Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)

title Constraint System dated Fall 2023 author Summary of work on relax-pk At the beginning of phase 2, we weren’t sure what to do about constraints. Based on past exploration, constraints seemed to hold a lot of promise but were notoriously unreliable. A good constraint system could unify and power a number of key aspects of the dynamic medium we seek. It would allow for mechanical constructions, like a rope and pulley, that feel physically correct. It would allow for a computational model that bridged between algebraic formulae and tangible objects, like an architectural drawing that changed in response to edits in a parameter table. It’d allow for true bidirectional computation, instead of the limited / biased computation we had in Crosscut. But constraint systems are hard to implement. They tend to suffer from the following issues: “Floaty-ness”, where manipulating one parameter causes other parameters to drift in ways that feel unnatural or unrealistic. “Blow-ups”, where manip ... Read full article.