Spreadsheet Animation

Algorithmic animation for the Pausch Bridge can even be created using a spreadsheet. In this example, a Google Sheet generates a series of monochrome images as rows in a spreadsheet using parameterized cell formulas. This array is exported as a CSV file, converted to a colorized PNG image, and animated into video.

The conversion was performed using the Python scripts pb_csv_to_png.py and pb_animate_image.py.

Google Sheet

The original sheet can be viewed online.

A representative sample of the cell formulas are shown below. For the ‘diffusion’ rows, each interior cell is a weighted sum of the previous values of the cell and its immediate neighbors. Each edge cell uses only the one immediate neighbor. The selection of weights determines the direction of motion, rate of diffusion, and fade rate. The periodic ‘threshold’ rows instead apply a threshold test to reset each cell value to 0 or 1.

Colorized Image

Colorized representation of the spreadsheet data.

Sample Output Video

Downloads

The CSV data can be downloaded as cellular.csv