Ants of Focus

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  Before the scourge

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  During the scourge

Inspiration

Ants! We love ants. And staring at them as they eat things. So why not procrastinate while watching an ant creation nutritionally un-create your homework?

What it does

It adds an invisible fullscreen program which waits until you are inactive for a set amount of time before releasing the horde. Don't worry, though: they don't actually touch your actual stuff. They only interact with a seamless, static screenshot.

How we built it

I built it in python. I knew it would be easy to figure out with some extra digital assistance, and it was. Simply put, I kept everything as modular as possible to help with ai-assisted debugging, and built it myself. I also made sure to keep expectations as low as possible, and celebrated the small steps.

Challenges we ran into

I was surprised to learn that python's de-facto basic window library can't rotate images itself. Nor does it keep images it has references to from being eaten up by python's garbage collector. That was confusing. Overall, though, smooth sailing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It works! Almost flawlessly, too!

What we learned

A lot about python's accessibility for image processing and data conversions. Definitely powerful, albeit slow. It really does trade your time for computing time.

What's next for Ants of Focus

Multiple window layers! And interactive ants! Simply put, the current version only manages a fullscreen image. This means that once the ants have expended all the available snippets of pixels, they wander aimlessly forever. I want them to eat the underlying window, through to the next one, and so forth, recursively. I also want to be able to click the ants themselves. At the moment, the clicking functionality exists but isn't used at all except for the whole screen (to reset the whole thing). I want more specific quirks.

Built With

• python