“Where the future is being made … today!”

You already know Processing can create wonderful visual stuff. It can output movie files, so it can be a companion to your live visual tool of choice. It also happens to be a great way to experiment with OpenGL, so you can work with shader code and other goodies to use elsewhere. But learning its ins and outs requires some skill development.

I’m doing a lot of Processing teaching and coding, so I’m pleased to bring you some of the results of that work live on our companion site, CDM Labs. Labs quietly poked its nose out earlier this spring, but starting this week, it’s the place on which I’ll be “journaling” code examples and teaching materials. You can think of it as an additional output of my sometimes-cluttered but sometimes-useful brain. I’m finding that keeping stuff on the blog also helps organize my thoughts, so I’m really looking forward to the new approach.

Regularly, I’ll also organize some specific CDM Labs projects that are more fully-formed.

For starters, you can check in on the 5-minute presentation I did of Processing (20 slides, each advancing automatically every 15 seconds), as part of Ignite NYC.

Ignite: Visual Code Literacy with Processing, in Five Minutes

Be sure to click through to the actual site so the code formatting and embedded presentation work properly!

I can also say, it is possible to learn Processing even if you’re not a programmer. It’s also possible – though probably not advisable – to cram the fundamentals of programming into 20 slides and five minutes and get the point across in a bar full of loud people drinking beer! (Full presentation with voice explanation coming soon.)

CDM Labs is here:

labs.noisepages.com

And you can add CDM Labs to your RSS feed reader:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/cdmlabs

Wondering what this “noisepages” business is about? We’ll be talking more about that soon. Don’t worry, we’re not spreading ourselves thin with more blogs – on the contrary, Labs and others are about better organizing what we’re doing, keeping you in the loop, and making us more productive. But we will have something else to share soon.

Bonus points to anyone who knows what the first line of this article is about.

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab.

I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to hear from some CDM readers too. There’s plenty of visualists out there currently working on transitioning their art from hobby to business. We have some ideas on how we can help this process along (more on that next week), but in the meantime: How are you building up your visual business? What opportunities or resources would help you?

And for those who are quite happy to do this just for the fun of it, here’s a little DIY TV I put together last week, a continuation of my quick, single shot “Bridge Sessions” video series.

Edward Guglielmino - Landslide (Bridge Sessions) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

We’ve seen terrific iPhone / iPod Touch apps for MIDI and OpenSoundControl, including Mrmr running VJ apps, i3L outputing to MIDI, and free, cross-platform Pd tools. With these, you can run visual, music, and other apps. But the latest addition is a very polished-looking app dedicated entirely to DMX, the protocol of choice for automated lighting and certain motorized projectors we love so much.

Luminar is a DMX lighting control app for iPhone and Touch, running control data for DMX rigs over wifi. There’s a touch-enabled mixer, precise, per-channel control, and color manipulation with a Color Changer channel layout. It’s definitely geared for lights in a way that general-purpose control software is not. I feel slightly icky talking about “lights” on this site. (Hey, aren’t those the things that blow out our projections?) But on the other hand, this kind of control and better software is just the kind of tool that can help give us better control over live rigs – and it’ll certainly work for DMX-controlled visuals, too, or (if you’re lucky enough to be doing this) synced projected visuals and lights, not to mention the kind of lights we very much enjoy (like LED arrays).

Last month we had a little teaser of Psychadelic Fluids, as CDM reader Memo was preparing to install the project (as part of a crew put together by Seeper) at the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK.

Well, the festival is over now, and Memo has followed up with a video documenting the project, and some more technical details on his site:

Glastonbury 2008 - Pi Interactive Installation from evan on Vimeo.

The biggest challenge in creating an application of this scale was to structure and optimize it in a way so it could analyze upto 6 camera feeds, and run at a large enough resolution to cover the entire tent. A multiple computer approach was out of the question due to the complications of synchronising a fluid simulation across multiple PC’s, so the decision was made to go with a multi-threaded app running on an 8-core Mac Pro. The motion estimation was split into 6 threads (one for each camera), the fluid solver ran in its own thread, and the particles (glitter & orb) ran in another thread - all of these threads ran in parallel. Once all threads were finished processing their data for one frame, they exchanged their results ready for processing for the next frame (camera motion fed into fluid solver ready for next frame, fluid currents fed into particles ready for next frame etc.). This approach allowed everything to run in parallel with smooth framerates of 30fps.

Tech aside, the crowd definitely seemed to like it.

More information @ memo.tv. Photos on Flickr.

I really adore Julian Oliver’s work; he’s constantly finding ways of making three-dimensional, virtual spaces more expressive. We’ve seen Quake as a musical instrument, gaming actors as insane digital painters, and 3D interactive game equivalents of Grantz Graf. But this piece is unusually poetic and moving to me. It features a figure inside a virtual space, placed over real-world blocks by augmented reality gaming technology. Your role in the game is to navigate this figure through an M.C. Escher-style, three-dimensional labyrinth. It reminds me of toy theater and puppetry pieces, extended to the digital domain. And that’s just the idea of releasing tools into the open source, that artists could pick up the basic infrastructure of a digital project and build upon it, doing something unexpected – just as with any artistic technique, that the resulting art would be more important than the tool used to make it.

The video is a “spoiler” in that, if you have really good spatial memory, I suppose it could give away the game. I don’t, though, so I look forward to playing this tangible game at some point in the future. Eat your heart out, Portal.

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Via MAKE:blog; see also (in Spanish) Edgar Gonzalez.

For more Julian Oliverism, see his blog:

/var/log/sysblog

– a detailed keynote where he explores cartography (also of interest in terms of visual language):

Inclusiva-Net Madrid Keynote

– and an extensive interview and bibliography by our friend, VJ and artist Jean Poole (Sean Healy), which pulls together a lot of Julian’s work, in particular his Internet visualization Packet Garden (seen at right):

Julian Oliver : The Art of Gardening

Resolume Avenue 3 Introduction from Bart van der Ploeg on Vimeo.

With a new generation of visual apps, we’ll soon see if software innovation can help live visualism spread through the larger performance scene. One of the tools to watch has been Resolume 3, and it’s a secret no more.

We knew Resolume 3’s release would make a big splash, if for no other reason than its loyal (PC-only) audience. The older Resolume 2 was always a favorite for its streamlined interface and the ease with which it handled live gigs. It had its “legacy” downsides, too, like limited performance capabilities, a lack of 3D hardware support, and support for Windows only. Resolume 3 promised to fix that, but some loyalists wondered if the ground-up redesign – with a new engine and new interface – would live up to the name, or get lost in the avalanche of new VJ tools being developed this year.

Today, Resolume’s creators took the wraps off the new Resolume Avenue 3. The big news: this app could set itself apart with beat-matched, audiovisual mixing, not just video.

In short, think:

• 3D, multiple screens, OpenGL / FreeFrameGL effects
• Beat-synced everything, looping
• Audio in video clips, direct audio file triggering, VST audio effects

We’ve been playing with an early beta, and it’s been a blast — bringing over some of the basic principles we liked in the original Resolume interface, but with lots of fun newness added.

MediaCoder is a free do-everything, convert-everything audio and video batch processor. It relies on tools like ffmpeg behind the scenes, but supports multiple engines, lots of formats, and has a graphical front end. It works on Windows, and could be a good reason to virtualize Windows on Mac or Linux, and it also evidently works pretty well on Mac and Linux via WINE. (Haven’t tried that yet; see the download page for details.)

The best news from MediaCoder land is that a recent build has added support for AVCHD, the widely-used HD format. This is essential for those times you get media off someone’s hard drive-based player. The MediaCoder folks have a brief tutorial with screenshots on their site:

How to convert AVCHD with MediaCoder

If you have a preferred conversion method for AVCHD or other formats on your platform of choice, let us know. In the meantime, I’m finding I fire up MediaCoder almost every day.

Artists and visualists often want to work in 3D, as our world increasingly becomes saturated with 3D technology. But we may want to get their feet wet before making an investment in a massive program. Fortunately, we’re now blessed with free 3D tools — partly because industry heavyweights Google and Microsoft are so desperate for the Average Joe to populate their virtual worlds with 3D models.

First, Google acquired SketchUp, the fantastic, user-friendly 3D sketching tool. They made the basic version of SketchUp completely free. Unfortunately for visualists wanting to use videos in a VJ app or OBJ models in a Processing sketch, exporting requires the full version of the software. (On the other hand, it’s $500, a tiny fraction of that for academic users, and it is user friendly.)

Well, now you have yet another choice, courtesy your friends at Microsoft. Microsoft snapped up a 3D app of their own for their competing Virtual Earth product when they bought Caligari, creator of trueSpace back in February. Sure enough, like Google they’re making the tool free.

Now, I expect Microsoft is hoping you’ll spend countless hours making models of houses for Virtual Earth, not just using this as a cheapskate way of making 3D models for your visualist projects. But they’ll survive.

trueSpace itself could be a strong choice even if you had to pay for it. It has a rather lovely interface, and some powerful tools for modeling organic-looking shapes. You can also script complex generative, interactive procedural models. There’s even a real-time DirectX9 renderer, which I believe, with effort, could even make trueSpace your live tool. There are powerful export tools — something SketchUp tends to lack — and scripting options, so this could fit well into another workflow. And unlike SketchUp, trueSpace is a "real" 3D tool that does everything. Microsoft also gives you the full-blown tool for free, minus just a few add-ons like ray tracing. The only catch is that trueSpace is Windows-only.

trueSpace even stacks up nicely against some of the 3D heavyweights, with tools like a node editor, real-time 3D collaboration, and lots of rendering options that set it apart.

Of course, SketchUp and trueSpace are both proprietary, so the open source Blender is another option. Those with more 3D experience than me, I’d be curious to hear how you think trueSpace stacks up against Blender.

Caligari

Free trueSpace 7.6 sign-up

When you’re ready to learn the tool, the video tutorials are now completely free, too.

But the bottom line: 3D tools are becoming more accessible, in cost, power, and ease of use alike. And as more people dive into 3D interactive tools like vvvv or Processing, and VJ-focused apps like 3L add 3D object import, I think the third dimension may increasingly infect visualist work.

It hasn’t been long since we last mentioned fantastic stop-motion animator Pes, but his latest offering takes his already quirky-yet-smooth style and adds considerably more awesome.

PES’ Western Spaghetti from ideals creatives on Vimeo.

The liquid effects here are absolutely wonderful, as are the various chopping and squashing parts. Animation is all about problem solving, and stop-motion doubly so. I spent the first two weeks of this month teaching stop-motion to over 100 9-16 year olds, and it was fascinating to watch them trying to figure out how to get what was in their heads on to the screen. Watching Pes’ work, there’s plenty of “how would I do that?” moments.

[via Make]

Ed.: The global visualist community is more underground than people outside the scene may realize. LPM is an essential event in which these artists come together. Events have tended to be in Europe, but now it’s North America’s turn — the other “United States,” the Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

Live Performers Meeting won’t be making their sixth edition in Rome as before, nor even Europe, but rather Xalapa, Mexico. LPM came out of the flxer community, a network of vjs using the flxer flash vj software and sharing content through its online system, and now the Mexican contingent have stepped up to the plate. So if you’re on the American continent and want to play and progress your game amongst many of your peers, go check the site out and see if you can make it - the last LPM programmed 240 artists on 13 screens over four days, in gothic-yet-with-high-quality-VGA-routing splendour.

If you want to see the report from LPM Roma 2008, its freshly posted here at cdm, and the archive website with a photostream and videos is at http://liveperformersmeeting.net/2008/gallery/

LPM site: http://liveperformersmeeting.net

LPM Mexico permalink: http://liveperformersmeeting.net/2008mex/