The Major Project! This one is all about particles. Particle simulations are something I’ve always been interested in, so I was very keen to try and see what Max could make. For this project, I wanted to make something fun for people to play with using their webcam. Basically, the idea is for people to be able to move around particles with their arms.

This level of interaction didn’t work out as well as I would’ve liked, it turns out it’s actually quite difficult to connect OpenGL with Jitter matrices. The user is still able to interact with the particles with their arms however to a much more constrained extent than I had hoped.

I tried 5 or 6 completely different methods of particle interaction, but the one I ended up using was having 4 webcam ‘zones’ that would trigger different particle attractors. This means interaction is pretty limited but still existent. Luckily, the particles are still very nice to look at without a high level of control.

Ideally, I would’ve been able to use computer vision to create an outline of a person using flowing particles. However, it seems like it is nearly impossible to connect a video feed and a particle system to that extent. I wanted full body tracking as opposed to the facial tracking that some plugins offered.

Because I am using the jit.gl.gen method of controlling the particles, I have to have set coordinates for forces, and it would’ve been too costly on the CPU to have one for each pixel, although that likely would’ve worked.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the result because I think the particles look great, however, I would like to look into adding more interaction in the future.

Download the Max Patch here.