slh // itp

After considering a few ideas related to a pond ecosystem, in the end I decided to shift direction a bit and work instead on a caterpillar that eats paintings. I wanted to stay with the idea of a creature that interacts with its environment, but rather than try to create a realistic nature environment, I decided to go with something more fun and abstract. I’d been looking at images of butterflies a lot for my midterm, and I thought that it would be fun to do something with a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly after it eats enough. But rather than feeding this caterpillar leaves, I decided to feed it a painting — Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples. As the “caterpainter” chomps through Cézanne’s painting, it re-colors the painting with colors from another painting. I used Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, if only because it is so popular and easy for most people to recognize just by color. Unfortunately I didn’t actually get as far as the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, but I would like to continue working on this sketch and develop it further. I really learned a lot about arraylists by working on this project! Here is a link to the applet: http://itp.nyu.edu/~sh1621/noc/final/

The Menu+ interface is for people who are trying to make an informed choice when dining out, but are constantly frustrated by poorly written menus and wait staff who know too little about where the food that they are serving comes from.

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I just can’t let go of these butterflies! For my midterm (and possibly my final), I’d like to stay with the theme of butterflies and try to create a very simple simulation of entomophily — pollination of flowers by insects. So far I have the butterfly fluttering about a single flower. I would like to have a field of flowers with some simple variations — petal shape, size, and color — and an array of (user-generated?) butterflies that would flutter about, land on various flowers, and create new cross-pollinated flower varieties in the process. This wouldn’t be a very realistic simulation of how things work in nature, but I think that it will be a good project for me to work on in order to improve my coding skills. I’m still not happy with the look of my butterfly, but I will ignore that for now and just try to focus on the butterfly’s movement and the creation of new flower varieties.

Bring back game night! With the GameNight! Table you can play all your favorite board games with all your favorite friends, even if some of them live thousands of miles away.

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