Tag Archives: gganimate

Spinning Pins

Condenado a estar toda la vida, preparando alguna despedida (Desarraigo, Extremoduro)

I live just a few minutes from the Spanish National Museum of Science and Technology (MUNCYT), where I use to go from time to time with my family. The museum is plenty of interesting artifacts, from a portrait of Albert Einstein made with thousands of small dices to a wind machine to experiment with the Bernoulli’s effect. There is also a device which creates waves. It is formed by a number of sticks, arranged vertically, each of one ending with a ball (so it forms a sort of pin). When you push the start button, all the pins start to move describing circles. Since each pair of consecutive pins are separated by the same angle, the resulting movement imitates a wave. In this experiment I created some other machines. The first one imitates exactly the one of the museum:

If you look carefully only to one pin, you will see how it describes a circle. Each one starts at a different angle and all them move at the same speed. Although an individual pin is pretty boring, all together create a nice pattern. The museum’s machine is formed just by one row of 20 pins. I created a 20×20 grid of pins to make result more appealing.

Playing with the angle between pins you can create another nice patterns like these:

The code is incredibly simple and can be used as a starting point to create much more complicated patterns, changing the speed depending on time or the location of pins. Play with colors or shapes of points, the number of pins or with the separation and speed of them. The magic of movement is created with gganimate package. You can find the code here.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks a lot for reading my posts.

Exploring The Quick, Draw! Dataset With R: The Mona Lisa

All that noise, and all that sound, all those places I have found (Speed of Sound, Coldplay)

Some days ago, my friend Jorge showed me one of the coolest datasets I’ve ever seen: the Google quick draw dataset. In its Github website you can see a detailed description of the data. Briefly, it contains  around 50 million of drawings of people around the world in .ndjson format. In this experiment, I used the simplified version of drawings where strokes are simplified and resampled with a 1 pixel spacing. Drawings are also aligned to top-left corner and scaled to have a maximum value of 255. All these things make data easier to manage and to represent into a plot.

Since .ndjson files may be very large, I used LaF package to access randon lines of the file rather than reading it completely. I wrote a script to explore The Mona Lisa.ndjson file, which contains more than 120.000 drawings that the TensorFlow engine from Google recognized as being The Mona Lisa. It is quite funny to see them. Whit this script you can:

  • Reproduce a random single drawing
  • Create a 9×9 mosaic of random drawings
  • Create an animation simulating the way the drawing was created

I use ggplot2 package to render drawings and gganimate package of David Robinson to create animations.

This is an example of a single drawing:

This is an example of a 3×3 mosaic:

This is an example of animation:

If you want to try by yourself, you can find the code here.

Note: to work with gganimate, I downloaded the portable version and pointed to it with Sys.setenv command as explained here.