Today on CDMusic, I’m looking at the new OpenStomp, an open source guitar stompbox. That’s the project’s main focus, but dig into the specs, and you find something interesting: an NTSC output. There’s even an example patch with Pong. Using visual programming tools, it should be possible to whip up more.

More on the video is found in the FAQ:

Video is essentially generated in software by the Propeller with a little bit of hardware support. Parallax’s website has drivers supporting both PAL and NTSC. The initial focus will be on NTSC, and the video based pieces of software (like Pong) shipping with the pedal are NTSC based, but conversion to PAL is possible and is supported by the Propeller chip and the Coyote-1 hardware.

It’s just a start, and there’s no video output. But how much fun would it be to have a custom, US$350 video stompbox you could code for? Because the project is open source, and it’s based on the cheap but powerful Parallax Propeller, it should be very possible. Anyone interested in working on such a project, do let us know.

[CDMu Story | Project Page, Details, Online Ordering]

Ooh, and I see below our related posts feature is working nicely … so, yeah, see also those stories.

Miguex (who you may know from the CDMo comment stream.) has interviewed Suryummy, creator of the fantastic Interstellar Sugar (previously on CDMo).

Interstellar Sugar - Suryummy from Suryummy on Vimeo.

[ How would you describe you ideal gig? ]
Short and sweet. One thing that I’ve learned over the years, nothing can kill your artistic vibe more then 8 hours of continuous retinal mixing overload. That being said I enjoy the unexpected.

One of my favorite mixing experiences ever, took place in a tiny club in Shibuya Tokyo during a Lightrhythm Visuals tour. I had no idea what type of music I would be mixing too, was totally unprepared and had just managed to get unlost from the Tokyo jungle. The band turned out to be the most fierce live jazz group on the planet. I had never felt so thrilled and challenged as a live visualist.

[ Where do you think video performance is heading? ]
Hopefully to higher levels of quality and meaning. Obviously technology will be as important as ever in defining the landscape of live visuals. The high end tools that are available today such as VDMX, Processing and Resolume 3 will hopefully give artists the freedom to focus more on the art form rather then the technical hurdles that have plagued the movement for such a long time.

More tips from production to performance in the full interview at Accent Feed.
Suryummy’s Site.

iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Speaking of iPhones, here’s some really brilliant work by David O’Reilly. You may have seen it already, as it looks like it’s made the rounds, but I love the technique. By doing anamorphic perspective warping of the 3D scene on the device, this app simulates a holographic 3D on the screen of the iPhone, courtesy the device’s motion sensors. Correction: Okay, it’s not actually possible to do this on the iPhone. So why not build your own hardware for the job? Rotation sensors should be possible with the proper gyro-sensor. That makes all of this even less about the iPhone, and more about what is possible with augmented reality and mobile devices. (It looks absolutely possible — and suggests still other ideas. Thanks, visceralX, for the correction.)

It’s a fairly simple gimmick here, but it suggests some of the possibility of making art not just for big screens, but small screens, too, turning a “weakness” into a strength. Way back when CD-ROMs were in vogue, I remember hearing composer Morton Subotnik talk about how multimedia for computers was a new kind of chamber music performance. He saw the shift to smaller screens not as damaging large-scale performance spectacle, but making the work more “intimate.” I wonder if motion graphics and even live visuals might be able to do the same.

One possibility: invite three or four of your closest friends to your next gig. Gather them round a little screen, uncork some wine, and enjoy real appreciation instead of a massive club full of people.

We’ve seen fantastic ways of using the iPod touch and iPhone as controllers, but all require the jailbroken device. Once you up to 2.0 firmware, they cease to work — even if you jailbreak your 2.0 firmware. I’m hopeful that those apps will catch up, hopefully via a mixture of the jailbroken, open-source toolchain and the official Apple SDK. But in the meantime, a very lovely OSC app has shown up on the official App Store. OSCemote (US$4.99) and its free, drum pad-only counterpart OSCemote Light each give you basic multi-touch controls for use with OSC. That should make them ideal for, say, whipping up an impromptu controller for Processing (site | CDM tag). In fact, I may give this a go and start dropping it into my Processing template, so on the fly I can mess with parameters while coding. See also: vvvv, VDMX, and many others for more OSC control.

iTunes links:
OSCemote
OSCemote Light

Via our latest iRoundup over at CDMusic:
iPhone/Touch Roundup: BtBx Acid Bass, iDrum Workflow and Babies, OpenSoundControl App

More on this soon! If anyone gives it a try and does something interesting, do let us know. And you can be sure we’ll have more details on the status of other apps like aka.iphone, mrmr, and i3L soon.

Netzstaub has been pumping out all kinds of great code and projects over on his blog. Here’s an especially sweet example: he’s got Processing working with a basic headtracking process. The input involves oscp5 and netp5 used with the Mac-only DarwiinRemoteOSC library, but could be adapted to other operating systems.

Wiimote Headtracking in Processing via wesen’s Twitter (follow CDM at Twitter: cdmblogs)

Once the data is there, the rest is basically math. You position the camera to look straight ahead, and then adjust the viewing angle based on incoming data.

The sketch is available, so go try it — and see if further improvements or other applications are possible.

In case you aren’t already familiar with it, here’s the now-famous video featuring Wiimote headtracking, by Carnegie Mellon’s Johnny Chung Lee:

VDMX5 may be “perpetually in beta”, but oh, what a beta it is. The latest version includes some major breakthroughs, a new render engine, lots of new features — and significant signs that VDMX may be nearing its milestone non-beta release. And don’t bother mentioning the “beta” status to the many people for whom this insanely rich, Mac-only VJ app is the center of live visual sets. VDMX has been rock solid, and keeps getting better.

VDMX5 public beta 6.9.0 now available [Vidvox User Forums]

New in this release:

• Faster rendering: A new render engine with vastly improved performance - and OpenGL add/over blend modes (”extremely fast,” say Vidvox)
• Smarter sizing: Smart auto-sizing and syncing size
• Stills: Better still image / texture support
• Interactive Web sources: Live use of Flash files and even Web pages (evidently including applets like Processing), with basic interaction
• Slicker effects: Layer-specific effects preset chains, new delay and RGB delay FX (I always enjoy a little RGB delay), and better effects management

More documentation and improvements are coming, as well.

The render engine is clearly the worthy headline here, but I think people will be very, very excited about including Flash and Processing sketches. I have to give that a try. (CDMotion’s own vade hacked his own solution, routing visuals between apps on Leopard — but, of course, better integration would be great.)

It’s also worth noting that this yet again demonstrates that “native” visual support isn’t always better — that is, OpenGL in this case trumped the Mac-only Core Image for blending modes. Obviously, you use whatever works best, and that is at least in some cases the cross-platform API.

As VDMX plows forward, it’s not alone. Just to mention one rival, previous preview.) Resolume is now on Twitter if you want to stalk — erm, follow — the creators.

Vello Virkhaus’ V Squared Labs takes on some of the biggest jobs around, and has put together 12,000 pixel wide, surround visuals for the Rok Vegas club in Las Vegas. It’s super-gaudy stuff, but I’m guessing the word “subtle” didn’t feature in the brief from this client.

Rok Land
Rok Red
Purple Pipes
Plug

Aesthetics aside, those demo videos are a great way of showing off surround content. If you’d like your 360 to be a little less commercial, how about this video for Cut Chemist’s “1st Big Break”:

Cut Chemist - 1st Big Break from eyestorm on Vimeo.

They’re going a little bit far calling this “The first music video ever shot with a 360 degree panoramic lens”, but it definitely has other things going for it.

V2 via VJ.TV.

It’s been a couple of months since Peter mentioned MachineCollective - the open, DIY modular controller enclosure system - on CDMu, and they haven’t been sitting on their hands during that time. MachineCollective.org has been updated with lots of new pictures and information, and they’ve even dropped a potential price point: €25-35.

Despite a couple of visualist-specific controllers - Ohm, VMX VJ, NuVJ - we generally have to make our controller choices from the gear designed for electronic musicians. We see a lot of inventive combinations of hardware and software solutions for VJing, but we also need some good, accessible, basic setups to actually get new people in to performing live visuals. We need more hardware, which means we need more people making prototypes, some of which will eventually become commercial solutions for the next generation.

Let’s get going, people. Ready? Go!

DIY on CDMo, DIY on CDMu.
Arduino site (Previously on CDMo).
Arduinome site.

… and if you’ve already been working on custom control options for VJing, tell us about it, so we can tell everyone else.

As code literacy improves and coding tools like Processing and Flash make it easier to produce stunning visual results, the line between the coder/hacker and digital artist, and more conventional artists, is blurring fast. The next trend: networks and blogs on which people share not just their work, but the code behind it. The idea is old, but there’s no question the breadth of content and number of participants is expanding - and beginners are welcome, too.

The Flash Virtuoso, and Galleries vs. Code Repositories

Keith Peters, aka BIT-101, has been instrumental in the Flash community in advocating digital art and animation. His books are clearly written and intuitive to non-programmers — despite their Flash basis, I’ve found them useful for my Processing experiments, too. And Keith has been busy of late. He’s got a second installment coming for his wonderful Making Things Move book, inspiring his isometric experiments pictured here, and he’s also launched a new site called “Art from Code.” (Various permutations of this theme come up regularly.)

I owe a huge debt to Keith, as I got into generative coding entirely through his books, before later going on to discover Processing.

Interestingly, the relationship between code and art is an imperfect one. Just open sourcing the code isn’t always practical. In a way, though, that makes the code even more beautiful — and sometimes sharing visual results can be just as interesting as sharing code. (It forces us to go back and try to reproduce the results, then get it all wrong, and wind up producing something original, often as a result of mistakes!)

Keith writes on his blog: