Thesis: Software Prototype
The above is a screenshot of the very first prototype of the software I'm writing for my thesis. I'm calling the software the Semantic Anomalizer. It's a subclass of Apple's WebKit HTML renderer that I've hacked to respond to OSC. The screenshot above depicts the result of a live typing session in which the size of the font is being modulated by a sine wave signal coming from a Processing applet. It's the simplest possible application, but the results are promising.
Using the WebKit renderer buys me a lot of features that would have been annoying, expensive or impossible to implement otherwise: beautifully rendered type, for one thing, and sane line breaking, not to mention printing and PDF. JavaScript integration is another interesting possibility. Manipulating the text is as easy as manipulating the DOM. I'm happy with how it looks so far, even if the implementation has been kind of a pain (learning Objective-C, threading, "autorelease pools," trolling through Apple header files to make up for shoddy documentation...). Using OSC should hopefully make it easy to hook the software up to whatever physical interface (or other software) I find lying around.
More as it develops.