I’ve been blogging effectively every day for nearly five years, so it’s hard to avoid novelty - that’s kind of what we publish. The question is, is it the novelty that’s important, or do you see these as little steps toward something greater that hasn’t happened yet? I tend to favor the latter.

Here’s the question: can augmented reality - using computer vision tools to mix computer graphics with stuff in the real world - become a real medium and not just a gimmick?

If it works in a game, you begin to think there’s really something to an interactive design. I’m not certain yet about the upcoming PSP game from giant Sony. Georgia Tech researchers, on the other hand, are coming up with stuff I really want to play.

Oh, yeah - and it makes me crave some Skittles. (Product integration, anyone?)

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.

Blender 2.49

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.)

N95 acceleremoter in Blender from aktathelegend on Vimeo.

Full details:
N95 accelerometer with Blender [ Akta's Way Blog, via BlenderNation ]

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:

Untitled from TweakingKnobs on Vimeo.

You can go grab Blender for basically any operating system you can imagine.

Philia 01 Support Video from Lia on Vimeo.

Artist Lia has created her first piece of art for the iPhone and iPod touch, something called PhiLia 01. It’s a quirky, gorgeous generative sound and visual app activated by movement, one that encourages users to save their own artwork.

http://www.iphoneart.org/philia01

On the iTunes Store

Composer Morton Subotnik used to talk really eloquently back in the days of multimedia CD-ROMs and The Voyager Company about computers as “chamber music” environments. Instead of seeing the personal scale of technology as an impediment, he viewed it as something intimate and wonderful. So it’s fantastic to see artists engage mobile platforms as a way to have that relationship with a participant.

There’s now also a page up that is beginning to collect some of these particular artworks, focusing on generative-style interactive creations, and featuring work by our friend Memo Akten. Joshua Davis’ kaleidoscopic artmaking tool Reflect, which he showed for the first time at OFFF earlier this month in Lisbon, is enroute.

http://www.iphoneart.org/

Open Source iPhone Art

The way in which these tools are being created is interesting, too. PhiLia is built in OpenFrameworks, the open source C++-based development tool made friendlier for artists with integrated toolsets, a community of friendly creative folk, and simplified, speedy syntax similar to Processing. OpenFrameworks, thanks to its open source nature, has made its way onto the iPhone.

Part of what this demonstrates is that, while the iPhone itself is proprietary, some of the power of open source can still triumph. And, indeed, by basing work on this open source foundation, these same artists aren’t imprisoned by a single platform. PhiLia could be a desktop app, or on other mobile platforms once they support OpenFrameworks.

And, yes, it means I’m aching that much harder to get OpenFrameworks and/or Processing onto Android – it should be possible. (Java on Android is not identical to Java on desktop, so it can’t be a direct port – you can’t just install Processing on Android – but it is possible.) There are also still some wrinkles in the App Store approval process; it really is refreshing on Android (and presumably things like Palm WebOS) not to have those restrictions.

Then again, that’s the whole point: OS and specific platform shouldn’t have to matter, and open source software – and artwork – can be just as brilliant on a proprietary platform as an open one.

Ready to try this yourself?

Developing for iPhone using openFrameworks and ofxiPhone [memo.tv]

Using openFrameworks for iPhone dev [Rober Carlsen]

On the OpenFrameworks Wiki

You can thank Lee Byron, Memo Akten, Damian Stewart, Zach Gage, and the core OF team (Zach, Theo, and Arturo). The “power of open source” is not some sort of magical whirlwind that surrounds code and makes things appear spontaneously – it’s blood, sweat, and tears (unpaid!) by real people. Although, if you get those real people together in a room and do some sort of battle shout or Care Bear Stare (sorry, I’m an 80s kid), it might help psych you up.

Trackmate :: 5 ways to get started from adam kumpf on Vimeo.

The mouse is not all that interesting as an invention. When people first saw mice, in fact, they typically weren’t terribly impressed, and often simply went back to their preferred non-keyboard input, the joystick. But destroy the novelty of the mouse, give it to half the population of the world and wait a couple of decades, and fantastic things start to happen.

See also: the knob, which is basically a simple hack for changing resistance in a circuit.

So, what could happen if we take novel interfaces now and try to accelerate what you do with them? That’s what’s starting to take place with tangible, multi-touch, and augmented interfaces, with the help of shared code tools (OpenFrameworks, Processing, ActionScript), shared libraries and trackers (ReacTIVision, the TUIO protocol, and LusidOSC/Trackmate), and communities like the fantastic NUI Group.

But enough about reading about this stuff and/or working alone. We’re going to try a new experiment in which we get lots of folks building this stuff – experienced users, relatively inexperienced users, your friends – and getting as quickly as possible into the business of actually trying apps, especially for the visual and musical performance stuff that we love.

Now, you may not have folks near you who are comfortable with code or have any idea what the heck we’re talking about. But readers of CDM and fellow hackers will join up on the Internet leading up to and around June 6. We’ve got a nice, fast Internet connection in New York, and we’re setting up some tools to help us share video streams, code we create, and to allow informal text chat.

Here’s how to get involved and join us.

Head to http://hackday.noisepages.com/ for all the details. (If you’re interested in experimenting with in-development noisepages blogs and networking features as you make stuff, you may – ahem – find that registration is open.)

lights on from thesystemis on Vimeo.

Digital visuals are often confined to a screen or a panel of wall. So there’s something magical about projects that get an entire building as a canvas. “Lights” is a live audiovisual performance for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria. The facade has some 1085 LED windows, controllable in real-time. The performance involved coordinating these windows with broadcast music.

The work was put together, stunningly, in just three days. OpenFrameworks, the artist-focused, C++-based code framework for “creative coding”, became a critical part of the process, assembling all of the real-time visuals. Zach Lieberman, co-developer of OF, also worked on the project and describes its ingredients and team:

this project was made as a collaboration between 4 different folks,
including daito manabe (musician & hacker), damian stewart (artist and
one of the creators of rjdj), joel gethin lewis (formerly with united
visual artists, where he worked on projects like massive attack’s LED
show) and myself (developer of openframeworks).
–> (daito) [daito.ws]
–> (joel) [http://www.joelgethinlewis.com/]
–> (damian) [http://frey.co.nz/]

we did alot of stuff with software that might be interesting for your readers — the tools involved (abelton, max, pd, openframeworks, dmx) and the challenges of a display like that, etc….

Breakdown of the tools:

• OpenSoundControl (OSC) for connecting audio and visual elements (and as Zach and I discussed privately in an email, it’s really the power of being able to relate different media, physical, aural, and visual, that defines the project more than any one tool)
• Max/MSP and Ableton Live for the audio score
• Pd (Pure Data), Max’s open-source cousin, for recording audio and OSC control signals

Zach notes “what I liked about it was how eye opening it was to feel that you can use each tool for what it’s good for.”