Constructing the Room Paths

While the top-down view of the tortoise's progress presents a clear picture of her trails on overlaid stimuli maps, I also sought to visualize an averaging of her movement in a familiar and concrete fashion. I originally got the idea of representing her progress in typical human perspective views of rooms from Flickr user Bartlec who used long exposure photography to capture the paths left by his roomba as it cleaned his house.

The problem with recreating this effect with the tortoise however, is that she is just far too slow to create as dynamic of a visualization as the roomba. Instead of a complex web of fibers visually representing the roombas internal algorithms, the tortoise's long exposure shot would simply look like a single bright line against a dark background. Therefore, instead of focusing on a single trip of the tortoise, i would establish an array of video cameras to track many of her journey's and combine these results into a more engaging piece.

A harness with two LEDs was constructed to aid the eventual motion tracking algorithms. By using a pair of lights it would be possible to not only track her location on the screen but also her relative scale and rotation.

When the cameras were ready, i would release the tortoise and wait until she had stopped in a single location for more than 10 minutes. After fifteen paths had been recorded over several nights, the video was brought into Adobe After Effects. I grouped the recorded trials by room location and analyzed the location of the tortoise in each frame by using After Effects's built in Motion Tracker. This left each clip with a custom motion path (group of keyframes representing a specific location and time) to which i could attach a particle generator. The final effect is that wherever the tortoise moved in the room, a bright path will be overlain with the thickness of the path demonstrating the tortoise's current speed (thinner lines=faster motion).

These paths were then exported as FLV files and incorporated into the final flash piece and are able to show both still images of all the paths and also animations of the paths propogating through each room.