Wednesday, September 08, 2010

[fhtppaza] Moving alphabet

Revisit "rotor" in more detail.

Every character is presented as a circular window viewing a moving starfield, with frame to delimit characters.  The design principle is that if you freeze frame, no character should be distinguishable from the others.

We can have no movement at all.  We can have simple translation in 4, maybe 8 directions.  We can have rotation around the center, or around any of four points at the edges of the window (is this too difficult to distinguish from translation?).  We can have contraction (implosion) or expansion (explosion) from the center (and again four edge points?)  In order to preserve homogeneity, points must disappear as they approach the center of contraction or appear out of nowhere as they go away.  Combine radial movement and rotation for spiraling in and out (this may be too difficult to distinguish, though there must be an optimal "angle"). 1+ 8 + 5*(3*3-1) = 49 characters at most.

Vaguely inspired by Korean, we can divide a window into two semicircles horizontally or vertically, and put half of two different characters in each of them.  This gets characters like converging onto a vertical line, and sliding past each other on opposite sides of a line.  Some combinations might not be permitted.  In particular if there is circular motion, the center of motion can only be in the center or on the semicircular edge, or else it will be very difficult to distinguish from translation.

Inspired by Simon Whitechapel's Rotor Script

Someday I'll get around to illustrating these.

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