You’ve seen the demos. You like the idea of tracking tags in the real world to create visuals. And now you want to try augmented reality for yourself - and, incidentally, you’re a Flash developer.

Reader Eric Socolofsky writes to share a framework he’s created that makes it much easier to work with the Flash-based, open source FLARToolkit, called FLARManager. Version 0.4 is just released:

http://words.transmote.com/wp/20090618/flarmanager-v04/

FLARManager has a number of features that improve upon the existing work done by FLARToolkit:

• Building the apps themselves is easier. Fire up the framework with Flex Builder (or Flash, or Eclipse, or FlashDevelop), and you have access to all the libraries you need, so you can start playing more or less out of the box. Hello, world, indeed.
• You don’t have to rely on Papervision if you don’t want to. Papervision, the faux-3D library for Flash, is included with the distribution. But marker tracking is decoupled from Papervision, so you don’t have to use it if you don’t need it.
• Better event management. Marker adding, updating, and removal, multiple pattern detection and management, and the like are all extended in FLARManager.
• Great documentation. Eric has taken the time to read some fantastic getting started tutorials, all accessible from the site above so you can go play.

Now, you wouldn’t pick Flash for speed - that’s not the idea.

Interface 27 from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo.

There has been a long tradition in live visuals and motion graphics, inherited from many other media, of maintaining a “secret sauce,” or the guarded formula of eleven herbs and spices. Ironically, for all you hear today “DIY” and “open source” in the same sentence, a lot of the motivation for doing something yourself has historically been doing something no one else can. Keep your secrets, and raise your value.

As our friend Bryant Place / CyberPatrolUnit sends over this latest set of live clips from a recent gig, and I browse through the comments, and reflect on the conversations I had last week at OFFF and during and following my own talk there, though, I’m struck.

The world has changed. First off, the Internet isn’t really about secrets. Your value is almost in direct proportion to how much you can share. Connections are forged through links of mutual exchange and good will. It’s not just about sharing your output or getting fans (the MySpace model), but sharing with a network of enthusiasts, and fellow artists. Those are the people from whom you often get real support (artistic, technical, and personal), gigs – and inspiration. (Even if you hate 8-bit music, that community is a really amazing model: their work to support each other and advocate for the whole subgenre has been I think the single biggest ingredient in their viral success.)

The visualist community increasingly itches not only to improve the quality of their own individual work, but everyone around them. A lot of us are in a battle for the future of this whole medium. Some parts of the world are devoid of live visuals, while others have mass-produced club visuals filling the nightlife.

Before I get carried away, the video itself is just the latest from the ongoing Interface 27 series. It employs a touch interface to control abstract visual pictures formed from streams of particles.

The reason I’m pulling back into the larger question is that these visuals are enabled by a library for Processing, a library we’ve seen here previously, developed by Memo Atken:

MSAFluid for processing (and Java)

If you’d rather use openFrameworks, there’s that version, too, as pictured below running blazingly fast:

ofxMSAFluid for openFrameworks

There’s even an ActionScript 3 port, in case you want to code Flash on the beach.

ofxMSAFluid for openFrameworks from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

CASTALIAN / New concept Audio Visual Touch Sequencer from nucode on Vimeo.

We’ve talked in the past about the idea of user interfaces and visual output merging. Instead of a UI on one screen and visuals on another, the idea is that the interface itself melds into the output. I can think of few better examples of how this begins to evolve than a video recently posted on Vimeo by user nucode. Working with a projected, camera-tracked multi-touch interface and audiovisual loops in custom Flash-based software, nucode manipulates samples as though on an alien, futuristic interface.

The result: a sequencer that has no timeline and seamlessly pulls content from online sources:

• Audiovisual loops, set as rotating circles/bubbles, palettes of sounds and visuals
• Sequence events together by attaching bubbles to one another – no timeline needed
• Gesture triggering of YouTube video search (make a gesture, get a video from YouTube)
• Simple real-time audio (low-pass filter, echo, and so on – sounds like there’s either some live synthesis or more sophisticated scrubbing going on, too)
• Runs in the browser on any OS, built with Flash and ActionScript 3

Artist Patrick Gunderson creates spectacular canvases of particle-generated paintings, a bit like code action paintings. (Action as in the likes of Jackson Pollack, not just ActionScript.) Above, an image from the Create Digital Motion Flickr pool. It’s worth having a closer look on Flickr - as with a physical painting, the closer you get, the more detail you see.

This is a Actionscript 3 generated composition. Color samples are taken from a base image then drawn using a psudo-random line drawing algorithm in concert with a particle system.

The technique itself is not exclusive to Mr. Gunderson, though I really love his use of color in the composition. Now, all due respect to ActionScript, I just hope he takes a look at some Processing and OpenGL code, as this could be even more fun set in motion, for doing some things Flash may not be quick enough to do. (As you can tell from the name of the site, we have a certain bias toward things that move ’round these parts.)

Really beautiful work, and further evidence that the aesthetics of code can go in all sorts of directions. Definitely check out the many variations in Patrick’s Flickr set; there’s quite a lot more than can fit here.

Updated: I wrote this post quickly and really should have mentioned the work of Erik Natzke, whose techniques Patrick adapted and who is the major artist in this field. Erik’s stuff really deserves its own post, which I didn’t have time to do justice here, so — will remedy that by tomorrow.

VJs and visualists are often asked to just make something nice happen behind musicians. What if that relationship were more intense? And what if, instead of accompanying the music, the musicians accompanied the visualists (perhaps closer to a live cinema structure)?

That’s the question Daniel Hai and Joshue Ott ask in their series Soundtrack. It doesn’t mean the music is secondary - quite the opposite. Thursday night, we’ll be working live with some of the most talented improvisers I know. Robert Dick is the legendary flute player and composer who single-handedly revolutionized what the flute was, using avant-garde techniques that extend its sound to sound — well, anything like a flute. Morgan Packard, working with Jose Ayala, creates minimal, pulsing soundscapes that to me are the perfect sonic analog to some of the visual meditations.

I think it’s also significant that the visualists - myself, Joshue Ott, Daniel Hai, and Sabina Hahn - will be working with custom software we’ve built, allowing us to imagine the visuals as a performance instrument from the ground up. Daniel, for instance, has built the open-source VJ app OnyxVJ, created in Flash. Josh and I work in Processing and Java. Interestingly, Josh and I will each be going opposite directions - Josh is working with drawing illustrations in 3D on a tablet, whereas I’m deconstructing a library of photos, flattening things out more, until those textures become a kind of painterly medium.

I really hope that these kind of events start to prompt discussions about the relationship of music and visuals. Certainly, there’s already wonderful work happening, and wonderful collaboration. But getting people to actively engage these questions - particularly in the live visual-starved US - I think has a lot of potential. If nothing else, we’ll all be dining at Brooklyn’s MonkeyTown and having a chat or two over drinks afterward.

Those of you in the New York area, I hope you can make it. Those of you not, I should have documentation from this event and our appearance at mgfest in Cambridge (the one outside Boston) next weekend.

Thursday, 2/26
$10
Reservations highly recommended (limited capacity); reserve online or call 718.384.1369
7:30 - 10:00 pm
Monkeytown, 58 N 3rd St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
Map

Official Soundtrack Site
Soundtrack @ Facebook

In the meantime, the photo here is Josh and Morgan at Mutek last year, and we have video from a recent jam-in-progress.