If you haven’t seen it yet, Jamie and Adam did what may be the greatest illustration of a computing concept onstage ever, using an 1100-barrel paintball gun:

Updated: We’ve seen the basic idea before — one of the Max/MSP + Atmel-powered Printball notes his own, similar project, as featured on Pixelsumo way back in 2005. But it’s the first time I’ve seen this used to illustrate this point.

The basic idea: GPUs, by using parallel processing, are able to render graphics more effectively than CPUs. And while the illustration is something of an oversimplification, it is pretty literal in terms of showing people what’s going on — and why GPUs are uniquely well-suited to computing graphics. Conceptually, it’s really one of the most brilliant demos I’ve ever seen.

There are just a couple of problems — and, amusingly, this demo makes them visible, as well.

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:

The VJ and live visualist of the future isn’t just about DJ metaphors and what happens in clubs. It’s about a convergence of new interface technologies for dealing with visual material in a more fluid, flexible way. It’ll change not only visual performance, but how we express ourselves in digital visuals, as well — something we’ve already seen happen with non-linear video editing and vector and bitmap graphics software, but taken further.

Vade points us to a couple of glimpses of technologies being researched now that will help enable these changes.

Matthew Applegate sends this our way — it’s like two computers having a conversation, across epochs of computer history. The MacBook Pro is running a computer vision algorithm and "singing" notes based on colors it sees on the Spectrum’s screen.

Maybe this will get your brain thinking of something new — file this under "really odd inspirations."