The Nature of Code

Acknowledgments

The world around us moves in complicated and wonderful ways. We spend the earlier parts of our lives learning about our environment through perception and interaction. We expect the physical world around us to behave consistently with our perceptual memory, e.g., if we drop a rock, it will fall due to gravity, if a gust of wind blows, lighter objects will be tossed by the wind further. This class focuses on understanding, simulating, and incorporating motion-based elements of our physical world into the digital worlds that we create. Our hope is to create intuitive, rich, and more satisfying experiences by drawing from the perceptual memories of our users.

—James Tu, Dynamic Bodies course description, Spring 2003, ITP

In 2003, ...