Project 2 - Psychedelic Globe

• Design Process My process started with a day of discovery. When thinking about an object to create, I immediately knew I wanted something out of the ordinary. After tearing my apartment apart, I found the following object on my desk:
  
  The object, a paperweight statue, was exactly what I was looking for... something a bit psychedilec that you could stare at for hours. Sketching the statue was not easy, given the complexity of the object. I ended up with the following sketch using photoshop:
  
  I certainly wanted to toy with form and movement with this object, and make it responsive to user input via keystrokes, mouse position, and mouse click events. Creating the p5 design was a very iterative process.
  
  I started with the form itself, which took a night of combining an ellipse with a set of curved vertices. I then wanted to create the inner circles / objects inside the globe. I found it was difficult to have the objects fit inside the globe, as I didn't have a formula to express if an object was outside of the globe (p5 has no check if an object is outside of another object). My solution was to wrap the objects in the createObject method. This translates the object into an image, where I'm then able to use the mask method.
  
  I wanted to express a sort of lava-lamp/fluid interaction between the inner shapes of the globe. After some digging, I found an example of a wave pattern on the p5 website here. I combined this trigonometry from this example with the existing p5 layers and masks to create the moving globe.
  
  Rather than change the scale of the globe, I decided to instead change the background colors when a key is pressed. I thought this added a more thought-provoking and interactive experience than changing the scale as well.
  
  The final touch was adding small flowers when the user clicks on the globe. I added these using flower emojis with the mouse clicked method.
• Reflections
  
  I thought this project was a success. I dove deeper into p5, and explored creating a complex object.
  
  P5 lends itself well as a 2d interaction software; I find it can be difficult to use, particularly with it's documentation. It seems like objects in p5 have no knowledge of each other, which makes for some hacking.