Multimodal Media Madness - Winter Semester 2008/2009

In addition to allowing you to build cool animations very quickly, Quartz Composer also provides support for building interactive graphics demonstrations.
At our chair, one of our research projects is called “Time Window”, an interactive system with a multitouch tabletop display that allows people to interactively explore layered maps. In this assignment, you will build a simplified version of the Time Window software.



The interaction in your “Time Window Lite” will be accomplished using the mouse. Using a mouse, the user will be able to gradually "scrub away" the top layer of a map (a satellite photo of Aachen) to reveal the street map underneath.
As long as the mouse button is held down, the user should be able to see the parts of street map that he/she has scrubbed away. Once the mouse button is released, the scrubbed portions should gradually disappear, returning the image to the original satellite photo. Source images (from Google maps) are provided here:

• aachen_map.jpg
• aachen_map.sat

For this assignment, you are required to implement the following features:

• Scrubbed regions should fade in gradually, with “soft” edges.
• Scrubbing should occur directly underneath the mouse cursor position.
• Scrubbed regions should gradually fade out some time (e.g., 2 seconds) after the mouse button has been released.

You may find the following nodes useful: “Accumulator”, “Blend With Mask”.
As always you can get extra credits by extending your patch in some useful way. Be creative!
Some ideas for extra credit in this assignment:

• Additional layers of map images.
• Distortion effects or shadow effects to increase the feeling of 3D in the visuals.

Email an archive of your assignment to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. before the due date. The subject of your email should be "M3 Submission 2"; be sure to use this exact subject line as it will be used to filter assignment submissions for grading.

Your assignment archive should include your QC patch file. Include a short plain text README file that contains:

• the names and email addresses of all group members
• a short description of what your patch does
• non-obvious things you did (if any)
• if you did any extra credit work, be sure to tell us what you did

Be prepared to discuss your solution in the next lab.


The assignment will be graded on the following rough scale:

• 1.0 - exceptional work that clearly went above and beyond what was given on the exercise
• 2.0 - exercise was completed satisfactorily as per the assignment specification
• 3.0 - exercise was completed, but has some problems
• 4.0 - incomplete exercise
• 5.0 - little or no effort was put into the exercise

Late assignments will be graded with a penalty of 0.5 per 24 hour period after the due date.