3L has been in the wild for 2 weeks now, so I’m expecting to see some work from new users appearing online soon.

Since launch the artificialeyes crew have kept themselves busy. ExiledSurfer has been posting plenty of new content, example clips and screencast tutorials. I particularly enjoy the talking head screencast recorded from within 3L, using the Apple webcam to drop a little talking head into the preview window.

3LU Sophomore: Capture an Object + Feedback from professor thrill on Vimeo.

These videos have been collected into a Thrill University section of the site. This is being supplemented with live tutorials, the first of which happens 12 hours from now (GMT1300, Thursday) on the 3LU page (which will even remind you via email when the session is about to start). I’m going to be there to increase my 3L knowledge, it would be great to see some other CDMers as well.

There’s also a 3L channel on CDMo’s favorite online video service, Vimeo. CDM makes a little appearance in the 3L channel, as I was able to finally edit the bulk of the “3L Sessions” videos we shot with Michael in Perth last year. There’s over an hour of video in the 3L Sessions album, covering the history of 3L, and an extensive tour through the interface and capabilities of the software. Through the magic of Vimeo, these are all downloadable, so you can use them to guide your first steps with Thrill.

In case you haven’t seen, Apple has made a vague public mention of Snow Leopard, the next major release of OS X. Cost: unknown. Availability: a year out, roughly. Contents: "quality" improvements. (I talk about some of the confusion Apple’s software strategy has caused over on Create Digital Music.)

Here’s the visualist tidbit: on the official announcement page, Apple mentions that a key feature will be QuickTime X. I figure this could be fantastic news — or terrible news. For now, we mostly have questions:

• Will QuickTime X be back-ported to Tiger/Leopard? Will it be on Windows? (Normally, I wouldn’t even ask, but it’s listed as a "Snow Leopard" feature)
• What does this mean: "features optimized support for modern codecs and more efficient media playback"? (Which codecs? Efficient how?)
• What will it break?
• Why is this "media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone"?

What could be good news: this may mean real multi-threading in QuickTime playback, at least on Mac OS if not (wishful thinking) on Windows, where QuickTime is a fourth-class citizen.

There are some other juicy bits, as well. For fans of the GPU, there’s a new OpenCL library for doing general-purpose computing on the GPU. (GPGPU) And hidden in the OS X Server announcement for Snow Leopard, multiple video inputs:

"Support for dual-video source capture lets users record both a presenter and a presentation screen, allowing a picture-in-picture style ideal for podcasting lectures."

I imagine we could do some damage with that beyond lecture podcasting.

Unfortunately, OS X is generally covered under NDA until it’s released. So now, we wait — and hope that QuickTime X doesn’t cause compatibility issues with our favorite VJ apps.

Despite my complaints about trying to run Processing in JavaScript in a browser, the recent port of Processing’s syntax to JavaScript has a lot of potential. Part of the underlying lesson here: platform-independence is cool. So where better to show that off than the iPhone/iPod Touch: a showpiece for Apple’s proprietary, platform-specific goodies.

German user mqwaq has ported the Processing.js port to iPhone. But it’s not the iPhone part that makes this so excellent, necessarily. Even cooler:

• SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s C implementation of JavaScript, runs underneath. That allows for greater speed, and –
• It doesn’t require a browser to run. And –
• The graphics engine is OpenGL ES, the cross-platform 3D spec for mobile/embedded devices.
• And then he tweaked the whole thing to make it still faster.

The beauty of this to me, as well, is that the results can do all sorts of wonderful stuff — but you could easily bring the results to other mobile devices, too. (Hello, Android!) I’d still like to see Java on the iPhone, but it’s just one piece of the picture: the larger picture is the ability to make art with code on any platform using free and open-source code that works really well.

And credit where it’s due: the other reason this works well is that Apple’s done such a good job of making the OS and hardware interface work. This demonstrates that having a real OS has power not only when you’re using vendor-specific frameworks from Apple, but cross-platform frameworks, too. Now, if only Apple weren’t so restrictive about what they let you run.

Via Christopher Blizzard, who found this by way of JavaScript guru John Ressig who did the JS port in the first place.

The response to our 3L Giveaway was amazingly extensive, and also very exciting to see the names and websites of so many visualists from around the world.

So we’ve collated all of those email addresses, and with a little help from some atmospheric noise we chose the winners.

Grand Prize (3L Pro License)

Hiltmeyer

Runners-up (3L Student/Education License)

.lov.
sull
Toby Dixon
Korhan Erel

Comment Winners

The comments response was so overwhelming that artificialeyes offered to award an additional 5 education licenses to commenters, chosen semi-arbitrarily by artificialeyes:

Winner for BEST THRILL PUN: vj decoy - VL ONLY 3L!
honorable mention: LordBanjo - 3L = Luminous Lantern Lust!

Winner for BEING 1337: nausea - in case i win the license i will make it run on my linux box:)
honorable mention: dmos.tv - finally generative synthesized visuals at our fingertips, why not try that with a mo-cap suit

Winner for BEST SENSE OF HUMOUR: Willy - and on the 7th day God said. “Damn, tomorrow’s Monday.”
honorable mention: J.E JIM - Lets do this. I want to put this software to work at church!

Winner for DREAMING THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: memo - another comment in the sea of comments…
honorable mention: PreyStereo - There would be only one thing I would want more than a free license to Thrill…a free license to Thrill AND a cookie. Nah, forget the cookie.

Winner for SWITCHING: vj bonk - Nice! I hope that I am picked, I have been anxiously awaiting this release for a long time, Arkaos just does not cut it anymore this seems like a step in the right direction!
honorable mention: Pao - Hi, I’m a VJ and normally using Modul8. Few days ago I managed to use this software with my ipod touch. Let’s rock!

All of the winners will receive an email with instructions directly from artificialeyes within the next 48 hours on how to register their copy of the demo version. Thanks to everyone who entered, and to those who missed out: you didn’t miss out at all, really, because the Thrill Store is now open! You can download the 3L demo and give it a spin. Congratulations to the artificialeyes team. They’ve been working their butts off, and it will be great to see what happens when 3L hits the wild.

I’m currently editing several hours of 3L footage we shot with Michael last year, so you’ll be able to have expert help when coming to terms with the software.

Enjoy, and when your 3L output starts hitting the web, please tell us about it!

Want more evidence that tradition in user interfaces has blinded us to the possibilities for making graphics fluid and intuitive? Just look at the first known GUI, Dr. Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad. His 1962 PhD thesis at MIT, Sketchpad represents a whole bundle of firsts: the first object-oriented programming project, the first use of a toolbar, the first real-time graphics system, the first drawing program, the first GUI, the first use of instances, the first use of draggable vector graphics … and yet, that’s not what’s impressive about this. What’s really impressive is that the work of this one man still holds up in 2008, and not all of what he does here has been fully answered by modern UIs. (Sometimes the past turns out to be more futuristic than the present, perhaps because people doing modern development work don’t know enough of their history.)

The video here is introduced by Xerox PARC’s Dr. Alan Kay, who was later an Apple Fellow (among other things), and made his own contributions to UI history.

This is doubly interesting to me, because the simplicity of this kind of project makes it ideal for people writing their own interfaces into tools like Processing. And notice how nice it is having a persistent physical interface — something that might not be practical for Adobe, but could be perfectly practical for a DIY electronics builder and live visual performer. You can read his full thesis, and for more UI history with Alan Kay, there’s a full 1987 documentary that traces this and many other developments (including the mouse) on the Internet Archive.

Ivan Sutherland celebrated his 70th birthday last week, as described by Java creator James Gosling:
Happy Birthday, Ivan! [James Gosling: on the Java Road]

Gosling points out that even more interesting than this interface is what Ivan has to say about technology and courage. It’s well worth reading if you’re embarking on a research project of your own.

We’ve been avidly following the development of Thrill for quite a while now, and are very excited to hear from Michael that the commercial release is this week. But first, a little housekeeping: As a grand opening for the 3L store, CreateDigitalMotion has 5 copies of the software to give away! Much like the Beta giveaway, the rules are simple.

Your machine will need to meet the 3L minimum specs:

2GHz or faster Intel Core processor
MacOS X 10.4.9 or later QuickTime 7.0.4 or later
2GB or more of RAM
CoreImage capable AGP, PCI Express or Intel graphics processor with at least 256MB of VRAM w/ OpenGL hardware acceleration.
Minimum Screen Resolution 1440 x 960 (which therefore excludes the macbook)

… and you’ll need to leave a comment on this post in the next 48 hours.

In return, 4 winners will receive a 3L Student - single-machine - license (worth €150) , and one will receive 3L Pro , which is a 3-machine license (worth €200) and includes native uDMX support, for controlling VMS or other DMX hardware.

After the competition closes, I have it on good authority that The Wait Is Over, and 3L will be available for all and sundry to try out and purchase with Much Abandon. I also have several hours of footage of Michael taking us on a detailed tour of Thrill at ByteMeFest in Perth last year, so I’ll be going on a mad editing binge in the hope of having this available to help out those who download the demo later this week.

In the meantime: Hit the comments, check out some samples from the 3L Loops series on archive.org, and visit the 3L site for more information.

Update: Entries are now closed. Thanks to everyone who entered. The volume and quality of comments has been overwhelming! It’s really fantastic to see all of these readers come out of the woodwork. I think we’ll have to give more things away so we can hear from you all (Software and hardware developers, you know where to contact us…).

In the meantime, winners will be announced this time tomorrow, to coincide with the 3L store launch. So if you don’t win you’ll be able to try out the demo and even buy a copy!

The successor to ArKaos VJ, a staple in early VJ application history, is nearly here. GrandVJ just hit public beta.

GrandVJ is a complete, from-scratch rewrite of the app, with some new features — but still a nod to the simple, one-screen interface that made the original popular. You can now download a working demo, beta build (with some watermarks on output and other limitations) for both Mac and Windows. I have to say, I like the music keyboard interface and drag-and-drop-everywhere philosophy. At the very least, this could become the beginner-friendly VJ app a lot of people have been looking for. (That is, if it’s successful, I may have an answer for the "where should I start with VJing for something simple — and I don’t have a lot of time" question I get a lot, particularly on the music side.) It’s also got some generative and Flash-playing tricks I’ll be looking into. At the same time, I think it will be worth some constructive criticism. This field is also getting crowded — and users more demanding.

Watch for a more detailed preview from us soon, but in the meantime, you can go ahead and give it a spin and let us know what you think:

ArKaos GrandVJ Public Beta 1 [ArKaos Users Forum]

Previously:

ArKaos Rebuilds VJ Software From Ground Up: GrandVJ

The free (for non-commercial use), Windows-only, insanely-powerful visual/multimedia patching environment vvvv just got a killer feature: the ability to make your own "nodes" (what are called objects in some other modular tools).

It’s actually pretty easy to build, too, and the developers have some templates for you. This is way up the list on my summer projects. You can do matrix transforms, as well, so 3D / GPU-based video processing gets very interesting, along with simpler manipulations of color, string, and number values:

The latest vvvv version offers developers an interface to write their own nodes for vvvv. A plugin is basically a .dll file, that can be drag&dropped into a vvvv patch where it appears as a node. If its stored in vvvv’s plugins directory, its even available in the node list.

vvvv gurus, if you give this a try and make something interesting, let us know:

vvvv40beta16 release with plugin interface [Results in Reverse blog]