Project 3 Chaos and Complexity: Progress

After presenting my last work in progress it was clear that merely looking "chaotic" was not enough and I needed to embed a true chaotic system into my simulator.

I found the interactivity of my piece very rewarding and did not want to give that up. However, when it was not in use, my piece was quite uninteresting and would not entice viewers to actually interact with it. So I decided to embed a chaotic system to drive the cursor position when there are no users interacting, and as soon as someone starts interacting with the mouse, it uses their input to drive the simulation.

For the chaotic system, I chose to implement a double pendulum especially since it has similar forms to what my piece was already generating and I thought the movement would go well together. I use the end of the double pendulum to drive the particles and I only display the endpoint of the pendulum, so it is not very visible that my simulation is using a double pendulum. And I have not yet decided if that is desirable, or if I want to make the double pendulum more apparent.

Also, in order for my pendulum to be stable, I needed to implement 4th order Runge-Kutta instead of just simple Euler integration.

You can see the trail of the double pendulum as the circle in the image below.