IDAT106: Final Project

As mentioned before, the basis of my final project for IDAT106 involves using the ArchOS data collected from the Portland Square building, and to be presented on the Portland Square building's greenscreen. The greenscreen itself is an array consisting of 50x80 RGB LED pixels. When designing projects for the greenscreen there are several different factors you need to think about. The first is the dimensions of the screen itself, its been recommended that the source media is to the resolution of 330x500 pixels onscreen; so what can be displayed is very limited by this factor. This got me thinking visually what im going to display on the screen and what scale its going to be.

First off I researched different style types such as grunge, minimalistic, retro, futuristic etc and found that a very basic retro style was the best way to go forward. When I say the style retro I mean very basic block images with defined edges such as graphics seen in very early video games.

In the games above both of them seem to use a sort of tile based system consisting of a grid of squares. Inside these squares different shapes/colours are used to show different directions/solids. This idea of using a grid system to define tiles seemed like a really awesome way of creating simple yet effective boundaries between transparent and opaque.

This lead me onto my first idea for a visual look on my project, by creating a grid of patterned tiles in a 8x12 grid, to the size of the screen (330x500). Each of the tiles could either be opaque, transparent, or a mix of the two.

The above image is a possible outcome of a randomly generated set of tiles, with a mirror along the middle to create a great visual effect. This mirroring idea lead me onto a great idea for how I could manipulate the ArchOS data to generate these funky pattern designs. After a discussion with fellow members of my course, the huge contrast of the transparent/opaque look makes the design look like a sort of ventilation system on the side of the building. I then took this idea further and thought about doing a contrast between the temperatures inside and outside of the building, so I could open and close up individual vents depending on the difference between temperatures inside and outside of the building.

After many hours of planning and coding, I managed to create an algorithm which managed the flow of the 'ventilation' tiles, which over time opened and closed the vents to adapt to the temperature change. For example if it started getting colder outside of the building, the vents would start closing up to seal more of the heat inside the building and vise-versa.

Click here for a link to Tiles v1