An interest in studying networks and communications processes. How can a network of physical devices can be a starting point of a study in how networks are organized and in how communication between those devices can be build up and improved.
The starting point of this project was to understand how this processes evolve and how they could function when some part of the process are omit or not so clear. How can in a mess or a broken process, organization and communication can emerge? How do we react if we feel that we don't have control or any feedback given by the system?
In the context of this class, besides implementing the physical network and setting up the devices I pretend to write an application that function as a study or simulation of how the network could function.
Technology:
Using processing and the Network Library, the application simulates the physical network.
The physical network consists on multiple nodes that are able to receive and send messages - voice messages. Each device has a microphone( send - output and a speaker ( receive - input ).
The rules that defines the communication between devices is that:
- Each node can send a message at will.
- The device can only send a message to one of the devices that are active (on the network), and from that devices it excludes the device that had previously send a message to this device.
When define and build the simulation I start having some problems in relation with setting up a network under the nyu domain and in figuring out how to send sound over a computer network. To simplify, I decided that instead of sending sound I should instead send data that the nodes can send - color.
In conclusion, the simulation will consist on setting up a physical network where each computer is a node( client program) in the network that "talks" with other nodes via a server ( another program) that "observe" and visualize the activity on the network.
Each node can send ( at free will - free speech) one from five colors that are available. It can send how many messages it want but it has to follow one rule: if it receive as an input message a specific color it has to send that color back to the network.
The colors work as a metaphor for messages ( voice messages). Each color "means" a common message. When one device receive for example a blue and responds with a blue, it means that it is responding to that message, to the context of that message.
The idea is to see - having the server as the observer - how long it takes to get all nodes sending the same color over and over.
This is the first step of trying to make a working prototype but my final aim is to put this network working with sound - input from the computer microphone. After trying to solve the initial problem I found that if the computers connected via a LAN using a router they can also shared a folder where the sound files are stored and could be access by all nodes. Maybe it will not be so real-time as I wished but it's a solution.
