A Lousy but Illustrated Samasthiti

I haven’t been writing much over the last few days and probably will be writing less in the coming days (if not beyond that) because I am caught up in an experiment. I though to write a few words about the experiment.

About two weeks ago I began playing with an idea on how to construct on-screen Yoga asana sequences on screen. It worked – you can see a demo and explanation of it here. It uses a relatively small Javascript to replace written asana names in an HTML document with correlated images.  I started using that to document one of my practice sequences (I really should complete the practice I started on – it’s almost complete) – and as I was doing that I began to push the idea further – because I still wasn’t satisfied with the process and the result.

Now I am playing around with some more complex Javascript. I have created a method of describing a two dimensional posture  using anatomical constructs such as limbs, joints and articulations. I spent the last week staring at stick figures and thinking of a way to transform them into code and then writing up some theoretical code based on my conclusions. Tonight I completed a first round of coding – I have gone from theory to a visual result – a messed up Samasthiti:

It’s a completely messed up visual result but it has a few great things going for it: (1) it exists; (2) there is a head; (3) there are 14 limbs (which is the number I was planning for). I hope over the next few days to debug and review some of the calculations that led to this result and to achieve a much better one (granted this result should be pretty easy to top).

If/when this works it will be possible to easily:

• Create endless variations of two-dimensional postures by simply dragging joints around on the screen.
• Build a generic quality online asana library that teachers and students can easily tailor for specific needs.
• Construct practice sequences that can be illustrated for both on screen and printing resolutions.
• Enable practitioners to maintain a log of their evolving practices.
• Enable teachers to create and share online sample practices.
• and much more …

There are still many steps to take until this becomes something usable, but for now a messed up samasthiti is satisfying progress for me 🙂