Secret sauce? Hardly. It’s more like a hot sauce competition with everyone sharing recipes. Naivi’a NAP Framework, if you missed it, is an open-source, high-octane toolset for digital artists that’s ready to plug into your data, DSP, multichannel audio, any protocol (OSC, MIDI, Artnet, serial, Web), and push graphics to the edge. And it keeps getting better.
So, imagine something with the performance and flexibility of a game engine, but without having a pre-defined, rigid pipeline. That’s NAP – a lean, free platform built around data and interaction. It’s basically ready for artists and interactive engineers to go play with out of the box, runs on everything, and has modules that can easily be extended.
It’s like the dream installation tool, basically – and built to be as lightweight as you’d want that to be.
And now it has improved High DPI support throughout for any display, a new Color Picker and Color Editor, better font rendering, Artnet receive, and other goodies.
https://github.com/napframework/nap/releases/tag/v0.4.4
Powered by Vulkan – the next-gen graphics API from Khronos (via AMD and DICE work) – it’s also graphics savvy. So maybe the best way to talk about it is just to show you some work. See the work by Heleen Blanken (with Lesley van Hoek assisting) on Habitat, just at SONAR Istanbul, or Nick Verstand’s Within Without for Royal Theatre Carr.
And yeah, that means as Nick does, you could run thousands of LEDs at 1000 Hz, all on Intel NUC with ultra-precise timing accuracy.
It’s all C++ and Python, pre-compiled or build from source either one. Fast, modular, multichannel audio + Vulkan 3D graphics. Sold. (Erm, or whatever word you use when it’s free.)
Go check it out:
Tons of nice showcase examples: https://www.napframework.com/showcase/
The project comes from Netherlands-based Naivi and artist/engineers who already had experience with – little surprise – SideFX (of Houdini fame), Guerilla Games, and Sony Interactive.
More: https://www.naivi.nl/about