each boid may have a maximum turning force, a maximum speed, a zone of influence, and relative weights of separation, following etc.

The appearance (the emergent bahaviour) of the whole flock can be changed markedly by small changes in those parameters. Designers wishing to fine-tune their systems genrally need to modify the parameters on a trial and error basis, directly modifying their code.

The aim of this project is to develop a collection of examples of emergent behaviour algorithms - specifically including various steering algorithms - where a well-designed user interface allows the user to modify the parameters live, through sliders for example, to see the effect on behaviour immediately.

Links and References

All development work will be in Processing, a Java based system widely used by new media artists and designers. Craig W. Reynolds invented and developed the idea of steering algorithms, and more information can be found at http://www.red3d.com/cwr/.