Tonight I talked with my twin, Josh, about my frustrations with my project, and I think having a fresh mind who is familiar with aspects of the project helped quite a bit. If not, the ranting sure did. Josh is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and has more of a mathy relationship with generative systems from his studies in HCI and AI.
I'll try to just bullet point a summary quickly:
Touch as a Medium
If I do insist on touch, can I utilize more from touch as a medium and use that? Maybe if people do draw out patterns that they then watch descend into chaos, could I find access to pressure sensitivity or use press duration to make the on-screen response more interesting or intuitive?
Perhaps when a user presses, color radiates outwards and slowly blends with any colors based on its distance away, instead of overwriting nearby colors.
A small OSD might also be helpful to explain controls or offer more options in a "touch mode"
If I want to test touch, just use my phone for now and get a tablet if it's worthwhile.
Dual screens, work with friend
Humoring the "game" idea, what if two people were meant to interact with this system and match each other's screen. Does that actually help?
I'm not sure about this idea, but I think I'll roll it around in my head a bit more. Up to this point I'd assumed the experience to always be between one person and the screen. Maybe a more social piece would be better.
Contextualize foreign concepts for audience
If I'm worried that I'll just end up telling everyone what they need to know about the piece, an alternative to text might be to contextualize the piece as a narrative story or something else relatable that could be more engaging. This might cause large changes in the project, but I'll keep it in mind
Since weather and stock markets show signs of chaos, perhaps look there for context. (Note to self: look up Condensation Cube, Haacke)
Also remember to keep maps simple, visual, and as 1:1 as possible.
Branch project to keep minimalism
If I love the aesthetic so much of the project that I don't want to change a thing, I may need to branch off so as to preserve my original idea, but also create something worthwhile as a final project.
Focus on useful optimizations, scale
Thread calculations or unify the timers so that much smaller boxes can be shown. I don't want to get too small though, or then I might as well be directly manipulating the screen's pixel array (which I can do from 654, but it's more code to write). The scale of the piece may change the experience dramatically, so get to testing it at the proper scale as soon as possible.
Include multiple alternative visualizations
One alternative we found interesting was having a single row centered vertically on the screen, and the grow the bar negative or positive (almost like an audio band spectrum) as the colors stray from their original value.
If I have time, I may very well implement this.
Attract mode might still be useful, and the ability to play both forward and in reverse would open up some options for looping the video if the touch aspect is fully removed.
Improved fitting function for variable width screen
Try to write a fitting function so that the screen fits better (probably centered) whenever the requested box size, rows, or columns don't divide evenly.
