March 9, 2007
Quartz Composer – Rocks
This is actually a project I started back in April of last year but so far it has just been sitting in my screen savers collecting dust. The project was to create an interactive screen saver using Quartz Composer. The reason for this was the lack of information reguarding composer and some spare time I wish I had right now.
Bubbles was the result of this work. The result is a fairly simple screen saver app built entirely in quartz composer. It uses the built in camera on the new Intel based machines iMac, and MacBooks. It uses the video feed to show you an image of yourself. You then blow into the microphone port on these machines and you should see bubbles generated that are proportional in size to how hard you blow, or more accurately how much noise you generate when you blow into the mic. Just a fun toy but it shows off how powerful the underlying graphical architecture is in mac os.
You can download the file to play with here (right click save as). I have also embedded the file to be played on this page but some users without isight cams may not be able to see the results.
You can also grab the file above and drop it in ~/Library/Screen Savers/ as use it as a screen saver. Or open it in Composer and edit to your hearts content.