Wish granted!

Think 3D in the browser will never catch on? Think again. The folks at Google Labs have built an incredible-looking 3D API called O3D. It does just about everything you want, and then some:

• It’s multi-platform: Mac + Windows + Linux.
• It can render to both OpenGL and DirectX render pipelines.
• You can write your own vertex and pixel shaders. You have to use O3D’s own language for doing this, but that actually enhances compatibility, as frustrated shader coders may already know. (See the FAQ)
• It’s a scene graph, so managing complex 3D scenes isn’t a chore.
• It has powerful built-in functions like viewports and pickers (plus custom pickers), so you can actually get something up and running in a reasonable time.
• It has an import workflow with COLLADA, an open standard for 3D assets (and which, incidentally, has support in Google’s own SketchUp).
• You code in JavaScript, using the powerful V8 engine (developed for Chrome).
• Gears lets you run offline.

MSAFluid for processing (Controlled by iPhone) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

We can continue to ponder how to convince Apple to let Memo’s simple but powerful-looking MSA Remote multitouch app on the App Store. But in the meantime, a resourceful developer has tried simply writing a quick app for the Safari browser. This is doubly promising to me. I love full-blown apps, and they typically allow access to some of the powerful sensor and location features of mobile devices. But that’s not to say browser apps won’t also have a place for quick prototyping, live performance, and installation. WebKit browsers are now not only on iPhone and iPod touch, but Palm Pre and Android – and, I suspect, more places soon. This could be a great outlet even for extending functionality of apps.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a quick way of using the TUIO protocol – as Memo is doing with his (App Store-rejected) app + Processing above – Andrew Turley’s app is a quick fix. I’ll be looking at mobile browser development alongside app development, I know, and I imagine all of us will keep praying for the MSA app.

TUIO Multitouch for iPhone: Browser App Hack Replaces Rejected App [Create Digital Music]

touchy feely [Pillowsopher Blog]

And yes, as this is a browser app, it should work on other platforms, too. The disadvantage of Android G1 is you’ll get only one-touch … while we wait for generally-available multitouch capabilities on Android, I imagine more specialized apps with specific platform tie-ins will be more useful.

I may have to eat my words — here’s something I didn’t imagine being possible any time soon. It’s extremely processor-intensive computer vision, happening in a video stream, all with JavaScript worker threads. That is, this is possible because the next version of Firefox, version 3.1, allows for multiple threads processing the video instead of trying to do everything in succession. HTML5 + Firefox 3.1 + some not-terribly-backwards-compatible code = basic vision. It looks like it’s pretty simple frame differencing with a threshold, then a bounding area drawn around the spot that changes.

Video: Christopher Blizzard SoCal Linux Expo Javascript Motion Tracking, by AndroidAppFactory
Mozilla demos impressive Firefox 3.1 features at SCALE [Arts Technica]

And yep, that’s Linux running on a Mac, but you probably didn’t notice that — which is the whole point.

So, that’s it. No more desktop development. JavaScript is the future, and you’ll never need another language. Everything will happen in the browser. Nothing will happen in the browser, and everything will happen in servers. Not real servers - the cloud. In fact, nothing will happen in the cloud. That cloud will just virtualize another cloud. That cloud will be owned by Google. You won’t even have a computer, you’ll just have Firefox. Nothing will happen anywhere: you’ll just sit and think about Google and Firefox. Or a cloud will think about it for you.

Hacker extraorindaire Gijs Gieskes has turned your local web browser into an insane, glitched-out audiovisual instrument. He writes:

Here is a new project, it involves using webcrawlers to make live visuals with music.
<http://gieskes.nl/browserjockey/>. works quite o.k.
The music is some of my old recordings on mini disc’s i still had.. mostly 2000 till 2003 i think, its just to show the scripts in action.
Some more description is here <http://gieskes.nl/?archive=browser-jockey>

Flickr? YouTube? Explode?

If you could actually circuit-bend web browser code, the results might look something like this. Think of it as a software short-circuit. (The famous example of that in digital art history is, of course, the Jodi collective — who need some help with their Wikipedia page, if any budding digital art historians want to give them a well-deserved lift!)

Warning: the info page actually changes its own style, automatically. I thought I had lost my mind for a second.

By the way, if you’re going to be in Portugal in May, I’m luck enough to be part of a panel at the incredible OFFF festival of “post-digital creation.” The panel has an odd, odd name, but a nice lineup (think heterodox?):

There’s a new guy in town…The Nerdferences Panel at OFFF 2009!
OFFF 2009 will host for the first time the panel “Nerdferences”, where we’ll focus on D.I.Y. technologies and other hetedorox approaches to the media.

Concepts such as open software and hardware, circuitbending, control surfaces, hacks and cracks will be our guidelines.

For the moment, we can announce that brilliant guys like Eric Wilhelm, Peter Kirn or Gijs Gieskes (www.gieskes.nl) will be there to help us getting our nerdism out. And some more to come…stay tunned! This panel is curated and presented by our collegue Julià Carboneras.

Online remix contests are all the rage these days. User-generated content is becoming this decade’s latest annoying buzzword. But visualist engineer Marco Hinic took a different approach. He didn’t create one video remix. He created an app that can create endless video remixes. Nine Inch Nails Ghosts, meet random visual mash-ups from Creative Commons-licensed online videos. Marco describes the effort:

A few days ago I released the web site ghostss.com; it’s my entry to the NIN Ghosts Film Festival.

It’s an online video remixing application. It builds playlists describing a mix of videos with effects and renders them as an .flv Flash Video file. All the content is on the web site — around 1 gig of video loops and a few mp3’s from NIN music.

In accordance to NIN music, all Videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

The web site is a mix of c++, php and javascript for the client side. Basically the client builds a playlist with video references and effects, the playlist is translated into an xml request that is sent to the web site. The video mixer on the web site render the request into an flv or mp4 file that is then played to the client.

Yep, you read that right: it’s a website coded in C++.