I have been using Actionscript for a long time now. In order to break out of that, I have started to play around with some slightly more ‘direct’ languages – while Java is by no means a ‘low level’ language, I thought it would be worth making baby steps down from the convenient-but-inefficient heights of Flash down to the powerful-but-fiddly directness of C/C++. Towards that end, I have been reading through the tutorials for the Java 3D API tutorial, and despite being pretty obtuse at the outset, it gets fun pretty quickly.
I believe this could just as easily been produced in processing but I find the lack of assistance from the IDE to be too frustrating to manage. On the other hand, though, processing / Java is apparently very similar to the kind of instruction set that can be compiled on to arduino micro-controllers. Hopefully more on that later! In the meantime, here is a video of my anemone:
Note: the jitter is from the capture process – I am using CamStudio to grab the footage, which requires a little more of the system than Java wants to give up. If you want to install Java3D, you can view the Applet at a much higher resolution.