Weekly Update: Easy abstract art

Another week, another update on my various undertakings.

Blender

As promised last week, here are some of the renders I made with Blender's geometry nodes by following tutorials on YouTube [1]:

A bunch of monkey heads bundled up in a net

Desert mountain range

Abstract curved strands emerging from a point

Towers of various sizes with glass spheres on top

A ball floating on grass which bends towards it

The tutorials so far have been a great introduction and the lessons were fun to do, the person behind CrossMind Studio is a good teacher.

Game development

I picked up my Doodle Jump clone again that I started making some weeks ago in Godot. I increased the possible play time from three seconds to infinity by making platforms spawn on their own in a randomized fashion instead of needing manual placement. And I also experimented with accelerometer controls on Android - it is very janky but usable for now. At first I tried using the gyroscope because I didn't know the respective use cases. Apparently Input.get_gyroscope() gives the rate of change of rotation, while Input.get_accelerometer() measures the absolute orientation of the device, which is what I need. New screenshots are not necessary because visually the game is still indistinguishable from the last one I posted [2]. Next steps: A jump sound, graphics other than the Godot logo, and some platforms with different properties to introduce more variety.

Playing games

I had not felt the desire to continue playing Fatal Frame (maybe just not my type of game after all?) so I started something else on my list: Dishonered. It's kind of shocking that it's a decade old now - I have always thought of it as a recent-ish release that I would get to eventually! I love stealthy games with many possible ways to complete your objective, so Dishonered really is my kind of game. My preferred playstyle is staying completely undetected and killing no one, that there are achievements for those is a good sign.

Physics

I am steadily making progress with my thesis. For too long I have been lost, digging deeper and deeper into papers by following the citations that somehow always lead back to the 70's. But talking to some people has helped me clear my head and refocus on the core of my task. Instead of becoming paralyzed by trying to be complete and correct in everything I write, I should first finish a minimum viabale product - just the main ideas and the basic thread that connects them. Details can come later.

I also made progress on my side project, the quantum random number generator. According to a paper I found [3] a QRNG can be built cheaply with just a smartphone camera and an LED. The principle behind it is shot noise. There is an inherent randomness in the number of photons emitted per time interval and per direction, which a sensitive enough camera will pick up as noise. Amazingly, it seems that modern smartphone cameras are that sensitive. I was afraid expensive lab equipment might be the only way to measure quantum randomness, so I hope this cheap method works out!

References

[1] Geometry Nodes For Beginners

[2] Post where I first wrote about my Doodle Jump clone

[3] Quantum random number generation on a mobile phone

Posted 2022-02-06

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