Want to work on your coding chops, but get away from the slavery of your desk and your laptop? Want to stretch out on the couch – or the cramped confines of a bus or coach plane flight? (Hello, EasyJet!)

We saw yesterday how you can work with your iPad and Processing, via Processing.js.

Here’s another option. GLSL Studio, a tool which was already a fun way to play around with 3D coding, continues to grow. It’s a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 coding environment, running on … well, a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 3D platform, all in a wafer-thin tablet known as the iPad.

And while it’s a little more primitive, there’s an option for Android, too, called Shader Toy. That, in turn, is inspired by a Web version, too. I’m grabbing all of them, I think, until I get my head around GLSL.

What’s GLSL, you ask? Why, it’s the omni-platform OpenGL coding language that allows you to do elaborate graphical math in real-time. It’s the secret sauce behind all the beautiful 2D and 3D pixel and model and video eye candy you see on modern computing platforms. It’s perfect for this environment, because you often write very little actual code, code that goes a long way. Now you can contemplate just what you’re trying anywhere you like.

What can you do with GLSL Studio? How about:

• Native code editing and data generation, with graphical management for shared attributes, uniforms, vertices – all the variables that make the things work.
• Texture management which will even integrate with your Photo Roll and (for devices that have them) camera.
• Example programs from pixels to 3D.
• Real-time controls using touch, motion, and your screen dimensions. Various render modes, too.
• Shader export so you can sketch shaders on the go, then add them to your desktop development environment when you’re back at your desk.

New in this version: Continue reading »

Processing has done wonders in popularizing for designers and artists the notion of using code to express visual ideas. Now, what if you didn’t have to fold the hinge of your laptop to explore ideas? What if it were as near as an iPhone or iPad? (Or, I suspect, other platforms, too?)

PR0C3551N6 isn’t the first tool to venture into these waters, but it looks like it could be the most sophisticated yet. Bring up your device’s touch keyboard (you’ll need some way to tap up that code), and start sketching. Through the power of Processing.js, you can run your creation, for creating generative artwork, interactive interfaces, and other visual ideas. To aid your coding process, the tool highlights syntax and includes integrated documentation. And you can use it even without an Internet connection – perfect for a distraction-free train ride.

You can even share creations, making this a mobile sketchpad that you can bring into your development environment on your “real” computer.

There are sacrifices in this system, of course. iOS doesn’t support Java, so full Processing functionality is out of the question. With that, you lose library support and 3D functionality, and console support is limited, though the print commands work. But that’s hardly a deal killer, because what you’d most want to do on a mobile platform – even a powerful tablet – is lightweight sketching, with the bigger, fancier projects on your laptop or desktop machine.

Ironically, the one mobile platform on which you can run full-blown Processing code is Android. But because Android apps require a sophisticated build toolchain on a desktop, I doubt we’ll see coding for Processing for Android directly on an Android device – at least, not without a nearby computer to do the heavy lifting. If you are a jealous Android user, though, this kind of functionality could be incorporated into a native Android app, too.

I hope developer Michael Markert releases the code under a free license. I’d happily pay more for the app on the App Store if I thought it’d help open development of the idea, and such a release could help assist people trying other platforms, including but not limited to Android. (Having a similar environment that worked across platforms has appeal, too.) But regardless, it’s admirable work.

More information:
http://processingjs.org/
http://processing.audiocommander.de/
Blog post: ANNOUNCING PR0C3551N6: PROCESSING FOR IOS [audiocommander.de]

I’ll post an update when it’s done and available! Thanks to the illustrious Ilan Katin for the tip!

The work by Theo Watson and team has been one of those magical technological revelations that makes people say “oh – that’s what that’s for.”

Say computer vision or tracking, or show the typical demo of what these can do with interaction, and eyes glaze over. But make them work as puppetry, and somewhere deep inside the mechanisms by which us human beings interact with our world, something lights up.

With iteration, that first proof of concept just gets better. Theo writes to share that he and collaborator Emily Gobeille made a second version of the project. In “Puppet Parade,” the Interactive Puppet Prototype 2.0, the barrier between digital realm and human gesture gets a bit thinner.

But don’t just watch the edited demo – see what it looks like in action below, and a brief visual look at how the system works. (Bonus: Theo wrote the tools on which the whole system was based – and shared them with a well-connected global community of hackers via his open source library.)

Description and credits: Continue reading »

Portrait of the ghost drummer from odaibe on Vimeo.

You might not have the chance to reflect on it amidst all the delightful noise, but a drummer is engaged in an elaborate choreography as they play. Bartek Szlachcic a.k.a. odaibe found a way to visualize just that dance digitally, in spare, rotating forms in 3D, and sends it our way. Motion-captured movements become a visual map over time. As he describes the project:

Exploration of graphic qualities in process of playing on a drum kit. Drum sticks are the extensions of drummer’s hands like brush is an extension of the painter’s hand. Invisible dynamics of drummer’s motion creates a spatial path which is both a visualized groove and a graphic notation. My self-developed technique sums the elements of areas such as drumming, music notation, action painting, choreography, calligraphy and 3d drawing.

Tech. description :

This animated drawing is a recorded motion path of drum sticks in process of performing rhythmic composition. Motion trajectory was captured by Vicon MX system, raw CSV files were translated into visual language in C4D. Thanks to David Green for tech. assistance

I worked on this animation during my recent artistic residency at Culture Lab in Newcastle.

More on this Poland-based artist:

http://www.odaibe.com/

And from him, as well, here’s a very different connection between visual and live drum kit, as video accompanies live kit onstage:

CO2 Cube from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.

It’s an older project, but no less timely: speaking of Obscura Digital’s work, they’ve also employed projection as a way to illustrate in tangible terms a serious issue. You’ll hear climate scientists speak in terms of metric tons of emissions. But because we can’t see those emissions, and because most people really don’t think about volumes of carbon dioxide (hardly something you pick up at the grocery), it’s tough to wrap your head around what that means.

That is, it’s tough until you see the volume. Assuming sea level, you get a cube of 8.2m x 8.2m x 8.2m (27ft x 27ft x 27ft) or a three-story building. And so at 2009′s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Obscura Digital made the message more concrete. The object itself illustrates the point, and then becomes a medium for conveying information gathered from YouTube and Google. It’s called a “4-D Hypercube User Interface System,” which seems a bit of a stretch – this would technically still be a 3-cube – if clever branding. But the message is really clear.

It also suggests an important role of creative projection, which is making the projection surface itself part of the content and meaning.

More information:
http://www.obscuradigital.com/work/detail/c02-cube/

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Projections from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.

Illuminating the facades of United Arab Emirates mosque and historical architecture with extraordinary imagery, Obscura Digital transformed these structures with visuals both decorative and cultural. It’s a visually-rich celebration of Arabic and Emirati culture, and one of the developers – absurdly-prolific artist and geek virtuoso Barry Threw – walks us through some of the details of how it was produced, all using TouchDesigner software.

The mosque, top:

In celebration of UAE National Day 2011
Projection and design by Obscura Digital

44 projectors with a combined brightness of 840,000 lumens
were used to cover a surface 600ft wide x 351ft high

Barry explains in detail how this lavish projection project came into being – and get ready for some nerdy vocabulary, folks, which is part of why we love what we do: Continue reading »

PIXXELPOINT 2011 from aljoša abrahamsberg on Vimeo.

Via Aljoša Abrahamsberg, an extended, 30-minute documentary of the PIXXELPOINT media festival reaches us, covering the happenings of this international digital media festival out of Nova Gorica, Slovenia last month. Not all in English, but more than enough English and images to look at. I also love their theme, fitting for the beginning of the year 2012: “let’s get ready.” Indeed.

http://www.pixxelpoint.org/