Via Aaron Meyers, who’s getting ready for some fun projects at Eyebeam here in New York this week, anyone using a camera for capture, live video, or tracking needs to check out this copious thread on the OpenFrameworks forum:

beginners ~ Sony PS3 Eye

We already knew Sony’s US$40 PS3 Eye camera was a wonder; that’s why we strongly recommended its use in the tangible interface hackday hosted earlier this month. But while we’ve heard some good luck squeezing performance out of the thing on Windows and Linux, the Mac - while reliable - could use more options and performance. Theo Watson, one of the OpenFrameworks team, comes to the rescue with a patched version of the macam open source video driver - halfway down the page. (I hope his changes get rolled into macam?)

You’ll find lots of other tips, not only for the Mac but other stuff, as well.

We’ll keep collecting tips on this camera. Macam experiences, anyone? I’m still trying to successfully build the Linux driver; once I sort that out, I’ll share.

For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics drivers. That would be fine, if PC vendors kept pace, but my near-universal experience has been that vendors are awful about drivers. Just finding drivers on many sites is a Herculean task, let alone getting something up-to-date.

That had meant that, for GPU gurus, the only alternative was a site like laptopvideo2go.com. That site is an awesome resource, with in-depth detailed descriptions of every new build (stable and experimental) from NVIDIA. To get the latest and greatest, you can use mods that allow these drivers to be installed on notebooks without having to go through your notebook vendor.

But nice as that is, it’s still terrific news that NVIDIA has finally made the switch to offering their drivers directly on their site. Now, when you go to NVIDIA.com, you get a prominent, front-page option for downloading notebook drivers:

NVIDIA Notebook Drivers

This covers just about everything, thanks to NVIDIA’s unified driver model. (NVS and GeForce are both there.) Notably missing: workstation-quality Quadro FX drivers. But this is still major progress. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and XP are covered.

This is a non-issue for Apple users, of course, and NVIDIA has long offered direct downloads for Linux (in addition to open source, community-supported drivers), but it’s great news for Windows users.

It specifically allows NVIDIA to push the beta of release 179 before the certified drivers become available. I hope this also means that, with added feedback, we’ll get more reliable NVIDIA mobile drivers.

NVIDIA also now prominently links to their Graphics Plus campaign, which promotes the use of your GPU for tasks like GPGPU and PhysX. There are tons of downloads there, though in the past those haven’t been officially supported on notebooks; with the beta, they are. I’m giving them a try later today on my NVIDIA 9500M GT to how they run with this new beta driver release. One big bonus for visualists: a chance to get faster video encoding. Being a fan of open standards, I’m still rooting for OpenCL in place of NVIDIA’s proprietary CUDA technology for processing on the GPU, but there’s no question NVIDIA does a lot to promote the science of GPU use. (And, for the record, NVIDIA has also pledged to support and promote OpenCL alongside CUDA.)

In fact, NVIDIA is specifically pushing these new notebook drivers for these features:

• Video applications
• Distributed computing (GPUGRID, Folding@home, and the like)
• PhysX in games like EA’s upcoming PC release of Mirror’s Edge (get the Dramamine handy!)

What about ATI? They helpfully let you select your notebook graphics card on the driver download page, then respond with:

Currently AMD does not provide any driver support for Mobility Radeon™ products. All driver and technical support for Mobility Radeon™ products is provided by the original laptop or notebook manufacturer. The drivers that are available for download at ati.amd.com are for desktop products only.

To download Windows Vista Mobility Radeon™ drivers or driver updates for your laptop or notebook product, please visit your laptop or notebook manufacturer’s website.

Ah, yes, because really, there’s nothing computer users enjoy more than dealing with notebook manufacturers. So, ATI, I hope you follow NVIDIA’s lead on this. If they can do it, so can you. We love your stuff, so help us run the latest drivers, okay? (By the way, does anyone know if there’s an ATI equivalent of laptopvideo2go?)

Thanks to Josh Ott (of superDraw fame) for the tip!

Believe it or not, people making art with webcams don’t rate very highly on the priority list for big computer companies. (Who would have thought?) On the PC, at least, there’s a thriving market for webcams for video chat, since so few PCs have built-in cameras. Meanwhile, on the Mac, Apple has absolutely zero interest in you using any webcams other than those built into their machines, or, if you’re lucky, one of the FireWire iSights Apple made before Apple discontinued them. (Given the high failure rate I’ve seen on the iSights, that assumes you’re lucky enough not only to have found one, but to have it still working.) Ditto, naturally, third-party manufacturers, since there’s unlikely to be any significant market for their wares — and they’re busy navigating the morass of driver development complexity on PCs.

Long story short: the Creative Labs Live! Optia I raved about in the fall is one of the few choices you’ve got that doesn’t require drivers. It’s USB video class-compliant, though unlike other USB classes, it’s not entirely clear that that’s all that meaningful.

But, for several glorious months, through last week, I was able to keep my Live Optia working perfectly with Processing (and thus QuickTime for Java) and QuickTime (via tools like Jitter). Until today, that is. Now I’ve got two of them, five Macs to test, and — nada. On 10.4.10 / QT 7.2 and 10.4.8 / QT 7.1.3 and 7.2, I get either a black screen or (in QuickTime video capture) garbled video. It looks like the sequence grabber isn’t properly setting the resolution, so pixels are being dumped arbitrarily from the camera … I suspect the other errors I’m seeing are also related. USB video class support is relatively new; it only hit iChat in 10.4.9 and may have reached the OS at the same time — I would know for sure, except documentation from Apple is scant.

I suspect some misbehaved QuickTime update, though I find it especially odd that it fails on multiple machines (all Intel — iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini) with different versions. I’ve tried reinstalling QT, zapping NVRAM (formerly PRAM), the lot. For once, I can’t blame QuickTime for Java, because everything else is broken, too.

Webcams working some of the time under unpredictable circumstances don’t inspire confidence. Suggestions, anyone? Any idea why this is happening? Anyone got a rock-solid solution for Mac webcams that doesn’t spontaneously cease functioning?

Incidentally, Windows isn’t much better; weird driver bugs there can cause fabulous results like an echo-cancellation driver knocking out USB MIDI devices, driver-related blue screens of death, and other goodies.

Maybe I should just start making my own cameras and writing my own drivers. Yeah, that’s it.

Jaymis is getting ready to go on tour with a rockstar, and I’m dreaming of geeky OpenGL implementations for 3D eye candy. Don’t worry; we’ll make the two worlds fit together eventually.

Here’s the latest from OpenGL land. First, perhaps the days of Java lagging in OpenGL implementation are done. The updated 1.1.0 JOGL bindings support OpenGL 2.1 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 extensions, for groovy geometry shaders and other good stuff. Let’s see, that puts Java’s OpenGL bindings well ahead of OpenGL 2.1 implementation on Mac OS X, which isn’t due until the fall. (Just a binding, but still.) And you should be able to experiment with OpenGL 2.1 and the NVIDIA extensions from within Processing.

And Vista? OpenGL runs just fine on Vista, according to the Khronos OpenGL ARB Working Group. (Hey, aren’t they the ones cloning the President’s nose? Sorry, Woody Allen reference.) It’s compatible. It benefits from Vista, somehow. And it’s competitive with XP. Of course, all of this is in theory; in practice, drivers from NVIDIA in particular seem … not so fresh, performance and stability wise, at least in my experience. I expect this situation may improve over coming months.

Enough geekiness. Simple translation: Java for OpenGL rocks! OpenGL will run well on Vista on all drivers someday.