When Apple released the free visual synthesizer tool Quartz Composer as part of Mac OS X 10.4, they hoped developers would take it up and create gorgeous eye candy. Keith Lang, part of the plasq team that created hit Mac software like Comic Life, has done just that with a new set of screensavers and visualizers for plasq’s audio software Rax. The lessons he learned in QC could be useful to anyone using the software, whether you’re a developer or building a live art installation or VJ set. -PK

We here at plasq recently released ’sqreensavers’ - a set of 10 screensavers based on the visualizers in our Rax 2.0 Audio Unit Host. I’m proud to say that in the short period since release the set has been downloaded over 20,000 times.

sqreensavers @ plasq.com
Rax audio app @ Create Digital Music

The good people at CDM asked me, as the Quartz Composer guy behind these, to share my experiences in working with QC.

Quartz Composer is an amazing bit of (now) Apple technology - it allows some really complex and artistic results from only a reasonable amount of effort. It’s free, and it’s also supported really well on the Mac platform - any machine running 10.4 can open a Quartz Composition within QuickTime. Finder also previews Quartz Compositions, and it’s also a breeze to incorporate into applications. There’s no support for it on the Windows platform.

QC, (as I’ll abbreviate it) is an application where you can connect many modules together to create a real time visual output, which can be exported as a QuickTime Movie, turned into a screensaver,
integrated into applications, or shared with mac users. Lots more info is on the net.

My personal experiences:

I don’t think they’ve done it just to spite Peter and CDMu readers, but not 3 days after the “is it vapourware” conversation, Thinkgeek have unboxed the first step towards Optimus.

It’s still not yet shipping, nor OSX or Linux compatible, and not really in the realm of truly useful gear ($169? How about a whole second or third 17″ monitor?), but it’s exciting news nevertheless. This device isn’t anywhere near the interaction leap of the multitouch demos we’ve been seeing, or even that daft “desktop metaphor enriching” thing, but it’s still extremely exciting that one of these thought experiments is actually becoming a reality.

There’s the obvious advantage for VJs: Triggering clips by hitting the key which displays the corresponding thumbnail, ditto for filters and transition modes, all with a stage-friendly backlit interface? Sign me up! Of course, if you want more than 3 buttons it would probably be cheaper and more functional to just get an LCD touchscreen for now, but for me this product is just as important for what it symbolises. This is the first step to those vapourware devices becoming real, and when every surface is covered with tiny displays, everyone is going to need some compelling visual content to cover those surfaces.

My fellow visualists, our time approaches. Don’t let someone else make the big money selling Matrix screensavers for all those Optimuses– Optimou– Optimii– things.

We’re long past the days when we believed running screen savers would stop phospher burn-in (though there are days when I miss After Dark). Now we can run screen savers that imagine, through genetic algorithms, our computers “dreaming of electric sheep.”

Electric Sheep is software that produces evolving paintings that can be synthesized by distributed networks of computers. It’s available as a free screen saver for Mac and Windows:

Electric Sheep

The animations are pretty abstract, but (apparently using a lot of imagination), users refer to them as “sheep.” Just be careful, because apparently you can become overly attached to those animations, like this person did:

can anyone help me??????, I fell in love with this sheep and now it is dead. I just got electric sheep and I did not know that my computer would delete my sheeps so fast….If anyone still has sheep 8915 or any of it’s relations…PLEASE tell me. I would be so pleased to see this sheep again…

Okay, a little odd. Anyway, here on Create Digital Motion when we’re not running oldskool vector graphics, we’re what you would call Whores for High Resolution. (I’ll explain later how I wound up running a SketchUp rendering for 18 hours earlier this week.) So, naturally, I’m pleased to learn there will be a higher-resolution version of the project at SIGGRAPH in the gallery:

Dreams in High Fidelity, via spot blog, the creator’s site

There are some stunningly-organic looking images; the added resolution on this custom hardware setup really does make a difference. If you make it to Boston, stop by and say hi to the creator, and try to steal secrets at a panel on simulation, evolution, and distributed systems.

Images courtesy the Dreams in High Fidelity site.