Assignment 2 – The Heliocentric Model

I sometimes find it crazy that we live on a planet. Out of billions of celestial objects in the universe, we exist on this beautiful sphere (not technically) – Earth.

This is the moving object I decided to use, because everything that exists in our reality belongs to this planet. The motion on this project involves a depiction of the Heliocentric modal of the universe, proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century, that asserts that the Sun is at the center of our solar system, with the planets, including Earth, orbiting around it.

However, the earth doesn’t just orbit the Sun. It also rotates on its own axis, which happens to be tilted ~23 degrees. This truly extraordinary fact of the universe, which took humans thousands of years to realize, is what is depicted in the sketch.

An interesting part of the sketch is the fabric of cosmos. It is a metaphorical concept often used in cosmology and physics to describe the underlying structure of the universe. It basically means that space itself is not empty but is woven with the fabric of spacetime, a four-dimensional framework where all matter and energy exist and interact. I wish I could show all four dimensions in this project, but this is what I could build in a short span of time. Oh wait, that could be a future improvement for the project!

Here’s the sketch. You can interact with it as well – try to hold-click and drag using your mouse.

The tiny green sphere is for a point of reference. It shows that the earth is tilted and is rotating around an axis.

As mentioned before a cool part of this project is the Fabric. Here’s how I was able to implement it.

class Fabric {
  constructor(rows, cols, spacing) {
    this.rows = rows;
    this.cols = cols;
    this.spacing = spacing;
    this.points = [];

    // create an array of PVectors to represent points in the fabric
    for (let y = 0; y < this.rows; y++) {
      for (let x = 0; x < this.cols; x++) {
        this.points.push(createVector(x * this.spacing - this.cols * this.spacing / 2, y * this.spacing - this.rows * this.spacing / 2, 0));
      }
    }
  }

  display() {
    push();
    stroke(255);
    strokeWeight(0.5);
    noFill();
    for (let i = 0; i < this.points.length; i++) {
      vertex(this.points[i].x, this.points[i].y, this.points[i].z);
    }
    pop();
  }
}