Sunday, November 27, 2011

Secret Agent Men





No, this is not a post about secret agents... but rather computational agents! (ok, bad joke!)
Jose Sanchez has an excellent example of flocking agents at the Plethora Project. Additionally, Satoru Sugihara has some great tutorials on using the agent class for piGeon.

My videos below show flocking behavior in 3D...specifically in relationship to the boundaries defined by a surface.

I am fascinated by the ability to use this behavior to describe irregular surface patterning. The processing sketch constrains the agents to the UV space of the surface and draws traces of the agent movement. The color change refers to the UV position.




I am also interesting dynamic human interaction with the agent system. This example shows a ControlP5 interface for dynamically changing the flocking variables (alignment, cohesion, and separation). I can also adjust the line connection variable to study the relationship structure.