EXPERIMENT 2: The Analytics Engine 

Week 06- Second Draft of Analytics Engine & Review 

 Building the bridge between architecture and Urban Design is the ability to evaluate environmental data in addition to representing it. This is done through the crisis wars environment I have designed and created. 

A distinctive and significant way of analysing data in Sandbox 2 is through xml files. As xml files hold data and values that can be represented on screen , I have found that they can also very easily be linked to movements such as velocity, rotation, scale, glow and particles effects in game. The flowgaph shows my first attempt at reading an xml file and displaying its single piece of data on screen. This was later developed after looking at Vinh Nguyen's post on how to reed multiple xml files rather than just one.  

Data from a Pachube light sensor feed is transferred into the real-time engine allowing the player to engage with the instillation. The data is represented through 31 to be precise, rotating shutters on the roof of the life raft. From the Pachube feed an xml in my mods folder has multiple data sets. Data ranging from 0-1023 is then translated using flowgraph nodes and assigned entities to change to an angle between 0 and 90 degrees. The low the data the higher the light intensity is. This is why the shutters remain closed blocking out as much light as they can. A high number correlated to low light intensity which see the shutter angle open up and more light dispersion through the structure. 

For example data ranging from:

0 -255.75 correlates to the shutters staying closed   

255.5 – 511.5 correlates to the shutters opening on a 35 degree angle

511.5- 767.25 correlates to the shutters opening up to a 45 degree angle  

767.25- 1023 corrleated to the shutters opening to a 90 degree angle 

As a person engages with the instillation and environment they can see data being translated in real time to the rotation of these shutters. The façade glow is also linked as you can see in the flowgraph to when there is low light intensity from the data ranging from 0 – 255.75 allowing the instillation to become heavily illuminated.HUD messages have also been linked so that all changing data can be represented in relation to the changing angle. 

This is detailed in the following screen captures of my custom flow graph.