A marble dropped in a bowl will maintain it’s energy and float around. I want to simulate a marble flowing through an ebbing bowl, where the “temperature” of the system is slowly raised by accelerating the marble in random directions. The marble can start calm, and stay around it’s “nest” but end chaotic, moving in every which way.
The height of the bowl is communicated by color in the below animation.
The simulation itself is easy, but what’s going to be harder is adding waves to the “bowl”. (slow the video down for it to make sense)
The physical piece will be an array of LED Lights enclosed in a box, emanating the colors that represent the topology of the “bowl”. They will be used to visualize the random waves.
The marble will be a little bird, suspended on wires (like the skycam shown here).
I want to diffuse the light using smoke in an enclosed space
One thing I’m on the fence about is what to use. I want to use smoke, but I’m not sure how to get it in there. If there were suggestions about things to use or how to get smoke in the container, that would be very helpful!
I’m also not sure how to add waves. Currently, the function for the bowl is just the distance from the origin squared. To add waves, I am adding another function that makes seemingly random peaks. I’m not sure how to describe the waves well mathematically. If the waves in the video seem good, that’s great, but if people had opinions/suggestions that would be appreciated.
Finally, I want to add a piano background (if I have time), but I know nothing about adding audio to the project. Suggestions about that would help a lot too!
Hi Akshay, I think you have a really cool idea for this project. I think the use of the waves is really interesting and I like how you plan to use the lights to represent temperature. If you would like to add audio without adding more technical challenges, you can use a speaker to accompany the project and have a playlist of songs that inspired the piece or have the feeling of what you want to communicate.
Hi Akshay! I think this is a very unique idea. I am going to guess that using something like a smoke machine would be the best way to get the smoke into the project space, but I would just be a bit cautious and it might take some experimenting especially if you want the project to be fully enclosed. For example, too much smoke might make the visibility of the bird bad, or if a temperature change is happening, then maybe the smoke would leave condensation marks on the clear encapsulation.
For adding the waves, you could potentially add some sort of small fan that moves randomly underneath the array of LEDs. That way you could potentially simulate waves flowing with the fog.