Still tweaking the magnetosphere. I got tired of not knowing where the gravitational fields were so I gave them the appearance of a fuzzy white sphere (by rotating overlapping ellipses so they always face the in-applet camera). Additionally, the magnetic particles are now dynamically sized, which effects the particle’s mass and charge. The gravity fields are also dynamic.
I haven’t made any progress in finding a way to translate 2D mouse positions into a 3D rotating environment but I wanted to have multiple gravitational fields. I tweaked them to behave more like negatively charged particles so that they would push away from each other but still attract the small positively charged particles.
Next step is to hook it up to the sonia engine to make them audio responsive. 
Oh, and here is another video.
[...] Flight404’s latest Magneto-Sphere (built in Processing) combines metaballs, gravity, and a self organizing network of magnetic nodes to create a tantalizing organic display of attraction and repulsion. [video] related : Santiago Ortiz : Spheres | Earth Vision : 360 Spherical Projection | [...]
Your experiment reminds me very much of a demo Eric Bonabeau likes to do at his lectures. Took me a few minutes to find a description but here it is:
“How do we shape emergence? Great demo at the end: Give people a slip of paper saying who they like and who they hate. They are to move towards those they like and away from those they hate. With random initial conditions, we get the same pattern: a rotating line within a following circle. Eric ran the simulation and it was, well, cool.” (taken from http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/2003_04.html ).
Tim
Sounds intriguing. I’d like to see this demo.
It intrigues me to throw a bunch of objects randomly into a virtual space and watch them quickly organize themselves into a sphere. Wish I had paid more attention in math and physics class though. So much I want to do with this project, but my knowledge of spherical math is lacking.
I finally got an audio responsive version working and the results are nice. Going to prepare a couple videos and hopefully have them, and the source code, posted at flight404 by the end of the weekend. Fingers crossed.
this is a beautiful piece.
This turned out really well.
The experiment that Tim Keller mentioned above reminds me of Jared’s ‘Happy Place’ piece: http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/happyPlace/index.php
As always, very inspiring. Thanks.