Day 23

Today started with pretty much the same stuff I did yesterday, but in smaller and more distracted quantities. At lunch, the TED Talks were all decent. I had already seen the one on classical music, but it was just as good the second time. After lunch, we took our break at Bytes/its neighboring coffee shop, where I ate too much chocolate. I came back from my break to Joe talking with the undergrads. I was glad to see him in the room so he could define my task better, because I sort of ran out of configurations I wanted to put in any effort to make. He laid out a calendar for the next few weeks and then mentioned a list he had worked up with a freshman during the year. He sent me four questions derived from that list to base the new configurations around:

1) What happens if you fix the width of the array and vary the number of cameras?

2) What happens if you fix the number of cameras and vary the spacing between them?

3) What happens if you add rows to the array?

4) What happens if you change the geometry from linear to curved?

I figured that theses were best attacked systematically so that we could see any correlations, so I planned out the configurations I should create for the first two questions. For the fixed width, I made arrays with 2,3,6,12, and 24 cameras, using the current array’s 6 cameras as a reference. For the varied spacing, I added or subtracted one (and then two) meter(s) from the current width, and then divided to find the spacing between the cameras for each width. From these calculations, I spaced the cameras 5, 25, 45, 65, and 85 centimeters apart, keeping the current array’s 6 cameras as the constant. Tomorrow, I plan on getting the configurations for the next two questions and then rendering out the stills for all of them. It’s nice to have a job again.