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:
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.
Blender, the free and open source 3D modeling tool that’s also a real-time game engine, promises real-time visual performance possibilities, and is even a video editing tool, continues its march toward the long-promised, insanely powerful 2.5 milestone. (”Point five” doesn’t really begin to cover it.)
2.49 is now stable. And boy does it have a heck of a lot going on. There’s nodal texture editing, multiple streams of video playback in the Game Engine (making this especially appealing to visualists), 3D painting, real-time dome rendering in case you’ve got a planetarium gig, faster Game Engine performance, Bullet physics improvements for lots of physics-y goodness, real-time shape modification, and better game logic and Python control and included Python script extensions. And that’s just the start.
Basically, Blender has become a full-blown, real-time OpenGL video and graphics powerhouse inside an existing modeling tool. I’m still intrigued by dedicated game engines, but this means your modeling workflow and real-time workflow are one and the same.
And it’s capable, as a result, of some stunning visuals. The video above is from Martin Supitis, who describes it thusly on YouTube:
Few weeks of exploring the magic world of GLSL coding and few days of getting it all in this demo. Here is the result.
The thread in BlenderArtists forums that also contains download links and updates - here: blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php? t=152343
Made for company Twilight 22 where i take part of creating adventure action game Fire Wire District 22 as concept artist, modeler, now also learning graphic coding.
here is seen final composite of GLSL scene + SSAO, Depth of Field, Light Scattering and Chromatic Aberration filters, captured 30fps in 1680X1050 resolution; 8xAnisotropic filtering and 16xQ Antialiasing.
For live visuals, of course, modeling tools do way more than we might actually want or need. But if you can dive into Blender and find a way to simplify the work to the point you might like for a visual performance, I think it could be an immensely powerful tool.
And then there’s hardware control. Marco Rapino aka Akta has been controlling Blender with the accelerometer in his Nokia N95 phone, as in the video seen here. (Oh yes, I do need to port this to Android, especially as I already have the sensors working.)
Of course, I’d like to see standardized OpenSoundControl for this sort of application. (Accordingly, OSC may soon lose the “Sound” officially in its title, given its more generalized purpose. Open Systems Control, perhaps? Open Stuff Control? Open Smurf Control?)
There’s been at least one paper on the topic of combining Blender with Pd for sound (”Blendnik”): http://porcaro.org/blendnik.html
I’m not sure of the preferred way to implement OSC inside Python inside Blender, but I’ll have to give this a try myself.
A huge thanks to Giorgio Martini aka Tweaking Knobs for these links. Giorgio is working on his own live project. Here’s a glimpse of what that looks like, in progress:
Memo’s ongoing quest to get his application MSARemote on the iTunes App Store has hit what is hopefully its last rejection today, this time because one of the screens “infringes an Apple trademark image.”
This is a reasonablywelldocumented failure mode, so hopefully this is the final invisible, electrified hurdle they expect Memo to sense and clear before MSA Remote is made available.
In the meantime, Memo has published a new video displaying the app controlling VDMX [on CDMo] and Ableton Live [on CDMo, on CDMu], and showcasing its velocity sensitive keyboard.
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:
Fractal-generating software was once all the rage. But fractal geometry is as compelling and organic as ever. And newly-released Fractice software is not only free, but has some unique features that make it worth a look – particularly real-time control for live visuals – and that bring fractal software into the year 2009:
Anti-aliasing
Deep zoom (a natural feature for fractals)
Multicore and distributed processing
Movie recording
Live visual controls: mixing, mirroring, origin motion, palette tweening, dual-monitor support, and MIDI
Where this gets even more interesting is that our friend Jeff Mission, maker of the generative, Wiimote-controllable software WiiWhorld, has written scripts allowing you to control Fractice with gestures on your Nintendo Wii remote. The video at top shows what happens when you blend Fractice as a background layer with Jeff’s own generative creations in WiiWhorld.
Jeff writes:
We’ve had a lot of fun working on this over the past several months, and putting it through its paces at some local events. Like Chris’ other software, it’s open-source and free to all.
I’d still like to see people push fractals in different aesthetic directions, but I find this fascinating, nonetheless. Curious to see what folks do with it.
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