In William Gibson’s novel Spook Country released last year, artists create a new generation of “locative art.” Peer through goggles at a real-world scene, and see something that isn’t literally there. Few would say it was Gibson’s best novel – perhaps partly because the plotline didn’t live up to how compelling the locative art ideas were. But the art has already moved from science fiction into reality.

You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quiet in recent months. The Game On Projection Mapping project is partly to blame, but the biggest culprit will be making its first public appearance as well this Saturday, and I’ve called it Herovision.

Herovision Testing Party from Jaymis on Vimeo.

The above video features a bit of a highlight reel from “performances” at our testing party last Saturday night, and I’ve posted a full song as well. As you can probably tell from the mixing techniques displayed, the core of the system is a Vixid mixer, anchored to a brace of cheap security cameras. The system still requires plenty of hardware hacking and software programming before the weekend, and the finished version will include some more advanced keying and compositing techniques, but I’m excited to finally have something to show for all the late nights, and couldn’t hold off posting this work-in-progress.

Obviously this is a great way to level up the fun value of a little collaborative rhythm gaming, however the serious, visualistic reasoning behind it all is that I’ve been working to create a compact setup for live music video production. After playing 90 live shows last year, I wanted to have a system which would allow a small team to put together a multi-camera, live streaming show with a minimum of gear, expense, and climbing of ladders.

I think we’ve achieved this aim, and after the festivities of this weekend have died down, I’d like to start sharing with you some of the techniques we’ve discovered and lessons we’ve learned.

Finally, if you’re in Brisbane this weekend, come along to the Game On Launch Party, play some games, check out the projection mapping, and get a little Herovision on.

DRM on displays and projectors? Believe it. Apple, like many computer vendors, has added DRM to its new laptops in the form of HDCP (which, bizarrely, stands for “High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection”). This is doubly odd, because Apple cited technical restrictions of Blu-Ray as a reason for not including those drives on their machines – only to turn around and add restrictions to their own content on the iTunes store.

It might not be worth mentioning at all, but it serves to demonstrate yet another disconnect between vendors and the way people actually use video output features on laptops. You might think that you could connect a flat-panel computer display or projector to your new, pricey MacBook, and watch a show or movie you bought from iTunes, right? No can do. But that’s the reality: a lot of people aren’t hooking up video out to an HD TV. Heck, some of us still have old, tube TVs – only to discover a lot of laptops (not just Apple’s) no longer include a dedicated TV out.

Running Vista? Running Processing? This is important: you’ll want to apply this fix if working with fullscreen apps (as you would be as a live visualist). The short version: there’s a property to set if you’re working in an IDE (Eclipse / NetBeans. If you’re just working in Processing, the easiest thing to do is to download Processing 0156 with Java included rather than the “expert” version. But if you’re interested in knowing the gory details, here goes:

Tired: Trying to get publicity for software updates. Wired: using publicity for software as a reason to finish an update!

Ilias Bergstrom has a new release up of an open-source project designed to make it easier to play live with Processing. With all-important support for 0156 (which again restores proper fullscreen operation, this is the one to go try if you haven’t tried already. And there’s splines:

I have just uploaded version 0.2 of Mother to the google code download page.

Besides now working with Processing 0156, I have also added a new feature that allows processing incoming OSC values using spline interpolation, thus allowing for better animation.

I have also included updated examples for getting started, and updated documentation.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Indeed!

processing-mother @ Google Code

Still Windows-only at the moment, but the Mac build is in progress, so stay tuned. Eventually should be fun to test this on Linux, as well.

Create Digital Motion is proud to be a sponsor of the 2009 MGFest. It’s a huge festival, now covering multiple US cities, covering all aspects of visual technology – including the stuff we especially like, at the convergence of live visuals, VJing, interactive graphics, and music.

Now’s the time to enter your stuff, as we’d love to see readers’ work in the festival (and will be sure to cover it). But it’s also worth noting how smart the organizers have been about the way they do the call for works – instead of an elaborate, multi-page specification where you’re suppose to talk about how this relates to the theme of “cross-species transubstantiation in a post-urban metastasis,” they’ve kept it simple and focus on the work. And they’ve provided different levels of involvement, as well, rather than gear everything to one pole or another, simplistic reels or elaborate proposals – they cover a spectrum. It’s a smart way to do a call for work and one (ahem, anyone listening?) I hope others try.

But without further ado, let’s get to that call. Note that if you enter by Friday, you save a significant amount of cash on DVD submission! Best of luck. (Update: Links fixed.)

Send your finest minutes, your dreams realized, your fictions animated, your adventures recorded, your sweat and passion woven into something of beauty, and the Motion Graphics Festival will
take it to audiences across the country. Selections will be screened during the 6th annual Motion Graphics Festival tour in Chicago, Boston, Austin, Atlanta and Washington DC.

[ Easy ]
http://mgfest.com/09/easy/
Simply enter a link to a video you think is really good!

[ Medium ]
http://mgfest.com/09/medium/
Send a DVD of a video you made.
Final Entry Deadline: Friday, November 21 - $35, $15 for students
Late Entry Deadline: Friday, December 21- $85, $35 for students

[ Hard ]
http://mgfest.com/09/hard/
Suggest a presentation topic, performance or installation. Motion Graphics Festival 2009 Tour
In its 6th year, MGFest stands as the premier US event showcasing creative motion picture design. The festival presents a year-long, regionally focused program of events. The 5-city tour focuses on motion design, sound design, and film & video technology by hosting: art showcases, exhibits, workshops, classes, panel discussions, studio tours, theater screenings and industry mixers.

Download the Call For Entry Poster:
http://www.mgfest.com/09/mg09Call_poster.pdf

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

If Minority Report has become the benchmark by which gestural interaction is judged, that was always intentional. The film’s production team wanted to work with the people actually developing science fiction-like technology. And it’s sci-fi like technology.

So, let’s not talk about how cool-looking the clip is above – not that it doesn’t look cool. After all, most of what you actually see on the screen is stuff you can do with your desktop computer and some projectors. So the question is, what benefit do you get from really nailing a gestural input? It’s the input that matters.

Even if you engage exclusively your right brain on this, there’s quite a lot that’s impressive – the properties proponents of this kind of interface have been advocating for many years:

• The interface is 3D. Not to overstate the obvious here, but the ability to intuitively navigate in 3D is no small matter. This sort of interface might not work for detailed 3D modeling, but for quicker, more comfortable 3D navigation, the mouse / mouse wheel has always been woefully inadequate. The mouse is fundamentally designed as a 2D pointing device, which is why it requires awkward conventions like WASD keyboard navigation in 3D games. Joysticks work for spatial navigation (ask your friendly fighter pilot who relies on them in life-or-death situation). But actually moving stuff around in 3D requires something different.
• Gestures are intuitive. We hear a lot about gestures, but these are actual, human gestures – the kinds of motions you’d make to a person, the kinds you’d use when running a dog around an agility course. (And, believe me, if you can keep up with a border collie, you’ve got a good interface!)
• It’s collaborative. Here’s an experiment: share your mouse with a friend. How’d that work out for you?
• It could help navigate information. This to me is actually the least convincing part of the demo – but I think that’s an opportunity. We’ve had a chicken and egg problem: our interface is 2D, so our information is 2D. Sure, there’s the odd exception, like Google Earth – but how much time do you use Google Earth compared to Google Maps? Thought so. Some of the demos here remind me of Apple’s 1990s tag navigation interface for the Web. Others return to the odd, needlessly-3D photo organizing app model that seems to permeate these demos. (And until you can shout “enhance” at your computer like on Star Trek to see some tiny area of an image, I wonder how useful that will be.) I think we have to re-learn how to organize information in three dimensions, having done it in two dimensions for so long.
• It blurs the lines between computing and performance. The reason we focus so much on live performance on this site is that, at its heart, it’s all about real-time communication. If you can make something work live onstage, or live in a club in front of drunken people, you’ve probably mastered it on some important level.

Quartz Composer/VDMX tutorial no 1: The bouncing ball from goto10 on Vimeo.

Trying to learn Apple’s free visual patching tool Quartz Composer, useful for making your own filters and simple generative effects?

Or perhaps you’re learning VDMX, the brilliant, semi-modular Mac-friendly visual tool – which also happens to host Quartz Composer compositions as effects or generative sources?

Well, good news for you: readers have a ton of tutorials for both, thanks to some intrepid readers in comments on that fantastic-looking CONTAKT/Richie Hawtin show.

First up, Joris de Jong aka Hybrid Visuals has started a series of tutorials on VDMX and Quartz Composer – two delicious tastes put together. And he points us at some other useful tutorials, too. Some of my favorites:

Ilias Bergstrom has created a tool for mixing Processing sketches live in performance. (Thanks, Bart!) The resulting tool lets you cross-fade between sketches and easily host a series of sketches in a gig. The process is pretty straightforward:

1. Use the included Foetus library with your sketch to prepare it for use (your sketch needs to use the OPENGL renderer, but I generally find that to be the best route, anyway)

2. Initialize your set for use in the code, setting it up to respond to input if desire (which is the whole fun of it, of course)

3. Put all your sketches together in a folder

4. Configure a text INI file to set up your OpenSoundController, so you can control your sets live with OSC-ready hardware and/or software

5. Play your sketches as “synths,” complete with cross-fading!

Put it all together, and you’ve got one bad Mother (watch your mouth!) The first release came out a bit earlier this fall. It comes with the library and some examples built in Max for control. Everything’s GPL v3 open-sourced.

Onar | 3D blog

processing-mother @ Google Code

Ilias and Beau Lotto have also written an academic paper on the tool.

Of course, once you start down this road, you could naturally come up with a lot of other potential features – and it’d be really, really nice to have this basic playback capability in a full-blown VJ host, so you could go back to some traditional clip mixing.

I haven’t had much chance to play with this, so anxious to hear feedback.

Do you play live with Processing? How do you do it? We’d love to hear how different people are working.

You can go hear Onar3d’s music on Last.fm. Something else to listen to while you code.

Updated: PC only for now, but a Mac version is in the works. (Could also be nice to test this on Linux…)

CONTAKT @ Amsterdam from Ali M. Demirel on Vimeo.

David Lublin at Vidvox points us to this fantastic video from CONTAKT, playing live in Amsterdam with Richie Hawtin:

I’ve started to use Kineme plugins for Quartz Composer in my live set. Here is a good example based on ‘tb soundflower’ composition by alx toneburst. I’ve modified it to my performance and controlled variables live through VDMX. It worked great when Richie was playing with the mixer. Special thanks to alx toneburst and Kineme!

I have to get over how great the projection looks. Yes, event planners / promoters / club owners, this is how it’s supposed to be.

It’s also great to see some really lovely generative work. And you can expect more. The Kineme plug-ins are open-source, donation-based plug-ins for Apple’s lovely Quartz Composer.

kineme.net

There are some great little tools in there, including useful utility stuff – work with the Apple Remote, QuickLook, audio devices, cameras – and visual stuff as well, including OpenGL-based tools and a network camera tool. Anyone else using them? Other QC tips? Seems like we need to do an updated Quartz Composer guide soon. (In the meantime, I remain committed to developing some of the stuff I’m working on on the PC, vvvv, and Processing sides!)