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.

Multi-touch for visualists? It’s coming, and it may have nothing to do with names like Apple or Microsoft. But while many projects now are experimental and pricey, your hands do seem to be close to being liberated from the mouse and keyboard alone.

No word on pricing and no real availability information, but the concept is very cool and the demos look fantastic: it’s the MultiTouch Cell, a plug-and-play, stackable, modular box with multi-touch input capabilities. The idea is to grab one, or two, or twenty of these ready-to-use boxes, running PCs with your choice of OS, and go to town with gesturally-controlled on-screen visuals. On paper (or screens, that is), it looks terrific; the creators say the unit is:

• Available in 32″, 46″ sizes with full HD or HD-ready resolution

• High resolution LCDs: full HD or HD-ready
• Several Cells can be combined into one display
• Scratch-resistant glass
• Self-calibrating, built-in diagnostics, and 50,000+-hour expected life
• Connect the display to Mac, Windows, Linux computers, running their proprietary CornerStone tracking and rendering screen “based on industry-standard libraries and protocols”

Now, naturally, there are more questions than answers here — not only about pricing and availability, but the software specifically and how it can be extended. But there’s no question this sort of thing is the future — which raises plenty of questions about why Microsoft isn’t being more aggressive with their Surface, as they could presumably do just this and make it cheaper and easy for developers.

multitouch.fi (Project Page)

More Multi-Touch Goodness

While we’re at it, here are a couple of related multi-touch projects I’ve seen lately — each, perhaps, more practical for the readers of this site than the proposed Cell project above:

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.

Apple’s iPhone — and the significantly more affordable, doesn’t-have-to-be-a-phone iPod Touch — are essentially pocket-sized, intelligent multi-touch controllers. Hooking them up to visual software as controllers simply requires some app on the phone to transmit data, and some way of dealing with that data on the computer side. We’ve already seen this a bit on Create Digital Motion, and we’ve been covering some of the specifics of parsing data with Pd (Pure Data), the open-source, tri-platform patching software, on Create Digital Music this week.

Here’s the basic setup:

On Your iPod/iPhone

You have two options of software to use on your iThing. (You’ll need to “jailbreak” your device, as these are not — and may never be, for all I know — approved Apple apps.)

1. mrmr by Eric Redlinger of Brooklyn (top right):  open-source, editable control screens (requires Mac-only software to edit). See our interview with Eric, including some examples with Quartz Composer.

2. akaRemote.app by Masayuki Akamatsu of Japan: not open-source, not editable, but comes with a set of useful control templates, and you can transmit data to the app. See our look at a recent release. Upcoming Mac-only visualist app 3L has its own special akaRemote-based bridge called i3L, which also runs on iPhone/iPod Touch; see our look at i3L with artificial eyes.

On Your Computer

While the iPhone and iPod Touch have Apple logos on them, all of these apps send OpenSoundControl data. That means any OSC-compatible software will work, which is gradually including more visual software, as well as modular apps like Quartz Composer, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, and vvvv. (I love saying that last one … vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv. Okay, moving on.)

Of all of these, Pd is the one solution that’s free, open source, and runs on any platform. That means it’s also a viable candidate for translating incoming OSC data to more broadly-compatible MIDI. (i3L has you covered, as it uses a MIDI bridge.)

We have not one but two sets of tutorials / example patches for working with Pd on Create Digital Music, using a patch like Cesare’s, pictured above:

Control Music and Visuals with iPhone/iPod, Free Via Pd

Tutorial: More iPhone/iPod Touch Control With Open-Source Pure Data

So, Is It Worth It?

I usually don’t ask that question, preferring instead to report on what other folks are doing. But it is always worth asking yourself — and it is an entirely personal question. I’m not totally convinced in the case of these devices that I’d want to buy one solely for VJing, but then, what makes this so cool is that it adds on additional functionality to a device. (Too bad Apple is being so uptight about third-party development, but at least there’s an SDK — and plenty of hackers ready to break Apple’s rules.)

My own preference remains squarely with tangible controllers and tactile feedback, especially as some of the advantages of multi-touch are diminished by the iPod/iPhone’s diminutive size. But I absolutely see the argument for using these. What do you think, dear readers?

Mobile, touch control of visual apps? We’ve seen one way to do it; here’s an even more compatible MIDI approach. I think I’d stick to the iPod Touch, personally, just to conserve battery on a phone. But it’s interesting. -PK

Hot on the heels of Mrmr, ArtificialEyes (the Istanbul-based VJ collective) have released i3L MIDI Bridge for the iPhone, which builds on Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.remote.app, giving those without Max/MSP skills a simple way to bridge their iPhone and audio/video performance software of choice.

i3L (pronounced “i thrill”) is Freeware, and was developed using Max/MSP from Cycling74 and is a support application for aka.remote by Masayuki Akamatsu i3L receives pre-defined UDP messages from aka.remote.app running on the iPhone, scales the values to MIDI, and allows you to configure the sending MIDI channel and control change message number. While this software was developed to work seamlessly with our Real-time 3D VJ software Thrill, you can use this program with any audio or video software which receives midi messages.

If you give i3L a try, let us know how it works out for you in the comments.

artificialeyes.tv
aka.objects by Masayuki Akamatsu — must-have stuff for Max/MSP/Jitter!

Ed.: Does anyone know if multi-touch gestures would be possible in DIY apps? Maybe in February when Apple shares the official SDK? -PK

Click to play

Mrmr is an open protocol for mobile devices. It is used to dynamically create user interfaces on your iPod Touch or iPhone which respond to client apps in a multi-user performance environment.

Okay, that sounds awfully dry. Let’s try that again.

Mrmr lets you control Quartz Composer applications (or really , any compatible OSC implementation)over Wi-Fi from your iPod Touch or iPhone. Now you, too, can dance around like a lunatic while still controlling your visuals from the dance floor. Did we mention it’s multi-user, as well?

Mrmr is the brainchild of Eric Redlinger, researcher-in-residence at Brooklyn Polytechnic University’s Integrated Digital Media Program. He has leveraged the iPhone’s OS X underbelly and 10.5’s new Quartz Composer features to allow this sort of functionality.

I had the lucky* chance to interview Eric and ask him a few questions about Mrmr and the iPhone. Apologies for the quality of the interview, it was very spur of the moment.

Mrmr is a work in progress, but I think the results so far speak for themselves.

*(ok, no so lucky, my desk is right next to his, but somehow I had not seen Mrmr in action until just recently…)

Most of the emphasis on working with multi-touch and alternative controllers has been on our sister site, Create Digital Music. But in a way, visuals are even more demanding of new hardware. After all, musicians have all kinds of hardware that work perfectly for performance (keyboards, knobs, drums, violins, sousaphones, kazoos, and whatnot). But new visual performance media demand something different if they’re to evolve.

Oh yeah, that, and most pro visual apps are kind of a b**** to use with a mouse and aren’t all that much better with a tablet. (Unless you’re somehow discovered the secret and find a Wacom as easy to use as a ballpoint. Please, tell me how.)

That makes this tidbit all the more interesting:

Jazzmutant is proud to have been selected by the Siggraph Emerging Technologies Committee in San Diego to demo a new prototype device for digital imaging involving multi-touch control. This solution will go beyond mere finger-drawing and clearly illustrate a new way to interact and improve productivity with drawing and video editing software. Furthermore, the solution presented will be the very first multi-touch enabled Tablet PC shown to the public.

JazzMutant news

What’s that now? Visual editing on a multi-touch surface? JazzMutant is best known for the creation of the Lemur multi-touch hardware. It wasn’t specifically intended for music, but that’s where it got most attention; you can, incidentally, route its native OSC control to Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pd/GEM, Flash, and so on. But it was pricey (US$2500), and while you could design your own interfaces for it, it wasn’t quite the same as having a computer.

Now we get a one-two punch of tantalizing possibilities: a controller specific to visuals, whatever that may mean, and the possibility of using an actual computer with multi-touch input. I’d love to have that with some of what I’m building with Processing these days for performance. I’m a little more skeptical on the visual hardware side, only because so far that has tended to mean a selection of templates for Lemur-like hardware. But either way, this is promising — we’ll be watching the news out of SIGGRAPH very closely indeed.

Yes. You can now VJ from your iPhone, controlling your Max/MSP/Jitter patch via Safari and the new aka.iphone object from Masayuki Akamatsu of aka.wiiremote fame.

The aka.iphone object is a work in progress, but stay tuned, there’s much fun to be had. Can anyone say “pocket Lemur”?

It’s remarkable what a difference accurate multi-touch can make for interface design, especially when the surface is scaled relative to the human body (sorry, iPhone). Jeff Han’s work, widely spread around the blogosphere, is significant because his team has really rethought the whole interface. Gestures for moving things around in 3D space just make perfect sense. The only bad news is that large-scale back-projected screens take up space, and make possible a number of implementation details that wouldn’t work (for the time being) on smaller displays. The good news is, this kind of work could soon be finding its way into performances. Right now, live visualists still focus on the DJ mixer as their primary performance metaphor — a surprisingly deep resource, to be sure, but likely only scratching the surface of what could be possible.

Via Mac Rumors

Half of you readers right now I think are at NYU, so, ahem, feel free to fill us in. (Or join in a chorus of “Our Dear Old NYU”, if you like. Darnit, CUNY needs a song.)