Emergent Feedback

Overview

Visual feedback occurs when an image is fed itself as an input. For example if you take a video camera and point it at a screen displaying what it is outputing.

Unique patterns can emerge that produce an animation even without further input. One type of this effect can be produced when you rotate the camera or feedback area. This program does this rotation and creates feedback by copying and scaling the current image.

Chris made a much cleaner Java version. The camera in his stays in one place, which seems to cut down on the unique patterns, but looks more polished.

Screenshots

Video

Usage

• Mouse position changes shape offset
• Hold right mouse button and drag to rotate image
• 0-9: change shape size
• q: turn on color
• w: white only
• e: place an ellipse
• r: place a rectangle
• t: capture frames/stop capture
• y: clear image
• make video from frames: ffmpeg -y -i pic%1d.jpg -b 9800000 emergentFeedback.mpg

Download

• Linux
• Windows
• Source Code
• git clone http://devrand.org:8080/git/emergentFeedback

Conclusion

I want to try again with the image staying more centered as it rotates and update this post in the future. Other than that it's a neat effect that's pretty simple to reproduce.