1000 Boids in Unity ECS

Leave a reply

An implementation of boids using ECS for Unity 2020

1000 boids implementing the following behaviours:

  • Seperation
  • Cohesion
  • Alignment
  • Constrain
  • Wander

With a procedural animation and trails implemented using ECS. There are 28K entities being updated every frame getting ~100 FPS and ~80 FPS in VR. See the steamvr branch for a VR implementation

Try doing that with MonoBehaviours! Source code here: https://github.com/skooter500/ECS2020

Infinite Forms @ Ozora

Leave a reply

Have you ever been to Ozora? Well the sign reads “Welcome to Paradise” and Paradise is an apt description. When you go there you can hardly believe that such a place of music, dancing, love and beauty exists. It’s a “temporary autonomous zone”. A place where everyone decides to be kind to each other and life a different kind of life for a week.

On Friday @ Ozora I gave a talk entitled “Infinite Forms: Psychedelic Coding” about the idea that coding can be used as a means of exploring consciousnesses. We think in language and then construct reality from language. We describe and name “things” and “events” from the continuum of reality thus giving it meaning. In a similar way, the language of computer code becomes non-conscious intelligence’s we call algorithms. Code can also manifest into virtual reality through procedural generation.

Coding can also be visionary, in that I can for example envision a creature like an octopus in my project Infinite Forms, construct the creature from code and algorithms and then in VR the octopus exists. Thus coding is mind manifesting – the very definition of psychedelic.

To demonstrate this, I showed 4 psychedelic coding projects during my talk:

Overthinker – a generative visual and musical journey programmed by Donnchadh McCullagh, Conor Dunne and Marika Robel, three first year game design students from my game programming class:

DEEP – A Virtual Reality Breathing Meditation:

For more information about DEEP see here and here.

Infinite Forms – An infinite generative psychedelic world and what I use to make visuals for Paradiso Party and other festivals and events:

For more information about Infinite Forms, see here.

Emergent Wonder – Emergent artificial life simulation programmed using Unity’s new Entity Component System:

Get the sourcecode for Emergent Wonder on github.

I also showed Robin Arnott’s Soundself project – a beautiful VR experience inspired by a transcendental LSD trip he experienced at Burning Man:

Some other references from my talk:

My teaching hero Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”:

Some pictures and videos from Ozora:

The vast psytrance stage covered by a spectacular canopy of fabric and light:

Also the Dome area, a sacred space with a sandy floor playing progressive and psybient music. Best experienced around 5am as the sun is coming up. Very groovy.

Me doing demos of Infinite Forms, Emergent Wonder and DEEP in the Artibarn in Ozora. With psychedelic coding wizard Adam John Williams performing jews harp and electronics :

Ten Years of Tunepal: Reflections and Future Directions

Leave a reply

I gave the keynote presentation at the 9th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis on 2 July 2019 in Birmingham City University. Here is a photo of Izzy McLaughlan (conference chair), myself and Pierre Beauguitte, PhD student from TU Dublin.

65966290_389486658357893_6432244534041640960_n (1)

My talk was a retrospective on the last ten years of Tunepal, and possible directions for future development of the project. I described how the project has grown in popularity and now serves around 60K searches per month. I also talked about various collaborations including the Tunetracker project developed by Norman Su and myself and the collaboration with Europeana Sounds that led to the ability to retrieve audio recordings from the Comhaltas archive through tunepal.org. I discussed Pierre Beauguitte’s excellent work in addressing many of the limitations of the existing Tunepal, such as improving transcription accuracy, automatically inferring the key and time signature of an audio recording and key invariant tune identification.

My slides from the talk:

A beautiful visualisation of 10 years of Tunepal searches made by Katie Kilroy:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/katie.kilroy#!/vizhome/TunePal-30JUNE2019/BRYANVERSION

And a visualisation I made of 5000 geotagged queries:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/bryan.duggan#!/vizhome/5000GeotaggedQueries/Tunepalmusicsearches?publish=yes

Pierre’s work:

Beauguitte, P., Duggan, B., Kelleher, J. (2016). A Corpus of Annotated Irish Traditional Dance Music Recordings: Design and Benchmark Evaluations. 17th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference 2016, , New York City, August 7-11.
Download the paper: http://arrow.dit.ie/scschcomcon/177
And the dataset: http://arrow.dit.ie/datas/1

Beauguitte, P., Duggan, B. and Kelleher, J. (2017) Key inference from Irish traditional music scores and recordings. 14th Sound and Music Computing Conference, July 5-8, 2017, Espoo, Finland.
Download the paper: http://arrow.dit.ie/scschcomcon/209

Beauguitte, P., Duggan, B. & Kelleher, J. D. (2018). Rhythm inference from audio recordings of Irish traditional music. Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, 26-29 June 2018, Thessaloniki (Greece). doi:10.21427/D74B2N
Download the paper: http://arrow.dit.ie/scschcomcon/224