Thanks to everyone who ran the system spec gauntlet and proudly entered our 3L Beta Giveaway. We’ll draw and announce the winners on Monday when ExiledSurfer and I have finished our respective travel itineraries.

In the meantime, for those who would like to get a head start on the 3L interface, artificialeyes have released the manual for public consumption (Download link: 1.2MB PDF).

When you open that file, you’ll be confronted with the following image.

Sage advice. artificialeyes have made some very interesting interface design choices with this software, and while they’ve packed a huge amount of control and signal flow functionality into a single screen interface, few would accuse it of being intuitive. Even with Michael and Todd showing you through the system it’s still quite confusing, and takes some time for the 3L paradigm to sink in. So for those 5 new beta testers hitting the software on Monday, getting a head start on the manual will have you blasting pixels out smoother and faster.

Good luck! As the commercial release of 3L approaches I’m sure we’ll have more exciting news coming.

Hang tight — we will have that announcement here. It’s Monday in New York for another few hours. -Ed.

Want to learn how to pull off graphics? Make it work with optical and real for real first. Tron may have been a pioneering moment in computer graphics, but a lot of its unique look came from unique optical effects on a scale not seen before or after. The glowing screen was an actual lighting effect, which is why CG artists have taken such a liking to the film’s aesthetic, even if it was ultimately too labor-intensive to apply to the whole movie. There’s even an analog in the music: Wendy Carlos’ adept blend of big orchestral, choral, and organ textures with synths.

Of course, the makers of Tron didn’t leave out computer graphics entirely. And that makes this fan remake — no CG, and no optical effects trickery, either — adorable and inspiring.

Via Kotaku.

You’re also aware of just how much of this sequence is sound and editing. Erm, not that motion isn’t important — if I were to say that, I should say it on, you know, the other blog. Think synthesis of the two.

We’ve seen visual vinyl, via the video stylings of Serato’s VIDEO-SL plug-in. But here’s a more literal approach: stick the camera on the turntable. Via a multi-camera setup, Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow are doing that with their honest-to-goodness, scratching turntablist sets. I especially like the camera up close on the turntable itself — something instrumentalists might try, too. (Well, maybe you want to stop somewhere … no endoscopies during your performance, please, unless you’re an avant-garde performance artist or something.)

More on this sort of thing soon, but there’s something to get the thought process going. Thanks, Jaymis!

It’s still early in development (read: it often crashes), but The Bean Machine applies nodal, patch-based development to Java. The interface is mysteriously close to Quartz Composer, down to capabilities, UI, and even the 3D cube tutorial. Personally, I use Java because it can do things Quartz Composer can’t, but it’s interesting nonetheless — and raises, again, the question of why we don’t see more tools that try to meld the capabilities of code and patches.

The cool bit: nodes are Java Beans, so you really could use this to combine the best of both worlds if it matures. No download yet, but we’ll be watching … perhaps it will inspire other developers, as well.

The project is labeled “experimental”, but could be worth a look. Developer Jerry Huxtable has lots of other goodies for Java-heads on his page, including lots of 2D image processing stuff and a map editor — Processing lovers, might want to pop this into your del.icio.us.

Bean Machine @ JH Labs

JH Labs main page with lots o’ projects

In case you haven’t seen the stunt spreading, meme-like, around the blogosphere, graffiti artist Skullphone hacked ten Los Angeles-area billboards owned by ClearChannel. It’s the coolest thing to happen to LA’s billboards since L.A. Story. And that was a movie, not real.

See it on Skullphone and Curbed L.A. via Textually and Supertouch, and F.A.T. and Anti-Advertising Agency, via Gizmodo and MAKE.

Now, this deserves special mention here because I imagine almost everyone here has dreamed of hijacking giant digital billboards — the way musicians dream of playing the Hollywood Bowl or being on the cover of Rolling Stone or something.

Not that we condone such behavior, of course. No, that’d be illegal.

Too bad you can only get away with stuff like this in LA and not, say, Times Square or Tokyo.

Okay, maybe not “hacked.” If by “hacked” you mean “rented from ClearChannel, the owner of the sign,” then this is a hack. Oops. Speaking of which, I’d better make sure to check my bank balance and make sure I can hack this month’s apartment. So much for sticking it to ClearChannel, evil corporate overlord. (Now, does someone know if you could hack these signs?)

I like Wired’s term, too — “checkbook culture jamming.” And now you know what to get your favorite visualist for his/her birthday, eh? (Thanks for the correction, mememamo!)