Week 3 Studio: Gesture as data

Reading more out of a pointer than its position — speed, dwell, and what those signals should change

8 March 2027

Before the studio#

Bring last week’s build. You’ll be cutting it open, not starting again.

In the studio#

An (x, y) position is the least interesting thing a pointer gives you. The gap between two events also carries how fast the hand was moving, how long it paused, whether it’s accelerating into the next mark or slowing out of the last one. Pick one such signal and wire it to something the mark does — width, opacity, colour, whatever suits the instrument you’re building. The lecture this week works through why velocity, computed from your own event stream, travels further across input devices than a hardware signal like pressure ever will.

Afterwards#

You should be able to point at a specific line of code and say “this is the number that makes a fast stroke look different from a slow one,” rather than gesturing at the instrument as a whole.