A catalogue of useful concepts and hand-curated resources for people interested in the Interactive Technologies for Performing and Media Arts MA or Art of Game Design MA. Many of these will sound familiar from highschool maths and physics, so this page should act as a refresh, and a taste of how we’ll use them to create art and games.
The page is arranged in three sections: data (types, operations), vectors (motion, algebra & geometry, physics), and signals (trigonometry, generation, effects).
Grigore Burloiu, April 2023
Anything that can be stored, processed and input/output by a computer. Without data, programming (and any interactivity design) would not be possible.
Making things with maths - Steven Wittens
Pairs (2D), triplets (3D) or multidimensional arrays of numbers (usually floats) that describe an object’s position, size, direction, or other features. Vectors enable the modelling of objects and other phenomena, allowing us to track them in space and time.
Audio, video, sensor data etc — treated by computers as discrete signals, i.e. series of numeric datapoints, evenly spaced in time or space. The generation, analysis, and treatment of these signals falls under digital signal processing (DSP).