Progress report for line tones, Reykjavik, July 2006.

Right-click to download movie 1

Please note; film is encoded for quicktime using the h.264 encoder. It may not play correctly if you don't have the latest quicktime installed. You can get the latest quicktime here; http://www.apple.com/quicktime/.

During the early stages of the project we were concerned with the development of an intuitive drawing interface for Anna. Rather than use her usual drawing software (Adobe Illustrator), we needed to build something with a more refined "artboard" and something we have complete control over.

I decided to used Jitter's openGL functions as these offer the most computationally efficient way of rendering graphical information. Our first experiment took half an hour to put together and is shown above. I am mapping tilt information from the graphic tablet onto rotation coordinates. Pressure from the pen is related to the darkness of the image as it appears. The slight blurring between frames is created by enabling the blend function of the renderer and setting the erase_color parameter to something close to zero.

For Anna this was a problematic interface to use. It has none of the refined qualities that Illustrator allows and there is also an artefact of using lineto coordinates for drawing.

However, over the flat vector drawing offered by Illustrator, this interface does allow the creation of a 3D environment and therefore richer complexity. As more lines are drawn however, these stack up inside the computer's memory and quickly the rendering of the machine begins to slow down.

The sound is filtered white noise at a low bit depth. It is unlikely we will dwell much on sounds like this.