Project 1, Romeo and Juliet, will help you learn how to make some cardboard robots that perform the famous balcony scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. We will create some talking robots using a pair of cheap speakers and some cardboard boxes, and learn how to install and use a text-to-speech library in Processing.

Project 2, The Stick Figure Dance Company, will help you in creating a dance company that is controlled using Microsoft Kinect. The dancers will be controlled using the Kinect skeletal tracking. After we have managed to control one stick figure, we will make more and more stick figures show up until we have a whole dance company, dancing the same moves the player makes.

Project 3, The Disco Dance Floor, will teach us how to play music and create a sound-reactive dance floor, since there is no dancing without music. We will learn how to use the Processing-sound API to make an audio visualizer. Then we will turn the 2D visualizer into a 3D dancefloor and invite our stick figure dance company from the previous project to dance on it.

Project 4, Smilie-O-Mat, will help you in creating an application that allows the user to create a smiley that matches his or her current mood using a customized user interface. This smiley can then be posted to a social network to let your buddies know how you currently feel, because sometimes a picture tells more than 140 characters.

Project 5, The Smilie-O-Mat Controller, helps you generate a custom controller board using Arduino and use it to simplify the adjustment of the Smilie-O-Mat controller from our previous project. For the controller, we will use an Arduino board, learn how to set up a simple electronic circuit, and then how to interface it with a computer. Then we will use the input parameters generated by the controller to change the face of a smiley and post it to a social network.

Project 6, Fly to the Moon, explores the different modes Processing offers and teaches you how to export a sketch for the Web or run it as an Android app. We will create a small moon-lander-like game from scratch and learn how to adapt it to run on different hardware as well as use different input devices.

Project 7, The Neon Globe, wonders what world-domination plans would be without a spinning neon globe? Here, we will learn how to generate a rotating 3D sphere that we will turn into a spinning globe using image textures and some lighting. We will later highlight the continent borders and make them glow using a GLSL filter.

Project 8, Logfile Geo-visualizer, will help us learn how to visualize some data on the spinning globe we generated in the previous project. We will use a web server logfile as our input and learn how to parse it in Processing. Then, we will geocode the data and use the geocoordinates of the page requests to draw something on our globe.

Project 9, From Virtual to Real, will help us learn how to turn mathematics into physical objects. We will learn how to unleash the beauty of mathematical functions and use them to generate a printable object like a pen box or a flower vase. Then, we will learn how to export the object to a format that can be fed into a 3D printer.

Project 2, The Stick Figure Dance Company, shows you how to use Kinect to create a stick figure that is controlled by the player's movements. To run this example, you will need a Kinect sensor board and a power adapter for it.

Project 5, The Smilie-O-Mat Controller, uses an Arduino board and some electronic components to create a customized hardware controller.

In Project 6, Fly to the Moon, we will create a game that runs on a PC, in a web browser, and on an Android device. If you want to see the game on a real device instead of an emulator, you need an Android mobile phone or tablet.

Project 9, From Virtual to Real, shows you how to create a 3D shape and turn it into a physical object using 3D printing or an online 3D printing service.

If you are a programmer or a visual artist that already has some experience with the Processing environment or another language similar to Java and want to make programs that reach beyond a window on your screen, this book is for you.

In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.

To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:

void mousePressed() {
  tts.speak("Hello, I am a Computer");
}

void setup() {
  String[] rawLines = loadStrings( "romeo_and_juliet.txt" );

  ArrayList lines = new ArrayList();
  for ( int i=0; i<rawLines.length; i++) {
    if (!"".equals(rawLines[i])) {
      String[] tmp = rawLines[i].split("#");
      lines.add( new Line( tmp[0], tmp[1].trim() ));
    }
  }

}

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