distributedlife

Every year in town there is a flower festival called Floriade. This year I went for the first time in what is probably 10-15 years. I was disappointed. It seemed smaller than how I remember it and the arrangements were uninspiring.

Whoever designed it created these moderately interesting 2D displays of flowers. If you happened to be flying over the flowers then it would look ever so slightly more interesting. Most people walked around the displays as they didn’t own jetpacks.

This irked me more than it should have. Calculating the necessary matrix transformations to take a perspective image of a 3D scene and applying to a 2D plane has been around for a long time. We’ve been doing in it in real time in games for at least the mid 90’s when Quake came out. Here is a wiki page about projection.

If I was asked to create these displays I would have created some interesting scenes and images that fit the theme and then worked out the average height of a person and the direction I want the visitors to view the flowers from. With this information we can build a basic 3D model of the flowers that will create our image. Using the ability to grown flowers on time, in place and to a specific height we could create some really interesting displays that could be seen by everyone at ground level.

If we wanted to get clever we could create a panorama that as you walked along (strafed) the length of the display the scene unfolded or we could create a display that looked different from two, three or four different sides.

Until that happens, and it would be awesome if it did, here are some shots from the various displays and the next time you plan your own garden consider if you can get some images hidden away inside the garden beds.