Mysterious alchemy

A few days ago, as I was putting the final touches on that interactive logo I talked about in yesterday’s post (well, it’s interactive if you’re not using Firefox), I decided to explore the space a bit more.

So I implemented a kind of ‘Lego version’: When you draw any collection of lines, those lines are converted into links of a flexible interactive shape that you can then play with. I showed this to my computer graphics class, and we used it to make little stick figure creatures as part of a discussion of principles of animation.

One thing led to another over the next two days, and now this little animated stick figure program has grown into a new direction for our lab that ties together research ideas in interactive drawing, procedural animation, recursive graphs and virtual reality.

I was very surprised when all of these connections started showing up, and also very pleased. That’s one of the things I like about research. Through some mysterious alchemy that I don’t completely understand, just ‘playing around’ can lead to exciting — and often unexpected — breakthroughs.