When it comes to controlling software, let’s put it bluntly: OSC good, MIDI bad. With OSC, it’s possible to control the array of things software might do, with easy use of high-resolution data, descriptive names in plain English (or your language of choice), a path hierarchy that makes it easier to structure messages in modular software, and smart networking features that makes assignment and communication a breeze. With MIDI, um… well, prepare for lots of mucking around.

Happily, visual software developers proprietary and open source alike have done what music developers generally haven’t - embrace OSC. Thanks to the fact that this community is unburdened by tradition and commercial development tends to involve small, responsive teams, change hasn’t been so tough.

So, visualists, it’s time to reap the fruit of that development work, and make the live performance rig work the way you’ve always dreamt it should work. Our friend Gian Pablo (check out his fantastic blog) clues us in to some recent developments with Resolume 3 “Avenue.”

Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo.

Media artists and design houses around the world: you’ve got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, and elephants.

Just how comfortable are these kids with technology? Comfortable enough that a robotic, killer elephant with glowing eyes is “cute.”

Give them a couple of decades, and I think they’ll invent Cylons. I can’t wait.

Thanks to Kyle McDonald and Memo Akten for sending this my way. As Kyle puts it:

Metaphor: "Could you put it in it’s head like a brain?"
The joy of interactive art: "Ah, that’s so cool!"
The joy of conceptual art: "I love diagrams!"
Hacking consumer devices: "We could just attach it to a remote control car."
Developing scripts: "When sensor is deactivated by…"
The frustration of similarity: "My idea was to do a walking dog!"
There is so much here. This is like the entire media art scene rolled into one six-minute video.

Brilliant.

Now I have to sing “I believe that children are our future…”

More information: Seaweed Studio Workshop

They add in that blog post:

It was interesting to see the contrast between the two groups - the younger ones appear to me more cautious to stay within boundaries of what they have previously seen as they worry about many things being ‘impossible’, which for me was quite unexpected. They had less patience with trying to learn the technological parts, although had a good idea of how the flow of action should be for their ideas. Given a slower teaching pace and a more graphical interface, I believe they would have gained much more control over what was happening.

The Arduino isn’t quite an deal choice for a live generative visual computer – but it can do some gorgeous things with signals. Sebastian Tomczak has a gorgeous hack (as seen via Limor Fried) that manipulates RGB data lines with the Arduino. You connect horizontal and vertical sync signals, then go to town. The Arduino in this case just converts the signal to digital and uses the lower 8 bits of the 10-bit data – a real Swiss Army Knife-style job for the microcontroller.

I’m curious looking at this, though – what other sorts of microcontroller projects might be possible? (Not limiting to the Arduino, either.)

How to: Use Arduino to Generate Glitchy Audio VGA Visuals [Little-Scale]

If you’re unimpressed and want to just stick to software, Anton keeps pumping out updates to his v002 Glitch plug-in pack, which emulates all manner of visual glitches – including, soon, his new optical flow implementation, adapted from Andrew Benson.

Updated: Downloads now available:

Glitch
Flow

Projector-type 3D scanning seems very functional, but I would expect it to lose accuracy as the object size decreases. So for scanning small objects (such as Lego), Lego genius Philippe Hurbain has come up with a scanner made of lego.

Philippe’s instructions also includes (under “3D reconstruction”) a technique for creating a “complete” 3D model out of several combined scans, using open source 3D software MeshLab.

More information (and via) Dansdata

What if virtual reality and seamless three-dimensional interfaces arrived, and they turned out to be a lot simpler technologically than you imagined? Well, perhaps you know a technology is within reach when it can not only be implemented, but implemented in a way that’s elegant and lightweight.

The latest in the ongoing YouTube-able head-tracking and 3D-manipulation videos is this creation by Timo Fleisch at the Center of Technology and Art Berlin. He has lots of resources on XNA programming, as well; thanks to a C# library, XNA and Wii mix nicely on the PC. (Less so on the Xbox 360 for obvious reasons, but XNA makes a lovely development framework for 3D on the PC, not just the console.)

http://www.vrhome.de/ [link is incorrect on the YouTube page]

The idea is pretty easy to grasp:

• 2 Wii remotes, basically acting as simple near-infrared-spectrum tracking cameras (which means, in fact, you could substitute something else if you really wanted)
• Head tracking, via emitters on glasses, as first widely popularized in a Wii video by Carnegie Mellon’s Johnny Lee
• Polarized 3D glasses, for 3D perception (and Coraline fans, natch)
• A 4-LED “LED Beacon” which allows three-dimensional manipulation of objects on the screen.

As a performance or interaction interface, I actually find the head tracking to be a bit awkward, especially as you’re still looking at a flat screen. But I love the manipulation via the “beacon.” I think there’s a lot that can be done to make manipulation of 3D spaces and objects more intuitive and more gestural - and naturally, that could lead to some lovely 3D performance tools, too (not to mention making modeling 3D objects less of a pain).

Stay tuned, same VR time, same VR channel.

Found via Veronica Pejril on Twitter.