I got to play a Theremin!

Fun, Music, Wii,
8/24/07

Some pure geeky fun today. A few weeks ago I was at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego, and was psyched to find a Theremin included in their new audio-related exhibition (which is quite good).  I’d never seen one in person, much less played one, so I immediately ran over and launched into my best rendition of Bernard Herrmann’s theme from The Day the Earth Stood Still.  I’m sure I embarrassed myself mightily, but who cares! I got to play a Theremin!

The Theremin I saw was the classic “piece of furniture with antennae” form factor you see in the image of Leon Theremin himself to the right, not the sleek Moog version you can see below in a performance of the Zelda theme.

This may qualify as a geek singularity: using the Wii remote to simulate a Theremin playing the theme from Star Trek. Enjoy…

 

 

“We get to decide” what is next-gen

Games, Interactive Design, Wii,
8/20/07

This is so right on, I couldn’t pass it up. In a speech at the GCDC in Germany this afternoon (covered in this article at GamesIndustry.biz), Stormfront Sudios President and CEO Don Daglow made some excellent points that deserve to be repeated far and wide.

“If it changes the player’s view of what interactive entertainment is; if you think differently about it; if you have a new perspective after playing the game that you didn’t have before, to me that’s next-gen,” Daglow said in a refutation of conventional wisdom that you can’t create a next-gen experience without dramatic increases in processing power. I couldn’t agree more.

The most significant innovations waiting in the wings for interactive art and entertainment are absolutely not about processing power, better algorithms, or any form of rocket science, though they may be enabled by technological innovation (as with the Wii remote). They are simply smart design, inspired thinking, artistry, and most importantly, perspective—an actual point of view on the world that arises from one’s personal experience.

Another Daglow quote: “We’ve spent a quarter of a century saying ‘the machine is holding me back’... The only problem is that now the machines are so powerful, we’ve lost our excuse.” This became really clear to me in the waning years of the last console generation (PS2, Xbox, GameCube), when I started to get bored with gaming in general. Everything was a retread; new versions of old games with upgraded graphics. I was shocked out of my complacency, however, when the Wii controller was first announced (evidenced by the fact that as soon as I heard the announcement I immediately estimated the dimensions of the remote and built a Duplo version the same size to start imagining what was possible…)

Daglow defends the Wii as a next-gen platform from the skeptics who doubt that it’s lesser-powered processor qualifies it as such with a blunt truth that should be remembered and repeated:

“Nobody gets to tell us what we think is next-gen - we get to decide for ourselves.”

Amen to that.

 

Cardinal splines in ActionScript (Updated)

Algorithms, Flex, Source Code,
8/20/07

Here’s the code driving the cardinal spline function I mentioned in the post last week on visual prototyping with Flex. ActionScript already has a bezier drawing method called “curveTo,” but it obliges you to specify a control point for every anchor point you add to the curve. This is great for precision, but sometimes you just want to run a smooth curve through a bunch of points without having to figure out where all the control points should be.

That’s what’s great about the cardinal spline—the next and previous points on the curve function as the control points.  (This means you need to add an extra point to the beginning and end of the curve, as you can see in the diagram accompanying the Wikipedia entry for c-splines.) You also get a “tension” parameter which allows you to set how taut the curve is between points.

I’ve included my current incarnation of this routine below.  Here’s how to use it:

1. Start with an array of values you want to run the curve through: 3, 7, 2, 6
2. Duplicate the start and end values: 3, 3, 7, 2, 6, 6
3. Iterate through each pair of the original values, each of which represents a segment of the curve: 3-7, 7-2, 2-6
4. For each of these iterations, proceed along the curve n number of steps (more steps = a smoother curve)
5. Call this function at each step to get the value of the curve at that step

If you’re using the function to set the location of a sprite, then you’ll need to maintain two lists of values (one for x position, one for y position) and call the function once for each list as you’re iterating through each segment of the curve.

Update: Here’s an .fla example that uses the function to draw a curved line through twenty random points.

Here’s the source for the function itself:

 

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