Explorations in Screen Based and Psychotic Computing
My Experience

From Circles to Stars

Created by Joe DePasquale / @astr0Pixel

Psychosis

A mental disorder characterized by a disconnection from reality.

A Grand Vision to Start

I knew I wanted to work on the supernova story from the start. My plan was ambitious and I soon realized I'd need to break it down into a manageable chunk to get something done in 3 weeks.

Starting Small

A circle that wants to be small and red and will fight you to stay that way!

Building Blocks (err...Circles)

Playing around with our in-class coding excercise, Josh and I pair-programmed our way into bouncing circles!

Slides

BTW - this is the first time I've used reveal.js to put together slides for a presentation and it's really cool!

Thinking Before Doing...

Our discussions in the first week of class about audience and why we code provided a great opportunity to step back and think about the overall goals of a project before diving neck deep into code.

An Intermediate Project

Getting tired of circles, I tried my hand at using an existing API to create a "Photoshop in the Browser" experience for visitors to the Chandra X-ray Observatory's image processing tutorial site. It was one line of code:



 

Digging into the Supernova

After the image editor mini-project, I was ready to start tackling the supernova project. I already knew I was going to focus on the formation and evolution of just a massive star, but even that turned out to be a bit ambitious.

How CSS 3D Transforms Nearly Killed My Computer!

My first attempt at creating an interactive 3D environment without actually using a 3D animation library was encouraging but my laptop hated me. I learned a lot from that excercise and it inspired me to jump into three js.

3D Animation

I didn't expect to focus my time in the class so heavily on 3D animation, but here I am! The scope of the supernova project necessitated using a library optimized for 3D animation. The *final* result is worth the effort.

Far from Done

There's still so much I want to do with this project but having taken it this far in the week and a half that I've had to work on it has inspired me to keep at it.

THE END?

- Thanks Bakhtiar, Alec, and Shaunalynn!
- Thanks to the class for great conversations!

...drinks...