Create Digital Motion

This is quite a week for visualist software - the release of Resolume 3, the 1.1 update to GrandVJ, and now an announcement regard Livid’s lightweight VJ app, Cell DNA. At US$149, it’s a neat little no-nonsense app — there’s even a lighter Cell Standard. What strikes me about the interface is that it’s reminiscent [...]

Aside from cool aesthetic effects, projection mapping (mapping projection precisely onto real-world objects) and augmented reality (what you get when you add digital projections to your reality) can be useful.So, while we’ve already seen plenty of projections on walls and floors, this is a projection on a climbing wall. It might seem silly, but climbers [...]

Just as VDMX and Resolume have been treated to ground-up rewrites, so, too, has a name in VJ apps that has endured since the early days of computer VJing: ArKaos. GrandVJ is a completely new program, though it does maintain ArKaos’ signature feature - a music keyboard along the bottom of the screen.Now, I’ve wanted [...]

pymt demo reel from Thomas Hansen on Vimeo.Today on Create Digital Music, I have a look at tasty, drool-worthy free multitouch frameworks, one for Max/MSP patchers and one for Python coders:Roll Your Own Multitouch Screens, Tables: Max Multitouch Framework, PyMTI’m curious, though: who out there is already employing multitouch interfaces in their live visual work? [...]

vellum | slices of a virtual sculpture | seoul | 2009 from 2minds on Vimeo.Our Modernist and Post-Modernist towers of capital are familiar sights. I live here in the shadow of the Chase Manhattan Building and across the street from an IM Pei block. But the magical thing about projection is the way in which [...]

No Carrier (a.k.a. Don Miller) has released glitchNES, a ROM (read: game cartridge) that makes user-controlled visuals on the old school Nintendo Entertainment System, with results that resemble the effects of circuit-bending. glitchNES is free, open source, and runs well on NES hardware and in accurate emulators, e.g., Nestopia. Get it from No-Carrier.com. [...]

Projector-type 3D scanning seems very functional, but I would expect it to lose accuracy as the object size decreases. So for scanning small objects (such as Lego), Lego genius Philippe Hurbain has come up with a scanner made of lego.Philippe’s instructions also includes (under “3D reconstruction”) a technique for creating a “complete” 3D model out [...]

The new Intuos graphics tablet from Wacom ticks some very attractive boxes. The scroll wheel and OLED “multifunction” buttons look great, but I’m most impressed that the tablet is smart enough to flip the screens when being used by a left hander.I own an Intuos 2, and while I don’t use it very regularly, when [...]

Wooster Collective said it: Every Once In A While, Brands Get It Right (This Is One Of Those Times)An inventive, tight use of projection mapping. There’s so much going on, it’s like watching a happy version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:Puma Lift. from CCW - Lab on Vimeo.Ok, so it’s nothing at all [...]

motion distortion 2 from andrew benson on Vimeo.Datamosh? Video squishification? Mushy data?Call it what you will, but applying real-time distortion and displacement to video so that video textures become flowing layers of pixels looks absolutely beautiful. Andrew Benson of Cycling ‘74 has only just begun playing with this in Jitter using GLSL shaders, [...]

Music lovers now have Max for Live coming later this year. But how about running custom visual patches inside your VJ app? That’s now possible using your own Jitter patches inside Cell DNA, Livid’s new, lightweight live visual tool.Livid has released a “DevKit” with some example patches and documentation to get you rolling if you’re [...]

Resolume 3 in action, in a lovely little rig by dingLUKAI. The folks at Resolume have been hard at work on a big update to the final 3.0 build just released. Bart says he just uploaded this to the server. Now, so far we’ve found the final build to be quite stable, so if you [...]

GPU HSFlow port to Quartz Composer from vade on Vimeo.The Live Optical Flow Processing continues. Anton Marini, aka vade, is working on his own Quartz Composer patch, which will in turn be integrated with the visualist software he’s assembling, v002. More details once we get them, but you can see how nice parameterizing this in [...]

Add Max patch effects to DNA. from Livid Instruments on Vimeo.Yesterday, we saw some splashy video distortion techniques applied to real-time video. You know what that means: it’s time to use these in live performance.Liquidify Video, Live: Optical Flow GLSL Datamosh TechniqueHere’s one start.Peter Nyboer, Max whiz and Livid developer, has [...]

Your GPU thanks you for playing this game back in the day.In case Quake creator John Carmack wasn’t already your hero, here’s a nice move: when EA wouldn’t green-light an iPhone version of the classic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, Carnack had an answer: fine, just let me do it myself.In an astonishingly open (though [...]

Jitter works brilliantly when it comes to processing signal - and that means for signal-like work with video and textures, it’s fantastic, as well as the usual Max-y tasks like processing input from physical sensors and input devices and the like. But try to do a whole lot of sophisticated 3D work, and Jitter may [...]

Musician Christopher Willits has an ongoing series for XLR8R Magazine in which he talks his own technical workflow. In the latest episode, he adds live visuals to his Ableton Live set using Max/MSP/Jitter. What’s nice about this is you see how some clever mapping can make visuals integrate neatly with music.I’m somewhat insane, so my [...]