Initial commit

The files as of KansasFest 2016

README.md

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-# wavydots
-KansasFest 2016 HackFest entry, motion illusion with Apple II graphics
+Wavydots
+========
+
+KansasFest 2016, HackFest entry
+(Ranking: "Participant")
+Paul Hagstrom
+
+This is kind of nothing as of v1.0 (though I got an incredibly good prize for my "participant" placing!),
+but here's the story.  I kind of like the idea at least, even if I didn't get that far into it at KFest.
+
+The basic idea is this: Apple II graphics are kind of... limited.
+But I had come across a couple of particularly impressive "motion illusions" and I thought maybe it would
+be interesting if I could leverage perceptual illusions to enhance the graphics beyond what the computer
+itself could do.  The illusion that struck me most was this one here:
+
+[blue dots on green, waving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anomalous_motion_illusion1.png)
+
+It is linked from [the Wikipedia article on illusory motion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_motion).
+
+The effect was the strongest I'd ever seen, so I set about to see if it would work in Apple II graphics.
+
+It took me a while of studying it to figure out how the illusion comes about, but it seems that what is
+happening is that the blue dot has offset black and white dots under it, which rotate at a slight offset
+as you progress across the image.
+
+So, the first step was to try to generate the image.  And that's the main step I actually managed to take.
+The program MAKEWAVES is an Applesoft program that will draw a series of circles that implement this.
+It draws a white circle, a black circle, and a purple circle, all atop one another but offset slightly, to
+get the "shadow" effect.  The program draws it all, then saves the result as WAVEYDOTS.PIC.  This is doing
+a lot of trigonometry, running it at >1MHz is recommended.  It only needs to be run once, and, really, it's
+just re-generating the WAVEYDOTS.PIC that's already on the disk image.
+
+I think the image can probably be improved.  First of all, it could be made smoother, possibly by hand.
+I tried a couple of different color combinations (red on blue, blue on red, green on purple) but the best
+effect did seem to be blue on green.  Further experimentation might be interesting, though.
+
+I had intended at this point to make some kind of ocean-based game, and even if possible dig a bit deeper
+into what triggers the illusion so that I could kind of force the eye to track in a way that would
+magnify the illusory motion.  But, I had pretty much run out of time.
+
+So, as a proof of concept, I basically just lifted an example program from Penguin's The Graphics Magician,
+which originally just allowed you to move a little person around on the screen with the keyboard, and I
+stuffed in the background image, added some text notes and allowed for ESC to exit, and that's the program
+you get when you run WAVEWALK, the main "demo" program.
+
+So, this is very much an early proof-of-concept. I'd like to prove more impressive concepts in this direction.
+One potential downside here is that it might look kind of cool, briefly, and then trigger migraines at minute
+3 of gameplay.  Which would reduce the funness of game a bit.  But apart from that, this seems like an
+interesting way around the graphics and processing limitations imposed by the Apple II.