Bring Your Own Medium to the Cave III: Cave Animations
CS137 Assignment #3
Out |
Tues, 9/28 |
Due |
Tues, 10/5 |
1. Get some introduction to real scientific data.
2. Start thinking about animated motion in your designs.
3. Learn more about the Cave's strengths and weaknesses for working with data and animation.
4. Learn more about CavePainting strengths and weaknesses for working with data and animation.
·
Check the
website for updated readings.
In this assignment you will augment your earlier assignments by connecting them to real data and incorporating animation. The idea is for you, as a group, to understand how this process is done both programmatically and interactively using a modified version of CavePainting. You will use the tools available to you in this assignment when working on your final projects as well, so the learning will have future value.
We have connected CavePainting to a dataset that contains information about the fluid flow around a bat during one cycle of its wing beat. Your goal on this assignment is to understand the examples given to you, see how you can fit your own design into the framework the support code is giving you, and implement it. This assignment will be graded based on three criteria: The use of animation in your environment, the use of some programming to connect design and data, and the realization of some pieces (or all) of your design being animated or otherwise modified in some aspect driven by the flow data.
Collaboration is key in this assignment. Designers will come up with ideas that computer scientists will have trouble implementing given the support code. That’s when computer scientists need to communicate to their designers the possibilities and limitations of the programming part.
The support code for this assignment is actually a program that you need to build (for non-programmers, this means translating the instructions we wrote in the code into instructions the computer understands… computers don’t speak much English) before you can run it on the cave.
There are a bunch of examples already in the support code that will help you understand the flow data and the assignment, and you don’t need to know how to code to see them! (... how about those TAs, ah?). There are three main types of examples you can interact with in the assignment:
The TAs will try to accommodate and improve the support code as required during this week, but the assignment will require some digging around if you want to implement some completely new idea during this week. Keep in mind this is not your final project but just a ‘getting-your-feet-wet’ mini-project.
On your cs137/ directory type:
cs137handout 3
This will create a subdirectory called asgn3/ under your cs137/ folder, where all the necessary code for this assignment is.
After you’ve got your code in your account, build it by typing:
make
After about 2 or 3 minutes, the prompt will return and you will be able to type again. Now you can run it in the cave by typing:
./runcave
Note, it’s all one word, not like the second assignment. We will have a help session to explain how to see the different examples and how the different parts of the assignment are present in the cave when you run the support code.
Go to your cs137/asgn3/ directory and type:
cs137handin3 yourgroupnamehere
Make sure a button shows up in the kiosk with ‘asgn3.yourgroupname’. Run it from the kiosk and make sure it has what you want to handin.
1. For each one of the readings due on Tue 10/5, write 2 discussion questions that you think are interesting about the paper or book chapter.
2. Describe your creations and how you adapted your design to include animation and real data interaction.
3. What do you wish you could have done, but you couldn’t? Did you need more time or just better support code?
· Completed readings
· Handed-in the code (one per group)
· E-mailed answers to questions to TA (each person in the group)