In the end, I forewent using Toxi’s library and instead opted to implement particle systems because I wanted a better understanding of how to use them. Here is a video of the end result. I added some perlin noise to vary the color and add a bit more sparkle to the “crystals.” But the code is using four particle systems which hit the “seeds,” each of which are generated upon a mouse press. As the particles hit the seeds, they will become part of the seed and expand the cluster, forming the branching-like DLA pattern.

source code here

For Nature of Code last week, we had to program an example of something demonstrating oscillating movement. Although I originally thought of the particular forces that exist between the nucleus and electrons of an atom, I decided to play up the idea by relating the gravitational mass of the “nucleus” in my sketch with the degree of oscillation between the corresponding “electrons”.

This code was heavily adapted from Shiffman’s code.

The last visualizing data assignment was parsing the XML from the Yahoo RSS feed using two data sets and two colors.

Since my usual gauge for weather consists of me looking out a window and taking an educated guess, i wanted to create something that would emulate window blinds that were moving in a weather vane like movement.  I chose to visualize the relationship between temperature and wind speed by setting the wind speed equal to the rotational speed of my blinds and mapping the color of the blinds from blue (coldest) to red (hottest) using an HSB colormode.  It doesn’t run well on the browser, but click here to download source code.

the last go-around was a bit static in terms of changing things up with my variables so here is a second attempt to make it more dynamic.

Data Viz assignment as inspired by graphic designer, Saul Bass.  

Constraints: (1) can only be in black and white; (2) one variable must be a string; (3) one variable must be an integer

Click image to launch and view source code.