overview

This site showcases my submission for DECO2606 - Real-time 3D Multimedia. The goal of this assignment was to produce a 3D real-time data driven demo using the Virtools development environment.

A demo is an abstract 3D visualisation depicting real-time animation and visual effects, played to the rhythm of a song. That is, rather than a keyframed and pre-rendered animation, the animation is calculated in real-time, from code that describes the sequence of events to the computer. Code and information for each frame is parsed by the CPU and the resulting animation is rendered to the screen.

As a result, demos tend to be very small in size (in terms of the hard disk space they occupy), but very CPU intensive. This means that the hardware being used is a limiting factor in what a demo can be made to do - the computer must be able to cope with the calculations required in real-time.

The purpose of a demo is to demonstrate the skill of the person (or people) who made it. The purpose of making a data driven demo for this assignment was to demonstrate how data can be abstracted and presented in different ways. The idea was not necessarily to reflect the nature of the data being used, but instead to use data in an interesting way to affect the aesthetics of the demo, so that it would look data driven and change somehow with each execution.

abstract

The demo I have produced is called 'schizophrenic'. It is a 3 minute demo inspired by neurological function ald schizophrenia. I haven't attempted to represent these concepts so much as use them as abstract inspiration for the sequences that comprise the demo. It is played to the song Breathe by The Prodigy. I chose this particular song because it reflects my concept well and gives the demo the edgy, gritty atmosphere I wanted to create.

The demo consists of 3 fairly different scenes that are linked only by a sense of fragmentation that they share in common.

I tried to rhythmically connect the demo to the music as much as possible to make the audio and visuals integrate well. This is because the music provides structural unification for the scenes.

The data being used is the business news RSS feed from news.com.au.