We’ll have some more on the Robotic Camera thing soon, but in the meantime, check out the Pilot View FPV 2400 kit. It’s not quite the gyro-controlled version (below), but apparently they have a pan/tilt coming soon.

As an intellectual exercise, let’s price a similar setup from aforementioned cheapie online store DealExtreme:

USB 2.4GHz Spy Camera Set: $120
iTheatre Virtual Vision Video Glasses: $149

Ok. I don’t think I should be considering this any further. VJing is an expensive enough hobby, remote control flight would be the end of me.

(via Make.)

Aforementioned visual synthsizer slash exercise tool WiiWhorld has been released for public consumption.

Jeff Mission has tied together GlovePIE (for Bluetooth/Wiimote input (previously on CDMo)), Whorld, and his own secret sauce (a GlovePIE script to control Whorld).

Put them all together with a dash of virtual midi port, and you get this:

Or as Jeff describes it:

Whorld is a free, open-source, live visual synthesizer for sacred geometry. It uses math to create a seamless animation of mesmerizing psychedelic images. You can VJ with it, make unique digital artwork with it, or sit back and watch it like a screensaver. The WiiWhorld project makes it possible to control the Whorld visualizer with the Nintendo Wiimote.

WiiWhorld.

Jeff Mission writes to say he’s been working on a new project that couples the Wii remote with generative visuals — all built in free software. Like it, but think it could go further? It’s free, so have a go (soon, at least). Jeff writes:

Chris Korda, developer of the open-source VJ softwares Whorld and FFRend, and I have been working on a project to control real-time, generative geometric visuals with the ever-popular Nintendo Wiimote. We dubbed the project WiiWhorld.

I am pleased to announce that the first proper WiiWhorld demo video is now available online:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bw1bHVPHk_g

Swirly colors, techno, dancing, and lots of smiling faces! Anyway, I think it does a decent job of capturing people having fun playing with our little digital toy.

The video was cobbled together from about 90 minutes of party footage shot a couple months ago. We set up our rig and invited people to play around, with a minimum of instruction. It was great fun to watch people play around, figure it out, and then teach new techniques to one another.

As for the project itself, it requires a Wiimote and a bluetooth-enabled computer. All the software involved (GlovePIE, Whorld, and FFRend) is 100% free, making this (we hope) a project that others can adopt and expand in the future, at minimal cost. We hope to publish more detailed information soon, so that others can try WiiWhorld for themselves.

Please give it a look, leave comments and ratings, and pass it on!

The project is apparently brand new — and Jeff says more web content and videos and documentation and such are all coming soon.

And yes, GlovePIE, Whorld, and FFRend are all free and open-source Windows apps. (And you thought Linux had all the fun.) beatfix (aka Jeff) suggested them and got our Windows free apps round-up going:

VisualJockey Goes Freeware; Free Windows and Cross-Platform VJ - Visualist Round-Up

Anyone who wants to get us rolling on a similar Mac or Linux list, drop us a line.

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…)

There you are: the party is amazing. Beautiful people everywhere, dancing as though it’s their last night on Earth. Bodies in sweaty, packed mo– [screeching record sound] — erm, okay, actually, you’re stuck behind a computer / VJ gear. Again. We’ve seen attempts to solve this problem before; only Tuesday night, in fact, I saw a DJ/PA set where the musician was wandering the floor with a wireless Xbox 360 controller and headset, manipulating Pd remotely. But here’s one novel solution: pack all your computer VJ tools into a wireless, battery-powered wrist brace:

Belmer Negrillo - On the Body [Project page, videos, technical details]

The basic controls: “pin buttons”, which actually use RFID tags for different commands, plus an accelerometer for controlling visuals with actual motion. Interestingly, the Wrist-Brace controller is designed to be adapted both to the discriminating VJ and the live clubber, so you can simplify the interactions for friends you make out on the dance floor. The project was produced for a class focusing on wearable interfaces called “On the Body” at Italy’s famed Ivrea Interaction Design Institute.

The interface looks great, though it makes me want to build controls into an oven mitt. (Sorry, couldn’t help but make the comparison.)

The title for the product is great: GoDance!

One technical problem not solved by this product: VJs with no rhythm / no coordination. You’ll have to sort out what to do on the dance floor on your own.

Got a preferred solution of your own / seen something similar? Or do you prefer to hide behind banks of hardware, safe from the dangers of the dance floor (maybe that’s why you went into this in the first place)? Let us know.

Lightborne writes us:

Hi, first of all I wanted to say I love the site and have been checking it daily for about a year now, as well as createdigitalmusic. I just came across a clip on youtube that really puts what I’ve seen of people abusing Wii remotes so far to shame. This seems to me to be the first case where it’s passed from the experimental to the creative-use phase. It’s freaking awesome and I’d love to know what software he’s using, perhaps a Max patch?

I’m fairly certain that it’s in fact a Jitter patch — the Mac has the terrific aka.wiiremote object. (See also: CDMusic’s Free Mac Looper for Wii Controller, Wii MIDI Hacking Round-up.)

And the creator is none other than Daito Manabe, the awesome Japanese DJ who created the Turntable-Controlled Vibrating Chaise Longue using Ms. Pinky vinyl. (And, as I recall, he uses Pinky as a vinyl control scheme for VJing as well as music.)

Daito’s website

It takes a turntablist to figure out clever ways of using the Wii remote that don’t reinvent the wheel. What I especially like about this is that the whole system becomes self-contained. It definitely pushes me to build a performance system around the Wii controller rather than the other way around. And he gets some nice, expressive controls in there, as well. Thanks to Lightbourne for this!

If you’re using the Wii remote for your live visuals, let us know how it’s going.

Much of the focus for the Wii controller has been on the music and VJ side, but they’re equally compelling as live visual controllers. Our friends at the uber-hip French visualist blog antivj have translated their slick Wii-to-MIDI tutorial into English, and added a video using Arkaos:

Wiimote to MIDI [Tutorial, antivj]

The instructions are PC-based; if you’re on the Mac, you’ll want to use wiitomidi. With Max/MSP/Jitter on Mac, try the superb aka.wiiremote external. I’d also really like to see an OpenSoundControl (OSC) application, which would be ideal for Flash and Processing. (Any ideas, anyone, on the best way to implement this? It’d be great if the core of the implementation could be cross-platform; you still need to do platform-specific stuff to talk to Bluetooth, as near as I can figure.)

What should be immediately apparent from the video, as well, is that there are many different ways of using the Wii remote in a visual patch. Here, scratching is linked to tilt; in a project I built, I used acceleration instead, with very different results. And a lot of what the results look like will depend on your visual style; I could see some great applications using interactive Processing animations, etc.

Jaymis has been working on using the Wii with Resolume on Windows; we should hear from him soon. I’ve been working with Jitter and VDMX on the Mac. And soon we should have Processing (here) and Reaktor (on cdmusic), as well.

Thanks for the great tutorial, antivj!

I am currently in the midst of an awesome toys storm! This week has seen the arrival of a Macbook, Crumpler Backpack and I just picked up my M3 DS Simply from the post office. With a Numark AVM02 arriving tomorrow, I’m worried that I’ll become paralysed by the sheer weight of cool techy stuff. Hence: Pocket Review!

Peter put the DS Lite and DS-Xtreme in his Digital Musician Holiday Wish List. I picked up a DS a couple of weeks ago, but thought the DS-Xtreme looked a little pricey and wanted something which would use SD or MicroSD media, as they’re the formats used by my still camera and phone.

Et volia. The Nintendo DS M3 Simply. A choice echoed by a comment made on CDM 3 days ago. AU$61 (US$48) delivered from Bamboo Gaming, it arrived in 9 days, and includes a “thumbdrive” form factor MicroSD reader, driver CD, and a cute little holder to attach to your keyring or mobile phone lanyard or nose ring or whatever it is the cool kids are doing on my lawn.

That’s all interesting, but there are loads of reviews online which could tell you what you’ll get in the box if you buy one of these things. What they don’t really get across is how simple this thing is. Following these instructions it took me less than ten minutes to go from this:

To this! Nitrotracker. DSMidiWifi baybee!

Modding my XBox to run Media Center was complicated enough that I enlisted another geek to do it for me. Getting homebrew running on the DS took less time than copying and resizing the above images.

Nintendo DS M3 Simply: Recommended! [tags]nintendo, DS, homebrew, trackers, gaming, midi, hacks, hardware, mobile, software, wireless[/tags]

Updated: I had to patch NitroTracker with DLDI for R4DS using the instructions here to get NitroTracker accessing the filesystem and saving correctly.

A portable computer on the back, a DS in the holster, the roaming visualist is ready to spin live eye candy in any situation, with only an S-Video port and four drink tickets to the bar.

Yes, if you happened to catch the wireless MIDI controller here on CDMo before it hit the rest of the blogosphere, I have good news: the download for DSMIDIWiFi is available today. You can now transmit MIDI from your DS to control your computer with no hardware other than a flash cart for running homebrew apps.

And, since Collin and Tob released their source into the wild, programmers out there have a great foundation for creating other apps. That means, not only is the DS Lite a tax write-off for the working VJ, it could be a student’s digital media thesis project, too. (Heck, one piece of software provides both the project AND procrastination options, all in one, compact device …)

File this next to the ndsvisuals project, which transmits via TCP and UDP, and is specially configured for visuals, including clip triggering and ordering, live scratching, and extra visual feedback on the DS screen. Unlike DSMIDIWiFi, ndsvisuals still isn’t ready for download, but you can bet we’ll let you know when it is. And developers / hobbyist programmers, it’s worth visiting the ndsvisuals page for additional ideas and resources — the WiFi communications component was already out there and enabled both projects, for instance.

Via MIDI or UDP, it would be possible to hook up the DS to software like Processing (both MIDI and UDP) or Flash (MIDI with some work, probably better off with UDP) in addition to the traditional VJ apps. Processing + Nintendo DS sounds like an especially tasty option to me.

Lastly, if you’re looking for an easy solution for running all this homebrew goodness, the DS-X shows lots of promise. All you need now is a game to suck up the rest of your time, but I’m guessing you can figure that part out for yourself. (I suggest Mario Kart, naturally.)

Now get that stylus finger twitching:

DSMIDIWiFi Free Download: Turn Your Nintendo DS into a Wireless Synth and Controller (Now Available!) [Create Digital Music]

Nintendo DS as VJ Controller, with vvvv and Homebrew Developer Tools

DSMIDIWiFi project page

ndsvisuals project page

DS-X and Homebrew Apps (probably the most plug-and-play solution) [Create Digital Music]