I just cannot stop mucking around with this project. I was getting annoyed at the flatness of the project, namely, the solid fill background color. I wanted the piece to exist in a more robust environment. A few months back, I was playing around with reproducing cubic VR effects in Processing. It turned out to be quite easy… just map each of the 6 sides onto a cube and stick the camera inside.

Here is a quick test video. And I simply cannot stop gushing about the OPENGL render option in Processing. This project easily runs fullscreen (1680×1050) with audio analysis on my Mac G4 tower at a fast framerate. Hot damn!

I haven’t gotten around to making my own cubic VR source, so for this experiment I am using a fantastic QTVR showing the inside of a rather gargantuan wind tunnel in France. I will swap it out with something custom before posting it on flight404 proper.

On that note, does anyone want to take on this chore? Making an engaging cubic VR image that I can use? No takers? Nobody? Eh, you bunch of lazy slags… (update: I just looked up ’slag’ and it doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. But I aint gonna change it.)

The hard part was making the ribbon trails reflect the environment. So hard, in fact, that I gave up and am now just faking it. Pretty easy to tell, but also pretty easy to ignore. I am arbitrarily assigning an x/y position to the texture image based on the angle of the ribbon at each point along its length. This way, ripples in the ribbon show a change in the ‘reflection’ in a reasonably believable manner.