Re: [Swarm-Support] 3-D Representation

[Paul Johnson]

Great. How about you look at the ballet dancing project Tina Yu and I 
did this last spring.

http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/Swarm/MySwarmCode/Dancer/

There is a Swarm model with dancers and they follow certain aesthetic 
rules that Tina created. I was using the 2d graph library to show the 
dancers as ovals on a square. I outputted the information about their 
positions and such to a data file, and Tina made a quick time movie of 
the dance with a program called lifeform. That showed stick people 
frolicking about.

I think it would be cool if you could write a 3d thing to directly 
attach to swarm to make the same representation. Maybe you could use the 
dancer model since it is already a working prototype.

A slightly abbreviated version of that paper was published in an art 
journal called YLEM about a month ago.

That dancer model has one feature that i think is really interesting 
from a Swarm scheduling point of view.  Each dancer chooses "steps" from 
a repertoire.  Some steps take one unit of time, others take more.  So 
this code features a sort of dynamic scheduling in which each dancer 
chooses a step, and then only when that step is finished, will the 
dancer choose another step.  All of the dancers are operating on 
individualized time sequences, i suppose I mean to say.

Artem Baguinski wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 05:35:34PM -0500, Paul E Johnson wrote:
>
> > I was freaked out there for a minute. I thought you meant somebody 
> > produced that 3d picture "graph.gif" with Swarm.  The 3dlib you refer to 
> > implements positional record keeping, but does not do any of the work 
> > of drawing the image onto a beautiful picture.
> >
> > Has anybody used Swarm to make a 3d picture?
>
>
> i'm interested in using Swarm in real time 3D graphics software. 
>
> being employed in a new media art lab, i'm interested in finding new
> ways of creation "interesting" graphics, audio, text :-) and now and
> then i spawn myself in a side projects when i have a hunch that
> they can deliver something new.
>
> so, I'm about to start such a new project, just need some time to get
> accuainted with swarm. The idea is to visualize swarm based models in
> fancy 3D. Since art is my domain I can sacrifice some accuracy of
> visualization in favor of fanciness, may be my approach isn't that
> useful for serious scientists.
>
>
> > It seems to me that drawing a 3d picture like that during a simulation 
> > would make it really slow, wouldn't it?  If you run a program to draw a 
> > picture like that from a dataset, it is usually not speedy...
>
>
> that picture is way simple for modern (graphics) hardware. although it
> depends of course what for parameters are visualized. it is statistics
> calculations that may take a lot of CPU, but I'm guessing, if you design
> your model taking the stats your interested in into account, you can
> optimize statistics calculation and make real time visualization
> possible, wether in 3 or in 2 dimensions.
>
> the application may be build that way that stats computations are only
> made if stats-swarm is requested (if i got it right that's the way you
> deal with GUI in swarm). then one can run simulation without stats /
> visualization for some time, save results and restart with visualizer to
> see what happenned to the model while (s)he was not looking. [here i
> imagine a model that slowly changes in time, like ecosystem for
> example].
>
>
> > Makes me wish there were a blt 3d component we could  hook up.
>
>
> GNU Maverik is a good GPLed virtual reality library. it's written in object
> oriented manner in C, i guess wraping it, or part of it, in Objective-C
> could provide swarm with nice framework for realtime 3D visualization.
>
> http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/maverik/
>
>
> > If this were my project, I would be inclined to say that the simulation 
> > should be in Swarm, but you should output the positional data and make 
> > the beautiful 3d picture with some other program that is intended for 3d 
> > pictures.  I have a really great commercial stat package called S+ that 
> > can do that, and its free cousin R can do it, but not so easily.  I saw 
> > some great graphs of that sort in a SAS presentation lately.
>
>
> If stats you wanna see are really complicated, then this is definitelly
> the way too go.
>
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--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700