Author: Connor Mattson

I apologize for the lack of live Max feed and vertical video:

My idea is to make a digital “mood ring”.

For background, mood rings are toy rings that have a material on the outside that changes color based some temperature input. Thus, if the wearer’s level of energy or heat transfer to the ring changes, so will the color of the ring, indicating a change of mood.

I really like color-emotion connections so this is an idea that stuck with me.

To put this in the digital world, I will use input from the user in the form of temperature and possibly another input device to add a randomness factor.

The output to the user is still undecided but may be a psychedelic visual based on their “mood” or a servo motor that acts as a pointer on an emotional spectrum.

I need to research mood rings, how they work, connection between emotion and color, as well as the necessary work to be done in Max. I will be using an Arduino board.

I was so occupied with holding the camera that I forgot to hit play when showing the sensor affecting a form of playback (2nd example in the video) and didn’t notice until editing it all together.

Sorry for the extremely late upload; very busy and hectic weekend.

Nonetheless, here it is in all of its glory. Enjoy.

The left analog stick affects the distortion and filter effect on the center video while the right analog stick affects the zoom and crop settings on the side video planes.

Concept:

My initial goal was to make a simplistic emotional representation of different colors. To aid the focus towards the action-color connection, I made the animation with stick figures void of shading. My inspiration for this was the old “animator vs. animation” videos. My controller is a painter’s palette with 4 swatches of color, each representing a different event that you can trigger on screen. For the events, each color will cause a new stick figure to come onto screen and through some action, get rid of the current stick figure and replace them in a standardized pose.

I will upload more pictures soon

The sound on two of my four animations do not work when put into Max. The audio on the actual QuickTime (.mov) file works fine for some reason.

WARNING: MAY BE EXTREMELY LOUD (TURN DOWN YOUR SOUND BEFORE WATCHING)

Sorry it took so long for me to upload this. I will end up making an entirely new patch for assignment 2, I wasn’t aware that we weren’t yet putting animation into our patches.

I am manually moving the object in the window but the transition of color is controlled by metronomes.

Experience with digital art:

Coming in to WPI, I was a IMGD tech but after a couple art classes I realized I wasn’t very passionate about code. I switched to art and have been really happy with the switch. My experience really only extends to classes that I’ve taken at WPI, as well as solo projects that i’ve done with those skills.

Experience with programming:

Because I came in as a IMGD Tech major, I did know a bit of coding from AP Comp Sci. I can read code much better than I can write it.

Other creative arts:

I listen to music whenever I can and am also a bit of a film junky. I enjoy all things creative and used to write poetry and short stories.

Creative Inspirations:

Music, Film, other art pieces, video games.

I usually obsess over one or two pieces from the list above for awhile, get tired of it after a while and change my focus.

So, whatever i’m into at that time is a big part of my inspiration.

Artistic Goals:

Create something I enjoy making and am happy with the results. Learning new things! When something you used to think is hard, becomes easy and progress is noticeable, I get motivation to work even more.

Recent creative projects: