Latency study 07

Move the mouse.

07 is the same as 06, except a property, rotation, is mapped to the ‘direction of movement’. Instead of mapping one value directly to another, a property (rotation) is mapped to something more formulaic: the angle between its current position and another position. The distinction between a ‘measurement’ or more ‘absolute value’ such as position and a more formulaic or higher order value one like ‘angle-to’ is, in reality, a arbitrary (as a screen based form, it may be described as entirely formulaic). The distinction is contingent only on the data structures in the programming environment, which may not manifest in clearly observable ways. So there’s no real reason to create such a distinction. Here though the distinction between the existent computational qualities and the mental faculty of the artist/designer comes into play. It may be ideal to make manipulable a quality of an element that is clearly perceptual, but has no computational equivalent. For example, the distance between two corners of a box may be relevant to a designer’s idea, but have no analogy in the code base at hand. Inversely, the computational environment may support properties that are otherwise unapparent to a person, either because of the level of their programming skill, or simply their creative and subjective way of perceiving the screen space. This tension will be discussed later.

Secondly, the manner in which delay has been introduced programmatically means that any property has not only a current value, but a value at any given previous time. In a sense the manipulations of the delayed cursors aren’t delayed so much as they are being driven by a property-as-it-was, ie. the mouse-position-n-steps-ago.

In the end, the cursors’ rotation gives them an entirely determined, but perceptually independent quality.