Create Digital Music got an interesting comment about allegedly, what really happened to Java in Leopard. Short version: nearly all of the development team is gone; the one Java 6 person left and many others were moved to, of all things, iCal. Java 5 is likely to be all you get on Leopard, and still without improvements to JavaSound or QuickTime for Java, which have left sound and video support pretty weak. (QuickTime for Java is an even worse choice on Windows, though at least on Windows and Linux JavaSound runs better.)

Caution: this could be no more than a rumor. There seems to still be a Java development team at Apple, so at the very least, it sounds exaggerated. However, it’s also clear that Apple’s commitment to developing Java on the Mac is tenuous to say the least.

For Processing fans, though, there’s various good news. First, Apple has updated Java 5, the version of Java targeted by Processing currently. Secondly, while JavaSound still lags behind major quality improvements made on Mac and Linux, if Apple really is abandoning Java on the Mac, it could mean the finger pointing is over and finally Sun could develop Java on the Mac platform, bringing all three desktop OSes in sync (sorry, Solaris, that’s Linux, Mac, and Windows for nearly all of us). Another interesting tidbit: JavaFX, if Sun is to be believed, could be more than a scripting language, it could provide better multimedia support long lacking in Java. I imagine that could be incorporated into Processing. See the CDM story for more details — taking them with a grain of salt, as none of this has been officially confirmed.

Rumor: Mac Java’s Demise is Real, and Why That Could Be Good News for Multimedia

Mobile, touch control of visual apps? We’ve seen one way to do it; here’s an even more compatible MIDI approach. I think I’d stick to the iPod Touch, personally, just to conserve battery on a phone. But it’s interesting. -PK

Hot on the heels of Mrmr, ArtificialEyes (the Istanbul-based VJ collective) have released i3L MIDI Bridge for the iPhone, which builds on Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.remote.app, giving those without Max/MSP skills a simple way to bridge their iPhone and audio/video performance software of choice.

i3L (pronounced “i thrill”) is Freeware, and was developed using Max/MSP from Cycling74 and is a support application for aka.remote by Masayuki Akamatsu i3L receives pre-defined UDP messages from aka.remote.app running on the iPhone, scales the values to MIDI, and allows you to configure the sending MIDI channel and control change message number. While this software was developed to work seamlessly with our Real-time 3D VJ software Thrill, you can use this program with any audio or video software which receives midi messages.

If you give i3L a try, let us know how it works out for you in the comments.

artificialeyes.tv
aka.objects by Masayuki Akamatsu — must-have stuff for Max/MSP/Jitter!

Ed.: Does anyone know if multi-touch gestures would be possible in DIY apps? Maybe in February when Apple shares the official SDK? -PK

Click to play

Mrmr is an open protocol for mobile devices. It is used to dynamically create user interfaces on your iPod Touch or iPhone which respond to client apps in a multi-user performance environment.

Okay, that sounds awfully dry. Let’s try that again.

Mrmr lets you control Quartz Composer applications (or really , any compatible OSC implementation)over Wi-Fi from your iPod Touch or iPhone. Now you, too, can dance around like a lunatic while still controlling your visuals from the dance floor. Did we mention it’s multi-user, as well?

Mrmr is the brainchild of Eric Redlinger, researcher-in-residence at Brooklyn Polytechnic University’s Integrated Digital Media Program. He has leveraged the iPhone’s OS X underbelly and 10.5’s new Quartz Composer features to allow this sort of functionality.

I had the lucky* chance to interview Eric and ask him a few questions about Mrmr and the iPhone. Apologies for the quality of the interview, it was very spur of the moment.

Mrmr is a work in progress, but I think the results so far speak for themselves.

*(ok, no so lucky, my desk is right next to his, but somehow I had not seen Mrmr in action until just recently…)

Pioneer have broken new ground in overstatement with the announcement of their upcoming Video/Audio mixer, the US$6000 SVM-1000.

World’s first mixer for 4-channel audio and video.

I guess they completely missed the AVM02 then? I’m not sure how, it’s rather big and heavy.

Does anybody actually believe marketing people? Do they even believe themselves when they open their mouths? A conversation between two marketing people must be like facing two TVs towards each other, tuning one to MTV and the other to MTV Europe. But I digress. Specifications can’t lie (much), so:

Ever miss 1995? In 1995, this passed for online entertainment: static web pages, some 20-somethings hanging out in casual- and swim-wear, and the ability to talk back to the “cast.”

Welcome to the Spot. We’re a bunch of friends sharing a beach house in Santa Monica, California.

Everyday we put up this website and tell the world about our lives through our daily journals.

We can also interact with you - but only if you come in!

The Spot, at the Internet Archive

Well, okay, actually, it didn’t really pass; I remember checking out its launch that year as a novelty but think few people really stuck with it. It returned, undead, in 2004. No one cared (wisely). Well, now The Spot is back again. Except it’s on the Rupert Murdoch-owner MySpace, has video, and has actually widened, not narrowed, the gap with trashy reality TV shows like Laguna Beach. (Ha! See, manufacturing Cheez Whiz isn’t as easy as you thought, is it?)

Roommates (Don’t click that. Really. I could believe Roommates could cause gastrointestinal distress even for a die-hard trash TV fan — maybe especially for them.)

But, somewhere out of this hideousness, is there a lesson for how we think about “new media” (as we called it in 1995)?

This week on VJ-U, Benton-C Bainbridge interviewed Ray Sweeten, an audio and visual artist who pushes the creative limits of the oscilloscope, creating gorgeous, abstract forms with intense waves of sound.

Watch VJ-U episode dvadeset i dva: Applications in cross-modal media

Chris O’Shea (also of the blog Pixelsumo) has a brilliant installation that allows people to see through walls. It’s an idea I’ve seen done before, but Chris actually makes the effect convincing, by giving visitors an infrared torch (what we’d call a flashlight here in the States, though torch in this case is an even better word). Software tracks the position of the IR emitter via an overhead security camera, and the whole thing is coded to make the impact realistic.

Software is coded in OpenCV (an open-source computer vision library from Intel, in C++) and OpenFrameworks (a lightweight multimedia C++ framework for artists, on some level trying to do for C++ what Processing has done for Java).

There is a childlike quality about wanting the ability to see through walls with x-ray vision like a superhero character. This memory is something Chris O’Shea wants to capture in the interactive installation Out of Bounds. The work encourages visitors to bore through the walls of the museum and engage in a ‘behind the scenes’ experience with an x-ray torch. This playful interaction encourages childlike curiosity in young and old alike, and opens up a portal into the Museum’s forbidden spaces.

Shine the torch at the wall to reveal the secrets hidden beneath. Pay an anonymous visit to the staff office, collection’s store, workshop, roof hatch or plant room.

Out of Bounds on Pixelsumo
Designers in Residence Program, Design Museum, London
Now showing at DesignTide, Tokyo
Out of Bounds Project Description, Documentation

Seeing the IR Rainbow

The results are so realistic, Chris says he’s gotten emails from people thinking it was real. But the whole effect is purely illusion; IR emitters of this type (near-infrared) aren’t capable of penetrating surfaces. That’s something I had to explain to people when I was using IR-sensitive cameras myself (nothing fancier than a DV cam in night vision mode). Higher up the IR spectrum, it is possible to sense heat through walls, though the effect is nothing like the Superman “X-ray vision” seen here.

But among those fooled by near-IR’s “magical” properties? The US government, evidently. It seems our government, in the latest expression of its infinite wisdom, has placed import/export bans on simple IR flashlights for security reasons. (This sounds really odd, even for us; if anyone knows more about this, I’m curious to know.) I’m not sure what the precise security threat would be; maybe commandeering someone’s TiVO by shining at its remote control receiver? Don’t tell the US government, but there’s all kinds of mobile lighting technology that allows you to see in the dark, too. Like Mag-Lites.

Reimagining Projection

What I most like about this project, separate from how lovely it is as installation art, is that it breaks up the projection itself. The spotlight mechanism is simple, but it suggests the potential for letting viewers control projection, and “virtualizing” the projected image rather than letting it simply be a rectangle. (Not that I don’t love rectangular images — I sure spent a lot of time watching TV episodes in rectangles this weekend. But you get the idea.) I’ll be interested to see how ideas like this show up in clubs and performances.

Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online.

Wait.

Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that.

Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for videos, and so on, can vastly expand the potential of what you can do with media. And I certainly see casual users of those applications preferring online services in some cases. (On the other hand, I also know even a lot of casual photographers who would rather sit in Aperture or Lightroom and tweak their photos than struggle with a Web app — for them, the Web is about uploading and sharing, not editing.)

It’s just really hard to see why pros would need to do everything online. And here’s the fundamental problem: why are we talking about taking applications online rather than taking online to applications? Witness Adobe’s Bruce Chizen making vague predictions about the far-off future — ten years, to be exact. By that point, we might as well start talking about how we’ll all be flooded by global warming and under attack by the Mutant Bug People who have dominated the Earth. But in ten years, says Adobe, their products will be fully online. Why? Uh … haven’t figure that one out yet, evidently.

Here’s the latest from visualist superstars UnitedVisualArtists. UVA is “producers, directors and designers of performance video, environmental graphics and real-time software and for a variety of media.” They combine “art direction, production design and software engineering.” Oh, and they’re really light sculptors. And installation/media artists. And live performance visualists.

Their most recent performance collaboration is with Chemical Brothers. The visuals, as with all of their work, rely on their custom-built software Dragonfly. Dragonfly is not only able to generate visuals, but can conceive how those visuals fit into three-dimensional space, instead of being constrained to a basic video out / single, two-dimensional frame. It’s flexible enough that it works on their light installations, as well. Here, it pumps out more conventional (though lovely) generative visuals. Click here if you’re lazy, but even better is the higher-quality version on their site.

More on the Chem Bros:

We were commissioned by the ICA as part of their 60th anniversary celebrations to produce a special one-off live collaboration with The Chemical Brothers in Trafalgar Square. The project was supported by Becks, and filmed for later transmission by Channel 4. We augmented the Chemicals’ touring set (designed by Tom Lesh, with visuals by Flat Nose George;) with a constellation of powerful lights around the square, and created a set of generative, realtime graphics for the show finale — the tracks Hold Tight London and crowdpleasers Leave Home and Block Rockin’ Beats.

What’s really impressive about their work is their ability to pursue rigorous minimalism and technical sophistication at the same time, without ever feeling cold or opposed to the sensory experience of the material. It’s something you might miss if you just see one of their light sculptures, but this sense of their aesthetic vision really emerges as you look at the whole body of their designs. And in case you haven’t been following UVA, there’s more. A lot more.