Reaction Diffusion

Completed as my final project for Advanced Creative Coding at NYU, this piece was created as an homage to the live visual effects at a Tame Impala concert. Using ofxCV (an openFrameworks wrapper for OpenCV) for blob detection, I used a Microsoft Kinect to determine the contours of the subject. I then took several hundred points along that contour and used each point to generate a reaction diffusion system.

Reaction–diffusion systems are mathematical models which correspond to several physical phenomena: the most common is the change in space and time of the concentration of one or more chemical substances: local chemical reactions in which the substances are transformed into each other, and diffusion which causes the substances to spread out over a surface in space. (from Wikipedia)

Using the computer microphone I capture the frequency bands of the music and fed its values to the reaction diffusion algorithm. The result is a visually captivating and fun interactive piece.