<< ben fry i've created a concepts video about the atmosphere project developed for the museum of modern art in new york. the video is really large and you need a fast connection to download it. this means you'll need a cable modem or T1 or something shmancy to see it. sorry to the dial-up and overseas people. this page explains a little about the video. more information about the project itself is at the atmosphere project page the text for the video is produced using a six-dimensional type engine that i had created for the project, but i eventually had to pull it because it slurped up too much computation time, making things needlessly slow (dropped our frame rate to 8 fps from 12 fps). as with most shapes, type does interesting things when rendered in 6D and then mapped down to 2D/3D. type's especially fun because our brains like typography so much (though that also makes it cheap eye candy). you might want to check out an ugly study that i created when i was working on atmosphere. this is only a 4D space (not a full 6, what a ripoff). it's a java applet draws a hypercube (the mathemagician/geometer's name for a four-dimensional cube) and some stick-letter typography. for the movie, the interstitial text blurbs were created with short c++ programs (about 30 lines apiece) that manipulate a chunk of text in some way over time. these are set up to render based on a set of parameters (time being the most common one), which the programs take as input. the programs render out tiff images, which are sequenced together in adobe premiere. in the more perfect world of me having infinite time to spend on things, i'd wrap up it all up as something that could be sequenced together in a manner similar to after effects, using my mini c++ programs (better yet python or java programs) to do the rendering, but having the programs' parameters manipulated using the after effects interface, to allow for better time-based sequencing of elements and more control over the final piece. << ben fry | spring 2001, last updated november 2003