Embedded Files
By Daisy & Lisanne
Flocking
Merriam-webster describes a flock as "a group of animals (such as birds or sheep) assembled or herded together". Animals gather together to for example, travel long distances, which is the behaviour of flocking.
Flocking is the behaviour that many birds, fish and insects use. This behaviour ended up also being used as an algorithm. It was invented by Craig Reynolds with his Boids program. To simulate a flock he used the following structure:
The flock had to avoid collision
The flock had to have the same speed
The flock had to stick close to each other
With these simple rules he was able to convincingly recreate a swarm of birds with a computer program.
Concept
We chose to recreate flocking by using origami. We wanted to show various aspects of birds and why we think flocking is interesting. That's why we picked to show protection and control. Birds fly together to protect each other from predators. The movements bird make are always controlled and they never seem to fly into one another.
So in the first video we can see that the birds are trying to protect each other: birds that stay together tend to survive together! In the second video we wanted to show that birds, although they make their own movements, are somehow controlled by the group.
Why origami?
The reason we chose to use origami is because it is a complete analogous method. With origami we can quickly demonstrate the aspects we wanted to portray.
In the first video we can see multiple birds on one string. In the second one we placed them separately to illustrate that the birds sway back and forth in synchronicity.
References
Reynolds, C. W. (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 21(4), 25–34. https://doi.org/10.1145/37402.37406
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