kate hollenbach

It’s been a busy couple of weeks with class projects, but I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on E15, too. Last week Tak helped me finish up some of the navigation code for E15, so now we can move through the 3D environment with six degrees of freedom — and I can focus on more visual work.

I wrote a script that uses text to draw a 2D image from a file. As I was developing and testing the script, I used an image of some orchids and repeated the same text for every pixel in the image:

Using the same text for every "pixel" created the uniform effect in the above image, but using a different string for every pixel made the texture a little more varied. To try this out, I used some strings generated from my del.icio.us bookmarks, although it wasn’t quite enough data to fill out the whole image:

And a view from inside the 3D image, where there’s lots of illegible text:

I know, there’s not really a relationship between the orchid picture and my del.icio.us links. I’ll probably try out a few more sketches that relate the image and data a little better, but this’ll probably end up just being a little aesthetic exercise.

Last week we put up a blog for E15 , and today I wrote my first post about some work I’ve been doing with images from Wikipedia . I was struggling to come up with some interesting paths to use for laying out images & text, when I found a good Wikipedia page with a list of different types of curves. The page didn’t have any images, though, so I wrote a script to find the related images and lay them out in E15. The results look nice so far, and I’ll be playing more with the same data this week.

The PLW presented E15 at Flashfoward last Friday. E15 is an OpenGL based programming environment with a Python scripting interface; right now we’re using it to visualize futuristic web interfaces. Screenshots and video of the project can be found at the E15 website , which will be updated as the project develops. Check back for more updates soon!