Completion

After receiving help from Martin and the code required to build the environment, we took the exisiting code martin had provided and added to it. Before we had one tree organism linked to the CO2 Levels of Lecture Theatre 'A', now we have three trees linked to Lecture 'A', The wind vane and rain sensors from Portland Square. This will show the environment possibly growing and dying at the same time in one application.

At the moment we are only able to run the application from inside 'J Developer' due to security settings within web browsers that won't allow us to run the Java application unless it is 'signed'.

We have to say that although we designed the environment ourselves all the coding required to achieve it was provided by Martin Beck and we only changed existing code to produce the final piece of work.

This is a screen grab of the organism running, as you can see two of the trees are fading in at different opacities and the third isn't even visible.













To conclude, we are happy with the way in which the organism idea turned out and is fairly close to that of our original ideas, however we did plan on using a more detailed representation of the organism being affected by the results of each sensor, however due to time and limited programming knowledge myself and Rob felt that this would be the more simple option for us to at least show something at the presentation sessions.

Building Cont...

Again we met up with Martin and with his help showed us how to replace the 'Red Square' with our own organism designs and to work on the alpha blending a bit more and added our environment image on which the organisms shall live.














This is the plant design to be used which shall be affected by three or four different sensors.
and below is the environment in which it will be placed.
The environment will constantly be visible unlike the tree designs which will fade in and out depending on the readings they are linked to.

Building has Begun....

Right now we have a red square connected to the Co2 levels of Lecture Theatre 'A', this is set up so that the opacity will decrease if increase depending on the levels. A number value showing the reading of the CO2 is displayed also, but is only there to see if the square is reacting properly.

The next Stage of this is to replace the red square with an image of a plant that we have designed from 'Vue'.













(Top right shows the applet displaying the running red square)

Technical Ideas

The organism's within the environment were due to be controlled by the real time weather. After speaking with Martin Beck to get ideas of a way of building this using Java, we got a few more ideas of ways in which the organism can be affected. The environment was going to be difficult to show the changing of the weather due to the weather not changing a great deal in a short amount of time. Getting the environment to react to the weather also turned out to be a long job which is beyond mines and Rob's coding capabilities.

However Martin showed us a program he built which takes readings from a number of sensors, linked to Portland Square. This program displayed wind speed and rain taken from a web page linked to all the sensors where the data is transferred to the program to display the reading from the web page. He told us that this web page also has readings for a number of lecture theatres Co2, Humidity and Temperature readings. This Gave us the new and more achievable idea for our organism.

The Environment could be affected by the C02 levels and humidity of the rooms which is likely to change depending on the number of people within these rooms.

The web page displaying all the sensors results and from where we shall extract our data is
http://arch-os.scce.plymouth.ac.uk/html_data.php?source=all_bms

Using Vue

These are some landscape designs Rob came up with whilst messing about with Vue, aswell as a screen grab of the layout of the program itself.

More Environments

Ok so with Google Earth out of the picture Myself and Rob had a look at a 3D program I had called Vue 5. Designed to create realistic 3D environments as well as plants and tree modelling.

Having not really used the software much before, we had to get used to the different aspects of what this modelling program can do and what we able to and not able to achieve with it.
Below are some images of landscapes and environments that were created by others using this piece of software.

Environments

Our organism is to be affected by the weather, the organism is in fact going to be an environment. We now need to think of a way to represent the environment in particular what software to use to build it.

Ideas of a 3D designed environment seem to be the favourite right now. We had initial ideas of using Google Earth due to the fact an entire environment is already there to be used. Only trouble is the representation of an environment isn't too good because the Google Earth environment is in a 2D perspective and in order to show organisms within that environment being affected by weather, we feel that 3D will be the most effective way. Plus Google Earth often shows blurred images of certain areas.

Organism Initial Ideas

The idea for a living organism brought us to the representation of weather. Our initial thoughts were to create a character that would react with the weather forecast from a website, but this seemed to just be too simple and didn't really represent what we wanted. With some guidance from Dan (lecturer) we decided that the idea of representing the weather was good.. but a way in which it could be translated was the only problem.

We decided instead of a character, an environment would better represent this idea. This environment would be effected depending on the actual weather forecast, constant rain or snow for example would determine how the environment may grow or suffer.