For my midterm in Nature of Code, I’d like to be able to simulate a part of my evolving thesis idea which broadly speaking, is the notion of a parasitic lighting system that draws electricity to nourish its own expanding, growing needs.  This ‘nourishment’ is redirected towards the dynamic growth of crystal structures grown on reconfigurable, modular ‘offsprings’.

Breakable: Rhino Rendering

The crystallization process can occur through what is known as DLA (Diffusion Limited Aggregation) in which particles move randomly due to Brownian motion until it collides with the base seed particles with a “sticking coefficient”.

I think this is better explained here: http://www.physics.uc.edu/~pinskia/dla/DLA.html

and here: http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/panorama/physics/dla/DLA.html

I’ve been looking at ways to develop a sketch which will use camera tracking to have the crystal growth start a seed based on where a person is standing, and using motion detection so that the less he or she moves, the more the seed will have a chance to grow into larger aggregations…

Toxi recently posted about a library called simultis which explores this DLA process with some amazing looking results: http://toxiclibs.org/2010/02/new-package-simutils/

I’ve been roughly experimenting with this and using a more traditional 2-dimensional approach to the issue but haven’t decided yet what would be the best course of action from here on out. I feel like the toxiclibs library would take a long time to get through (let alone render and process!) but the results would be stunning.  On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with using particle systems to simulate the process as well.