#Playing cdf files in worlfram player how to

#Playing cdf files in worlfram player how to

I had no idea about the algorithms that the app used and how to bypass the many challenges of complete app development. While I was indulging in several game rounds, it suddenly struck me-this would make a perfect game for “actual” historical drawings that I enjoy so much! And it would be wonderful to have a short story behind the images in the game too. The images seemed to be created by the company developers à la simple technical blueprints. The game play is to find this perspective by rotating a 3D cloud of scattered pieces. The app shatters blueprint drawings into myriad pieces scattered almost randomly in 3D space-“almost” because there is a single correct perspective under which the fragments suddenly assemble back into the original drawing. So now that we’re done with drama and profundities, how can we get to action? Recently I was lucky to come across the brilliant iOS game Blueprint3D by FDG Entertainment, which has been critically acclaimed and praised for its originality. With longer positive experience comes deeper immersion. By analogy, we turn presentation into a process-so an encounter with an image becomes more personal. Everything is a process, everything has a story, even merely finding an interesting image lost in the pages of an old manuscript. Can we tease, intrigue beholders with a conundrum and set them on a quest? The way we comprehend art echoes the way the art was created in the first place. I wonder if this can be a metaphor for the image presentation. An image is a mystery until we find a meaning and learn its story. For example, instead of showing an image, you can make it a discovery process. How do you share with others a fascination with subjective matters, understanding gained through time and experience? How do you engage others and transfer your perception? Well, maybe you can’t do it directly, but you can still orchestrate how others encounter art. I am being intentionally dramatic (you’ll miss it when we’ll get to coding), because art is a tricky thing. They fuse art and history because the enigma of their stories is no less elegant than their art. These abiding footprints of imagination possess striking visual power that survived their creators. There is a tremendous body of work, celebrated or little known, that has accumulated through the ages in libraries, antique book shops, private collections, ruins, burial sites, forgotten attics. And we still keep doodling on napkins, sand, and touch screens-solidifying ideas. The oldest things we can find, like cave paintings, are dated to 40,000 years ago. People have been expressing things visually since immemorial times. Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1490 Wouldn’t you be curious what was going on at that moment in time, what got frozen in this piece of craft in front of you? A first act when an idea, something very subjective, evasive, living solely inside one’s mind, materializes as a solid reality, now perceivable by another human being. I think it was then that it started to dawn on me what special value a first sketch has. But perception of time transforms when you stare at 500-year-old craft. My obsession with diagrams and simple line drawings began almost unnoticeably in the winter of 2003 in New York City after attending an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “the first comprehensive survey of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings ever presented in America.” You may think it’d be a drag-crowds marching very slowly in a single long line coiling through the exhibition hallways. I may have oversimplified things here for the sake of a rhyme, but if you bear with my lengthy prelude, we may just see a simple case of turning passion into software. What does programming have to do with a passion for the arts and history? Well, if you turn education into a game and add a bit of coding, then you can easily end up in the realm of a modern paradigm called, fancily, “gamification.” Though gamification is a very wide concept based on game use in non-game contexts (design, security, marketing, even protein folding, you name it), at heart it is very simple: play, have fun, and get things done.