This Processing project is a weather-based DJ/VJ that aims to improve the user’s mood by reacting to the current weather in the user’s location.

The scope of the project could have been very broad and encompassed many dimensions that would not have been realistic to accomplish given the limited time. Therefore, it was downsized quite a bit. For example, the user has only  3 locations to choose from: New York, Hawaii and Alaska (the project was developed in NY, and I was looking for weather conditions that would be pretty different, so I added the options of HI and AK). Ideally, users would be able to choose any place in the globe.

Click here for a brief overview of the project.

The following screen shots show the visualizations I sketched. Note: They are not the ideal result,  I would revise and modify these.

[if the weather is not great, a lighter more colorful composition]:

[if the weather is sunny/fair, a cooler colored and fresher composition]:

Workflow/Lessons Learned:

• The project was conceptually divided up into different modules (gui+weather grabber;viz;playlists), and prepared sketches for each. I think this was the correct approach. However, the code itself was not set up in the best way. As I later discovered, I wrote it using an approach that gave me an inflexible set of codes, that would require a great effort to merge into a single project, which was the desired goal.
•  Mimi Yin, an ITP Resident, suggested an approach that could help when trying to tackle this kind of project. She basically suggested the following steps:
  • prepare a hard coded version first
  • then modify all aspects to have variables
  • set up all arrays
  • set up classes
• Ideally, I would modify the project so that:
  • the style of the GUI would be different and would have a motif that would be repeated in the visualizations.
  • on top of using the current forecast, I would use the temperature to shape the audio visual output. This would require more versions of the visualization and playlists.
  • the visualizations are more interesting, not only more aesthetically pleasing, but also to make them subtly responsive to the songs in the playlist, and representative of the weather data that has been grabbed.
    •   I would add play,stop,pause and volume control functionality to the GUI.

The Processing codes will be uploaded later on.

CREDITS
Big thanks to advisors: Andres T., Chris K, Craig P., Mimi Y. Certain aspects of visualization were inspired/drawn from Erika Maher’s sketch.

THANK YOU!

Control IP5(GUI) and minim(audio) libraries were used in this project.