SARAH SONG

THE EYE

2018

We see things through our eyes and the International Space Station (ISS), as another "eye" in space,  give us a unique perspective when gazing upon the Earth.

Technical
Everybody can access the International Space Stations current location from the ISSTracker web API (here is the URL), so I took the longitude and latitude data from their JSON object in real time.
I created a class called Muscle, which can imitate both radial and circular muscles in iris. It is quite challenging for me to create a custom shape that can sort of simulating the organic form from nature. Luckily, there are lots of useful technical support from the internet(see references). I chose to use curveVertex function, sine function and cosine function to draw my muscle by using this algorithm:
// this noise value will make the coordinates change in time 
rad = scale*noise(i, t);
// the coordinates are controlled by the absolute value of latitude(0-52)
// I mapped the value to range 100% - 95%, (just scale it a little bit)
x = rad*cos(radians(ang))*map(abs(latitude), 0, 52, 1, 0.95);
y = rad*sin(radians(ang))*map(abs(latitude), 0, 52, 1, 0.95);
// the transparency is controlled by the absolute value of longitude, alpha value will change from 75-255
stroke(255, abs(longitude)+75);
curveVertex(x, y);
References
"Tracking the International Space Station" by Tim Blackwell from Programming For Artists(2017-2018) course 
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