A bit of explanation that is probably well overdue for my XML project. The main concept behind this piece is the idea that where other forms of information have become XML orientated, XHTML, XCSS etc, a new JPEG format will follow.

This new format will take the existing compression technology of the Joint Photographic Experts Group and add more than just metadata, but rather a whole section of the file in a compatible XML/text form. Inside this there can be a standardised method of defining the contents of the image (similar to the way in which RSS is based on XML), which will require new programs or tools within existing programs to save to this format.

The image can be broken up into any number of rectangles containing a portion of the image, and also a title and description of the contents of the rectangle. The rectangles are not within a fixed grid but rather have a starting XY coordinate and finishing XY coordinate. There is nothing to say that rectangles cannot overlap, and of course this should be the way, since pictures and photos will rarely be clearly broken into sections.

Tools could be developed to auto-tag sections of photos, for example detecting sections of an image and creating rectangles ready to be written about, or even adding generic information about them itself.

Other Stuff

http://www.kirupa.com/web/mysql_xml_php.htm – A useful way of applying XML I found while researching.

View the XML project as it comes along.
To get results, try the search terms ‘silver’ and ‘blue’ for now, but anything else if its there can be searched for.

Finishing the Simulacrum Project

And finally, the last 20 second section of my simulacrum video is complete. Saving it as Quicktime initially created a 1.3GB file, however this was before I set it to compress with mpeg4, giving me a nice 118MB 100% quality file. Still nothing near the size I would reasonably put online though. : (

Simulacrum Online Workbook

Langston’s Ant

Is to be replaced this week (tomorrow) by game of life.

HCI

Looking into the lovely 4000 word essay… Firstly I need to decide on the problem that my HCI orientated interface needs to solve.

XML

Here starts the second (of four) part of the idat204 module with Professor Vladimir Geroimenko who certainly knows his XML and Semantic Web. Looks like we’ll be having to make an application for the semantic web.

soft221

In addition to the current projects with rapidly approaching deadlines we have been introduced to a small mid-term exam from soft221. Marvellous stuff.

HCI

HCI (Human Computer Interaction or isad223) will be wanting coursework done by the end of this term, involving the creation of an interface based on the design techniques learnt here. That would be a four thousand word essay comprising 100% of the overall mark for this module.

Simulacrum 3D Video

Simulacrum (trans-spacial design) admittedly has been in the pipeline for a while but at least there are a number of thoughts as to an idea (I like this project as its the first that asks for a reasonable amount of creativity from my part – yes thats not f*ing actionscripting aka java) if not much to show for it yet. I have effectively what I want to create planned out already, but more of that to be revealed soon…

Critical Contexts

Idat203 – Critical Contexts, what else can be said? The ‘other’ four thousand word essay comes to mind.

Organism Project

Orrrrganism project proceeds and has a week-before-deadline deadline tomorrow, hence this is my current activity. The flowers grow, the bees move. The flowers currently undertake a form of assexual reproduction though, and literally create a clone seed of themselves which is planted and grows and seeds etc.

Creative Garden

For the Creative Garden company, our chosen niche of professional school and college websites seems very fruitful.

Oh yes and finally, I still want to create a working new design for my own website!

Each of our roles have been decided for The Creative Garden team, and work gets underway to creating our company persona, website and example products. It has been decided for now that I should produce the main HTML portfolio website while Tom and Lloyd handle the visuals and portfolio pieces.

idat 203

I have now considered examining the Generative Webpaintings by Stanza as a basis for my work in idat203. It has also been suggested to me that I should look into the photographer and artist Paul Smith (http://www.paulmsmith.co.uk/)

Other Stuff

Catalina Estrada – Artist from the Computer Arts magazine also featuring an ex-MLA (media lab arts was the course I signed up for but it changed to i-dat on our first year), Pete Harrison.

Back to replicating bees; having placed traces on every value surrounding the creation and death I have discovered the problem was far more elusive than I thought originally. Every-so-often a bee would die twice, or even three times, causing the total count to go down more than it should for a single death. The effect of this can be seen here, but be warned, running this for a while means a lot of extra bees and serious CPU stress. ALSO, it quite often needs to be left a while before things start to happen.

UPDATE: An even better code bug, just wait for the second generation plants to reproduce…

Possible Explanation

The musings of someone staring at ACTIONSCRIPT CODE:

Of course, there is a reasonable explanation. There is a time delay between creating a new bee after one dies, and should two die in quick succession, the hive notices that two have died perfectly normally. So the hive creates a new one, and waits to respawn the second. But what happens if another bee dies during this time? The hive counts 2 dead again, creates another, and then at some point one of the new bees dies too quickly, and again the hive is on 2. Three more are created, with a fourth of the new ones still flying about. The extra bee can be accomodated forever because every bee will report when it dies to the hive, that the total number are one down, which to the hive means 3 – 1 = 2 (create a new bee). A seventh has appeared while I typed this, scary…

While watching a trace of the number of bees the hive THINKS there are and the number actually onscreen, it is possible for the hive to say 2 while there are 3.

I’m not sure how to stop this, whether I can, or indeed if I WANT to stop this from happening. And finally, it seems I can’t get it to happen again, so maybe this IS a freak occurrence. I also assume, that the larger the number of bees, the more likely this event is to become.

UPDATE: With patience, it did happen within flash and I watched as the trace of the number said 2 alive, while 3 were flying and therefore it created another, fourth bee.

Thinking about it, the simple solution would be to make sure a bee can’t die faster than the hive can keep count, currently the hive takes 8 seconds to cycle around its activities twice (spawn 2 bees) and also, 8 seconds is the shortest lifespan of a bee. Unfortunately, while this is good for 3 bees, any more and the shortest lifespan will need to be more than 12, 16, 20 etc. The hard solution would be to replace the register of bees in the hive, and replace it with an actual counting of each bee every time it checks to see if any are needed to be spawned.

The Concept

The general idea we have had is to take a pretty common concept of organisms developing in a minature environment which includes its own ecosystem with variables which affect the organisms and place it within a virtual snowglobe, which can be shaken by the end user as a form of interaction. So I have been trying to think through how I could possibly go about creating a system where shaking our organism snowglobe could disassemble each flower and then recreate a load of new random ones. Got to create a growing flower first however…

A possible form of virtual life? Although its completely manmade, this is the sort of thing that might be relevant to the organism project. The BBC news article discusses it in terms of being a contagious disease, like a real organism.

Flash Organism Scripts

Having studied the scripting on blogged flash animations, I see that while being complex scripts, and based on randomness they have no potential for growth or alternative outcomes.

And they certainly aren’t affected by any external factors.

Weird plants with petals growing from the roots perhaps? Must discuss this with Rob.

As it is now progressing, a new plant within our environment has an approximate lifespan of 400 seconds in which to develop, attract our bees which will have their own rules as to what type of organism they find attractive (but ultimately I foresee a symbiotic relationship where the bees are attracted more to what is available rather than a fixed ideal set by us) and eventually expire. The bee population will be determined by the number of flowers and the flowers and the survival of their set of ‘genetic’ attributes will rely on the bees to pollinate them.

About the project

I will be working with Rob Gregory on this project.

To see the progress we’re making, you can view it being developed here: http://www.srjm.co.uk/portfolio/idat204/organism/

Research

Areas of research now include fibonacci in nature, the golden rule, average temperatures and optimal growing conditions for plants. I hope to be able to use Actionscript to simulate some of these phenomenon.