Mrmr is a wonderful tool for turning your Apple mobile device into a multi-touch controller for performance and controlling visuals and music. It allows custom control layouts, it’s beautifully geared to things you can do with your fingertips, and it’s fully open source. As is often the case on this site, we have two messages. One is about a specific technology to play with, the other about the broader possibilities of digital work.

The specific: Our friend Eric Redlinger has ported his Mrmr open-source OpenSoundControl multi-touch controller app to the 2.x firmware for iPhone and iPod touch. We’ve got screenshots, as seen above or via our Flickr stream, and Eric is looking for beta testers from the CDM community. (More on that in a second.)

The deeper issue: Beyond just Apple’s device, there’s a new opportunity to make controllers standard, open, and self-configuring. Why would you want to do that? Eric explains the vision:

Controlling your multimedia performance or installation with a handheld touchscreen device is cool, but what do you do when your friends want to spontaneously participate using their devices? Typically a long tutorial follows in which you explain what OSC and MIDI are and how they need to find and install a special app, then configure the server and port settings, etc. And, oh yeah, you’ll need their device’s IP number…etc.

Now imagine that conversation being like this: Go to the appstore on your phone right now and download this app. Launch the app. Play.

That’s Mrmr (pronounced murmur), and it exists already for the Mac and for the iPhone/iPod, with clients for other devices to come. Although it is not yet on the appstore, you can beta test it today. Ed.: Damn. I still want to pronounce it “mister mister.” -PK

Mrmr consists of a couple of protocols to specify the type and screen location of interface control ‘widgets’, and specifies a way to send the resulting key presses, slider values etc. back to the VJ/DJ app of your choice. It uses standard OSC for its messaging protocol so it works with any existing app that supports Open Sound Control support.

What this means for you is that you can design a custom interface for your Max/MSP/Jitter / Pure Data / Quartz Composer / etc. environment and push that interface onto your phone, and onto others’ phones, providing a great new way to add multi-user, collaborative elements to your set!

And, of course, this ultimately has implications not just for the multitouch Apple mobiles but future multitouch technology, too.

Project page / wiki: http://poly.share.dj/projects/#mrmr

How to get involved in the beta: Eric is definitely looking for testers. now has the testers he needs! Stay tuned!

You’ll need to email your device ID of your tester iPod touch or iPhone running the 2.x firmware. There are two ways to go about that. Here’s a set of instructions for how to find the ID:

Providing Your iPhone Device ID to a Developer

If you use that approach, be sure to put “mrmr beta” in the subject header.

Even better, Erica Sadun has built an app for the job.

Ad Hoc Helper [iTunes Link]

Download it, run it, and it automatically sends off an email with the ID with the subject line already filled in.

Either way, address your emails to eric (at) share [dot] dj with the ID — and let us know how it goes. We hope to have more support materials up on using mrmr very soon, so stay tuned.

Updated: Eric’s testing list is full! But while the beta testers and Eric work on making the app stable in preparation for release, do stay tuned — we’ll have quite a lot more on OSC and how to use it soon, and will keep you posted on official mrmr for firmware 2.0 availability!

If you still want mrmr right now, it’s available on jailbroken 2.0 firmware via Cydia.

iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Speaking of iPhones, here’s some really brilliant work by David O’Reilly. You may have seen it already, as it looks like it’s made the rounds, but I love the technique. By doing anamorphic perspective warping of the 3D scene on the device, this app simulates a holographic 3D on the screen of the iPhone, courtesy the device’s motion sensors. Correction: Okay, it’s not actually possible to do this on the iPhone. So why not build your own hardware for the job? Rotation sensors should be possible with the proper gyro-sensor. That makes all of this even less about the iPhone, and more about what is possible with augmented reality and mobile devices. (It looks absolutely possible — and suggests still other ideas. Thanks, visceralX, for the correction.)

It’s a fairly simple gimmick here, but it suggests some of the possibility of making art not just for big screens, but small screens, too, turning a “weakness” into a strength. Way back when CD-ROMs were in vogue, I remember hearing composer Morton Subotnik talk about how multimedia for computers was a new kind of chamber music performance. He saw the shift to smaller screens not as damaging large-scale performance spectacle, but making the work more “intimate.” I wonder if motion graphics and even live visuals might be able to do the same.

One possibility: invite three or four of your closest friends to your next gig. Gather them round a little screen, uncork some wine, and enjoy real appreciation instead of a massive club full of people.

We’ve seen fantastic ways of using the iPod touch and iPhone as controllers, but all require the jailbroken device. Once you up to 2.0 firmware, they cease to work — even if you jailbreak your 2.0 firmware. I’m hopeful that those apps will catch up, hopefully via a mixture of the jailbroken, open-source toolchain and the official Apple SDK. But in the meantime, a very lovely OSC app has shown up on the official App Store. OSCemote (US$4.99) and its free, drum pad-only counterpart OSCemote Light each give you basic multi-touch controls for use with OSC. That should make them ideal for, say, whipping up an impromptu controller for Processing (site | CDM tag). In fact, I may give this a go and start dropping it into my Processing template, so on the fly I can mess with parameters while coding. See also: vvvv, VDMX, and many others for more OSC control.

iTunes links:
OSCemote
OSCemote Light

Via our latest iRoundup over at CDMusic:
iPhone/Touch Roundup: BtBx Acid Bass, iDrum Workflow and Babies, OpenSoundControl App

More on this soon! If anyone gives it a try and does something interesting, do let us know. And you can be sure we’ll have more details on the status of other apps like aka.iphone, mrmr, and i3L soon.

We’ve seen terrific iPhone / iPod Touch apps for MIDI and OpenSoundControl, including Mrmr running VJ apps, i3L outputing to MIDI, and free, cross-platform Pd tools. With these, you can run visual, music, and other apps. But the latest addition is a very polished-looking app dedicated entirely to DMX, the protocol of choice for automated lighting and certain motorized projectors we love so much.

Luminar is a DMX lighting control app for iPhone and Touch, running control data for DMX rigs over wifi. There’s a touch-enabled mixer, precise, per-channel control, and color manipulation with a Color Changer channel layout. It’s definitely geared for lights in a way that general-purpose control software is not. I feel slightly icky talking about “lights” on this site. (Hey, aren’t those the things that blow out our projections?) But on the other hand, this kind of control and better software is just the kind of tool that can help give us better control over live rigs – and it’ll certainly work for DMX-controlled visuals, too, or (if you’re lucky enough to be doing this) synced projected visuals and lights, not to mention the kind of lights we very much enjoy (like LED arrays).