Jan 17, 2015

As I finish up the animations, I thought I’d go over the rest of the elements briefly.

The time display is self explanatory. Below it is the waves visualization which is a mesh that is displaced with a texture generated from 2d perlin noise. While I never ended up hooking up the visualizations to actual system stats, the idea was to take a measure of system activity (e.g. cpu activity) and make the waves flatter or larger with less or more activity.

Beneath is the cpu graphs, these are using the same b-spline technique as the radar, but limited to 2d and moving along horizontally. Below that is, again, a 2d perlin noise texture, but this time just displayed as dots rather than used to displace a plane.

On the right, other than the previously described radar there is the network display, which is just connected bezier curves (not via the b-spline technique this time, since I didn’t want the tips to be smooth).

The only element that really had to be hooked up was the keyboard, which needs to respond to any keyboard input even if it is to another program (like the terminal running above the UI). To do this I followed this method to read keyboard input via /dev/input. This let me see every key press, release and repeat, but only because I was basically keylogging myself.