Dancing, digitally, anyone? Capturing full-body motion has tended to be imprecise and primitive, expensive, complex, non-real-time, or sometimes a combination. Rapidly-paced open source development around Microsoft’s Kinect 3D depth camera is proving the future doesn’t have to be that way. The results, piping control data in real-time to any visual, music, or other software, demonstrate […]

Media Browser – Loading and Organizing from Vidvox on Vimeo. VDMX5 from Vidvox has really demonstrated what a semi-modular visual tool can be, with an open-ended set of live visual tools and powerful support for Mac features like Quartz Composer. It can be daunting to really wrap your head around, but once you do, it’s […]

Visuals for live performance require a lot of the same things over and over again – media loading and browsing, crossfades, effects… Vizzie is a set of macro-style add-ons for Max/MSP/Jitter, free to current users, you can drop into any patch. Very cool, and they look very nicely designed. Read some praise for the plugs […]

Syphon VDMX 5 Beta 8 integration Demo from vade on Vimeo. Once upon a time, we imagined a future in which computer applications shared content, media, and data effortlessly, where different tools all coexisted. The reality we got was, in almost every category, far more monolithic. By exploiting a little-known feature of the Mac’s graphics […]

Syphon Teaser from vade on Vimeo. In the audio realm, piping audio and MIDI between apps is commonplace (see ReWire, JACK, Soundflower, IAC MIDI, etc.). But imagine if you could take textures and frames from one app and share them, live and real-time, with another app. That’s the vision of Syphon, a Mac-only, open-source framework […]

MixEmergency is a little-known Mac visual app, but it’s got a passionate following. (How do I know? I get excited shouts from them every now and then.) With so many options for live visuals, what would inspire such enthusiasm? Simple: MixEmergency, in addition to some powerful features, can integrate with real-time scratch moves from Serato […]

Apple today, alongside beefed-up iMacs with quad-core and Mac Pro towers with twelve, introduced a $69 Bluetooth trackpad accessory with multi-touch gesture support. http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/ I’m not a huge fan of trackpads over mice, but yes, this does give you a cheap multi-touch input to play with. And we haven’t seen much in the dirt-cheap, under-$100 […]

As you probably know, Apple refreshed their MacBook Pro line, upgrading the 13″, 15″, and 17″ models to new NVIDIA GPUs and the 15″ and 17″ units to Core i5 and i7 CPUs. It’s a nice refresh for Mac fans, though a relatively modest one. Anyone hoping for a big leap in multi-core processing or […]

Pictured: Looks native, but this app is built with a cross-platform library. And really, for music making – or great, immersive development, in general – does it matter? The iPad has inflamed plenty of passions online. On this site, I’ve gotten a little flak from iPad lovers and haters alike. It goes something like this: […]

A dancer celebrates OpenFrameworks … and we celebrate OpenFrameworks goodness meeting up with FreeFrameGL flexibility. Photo (CC-BY-SA) aniara. The folks at Resolume have given us a fantastic gift: now, you can make your own FreeFrameGL plug-ins with OpenFrameworks. Say wha? Okay, so, first, let’s consider the problem. You want to create a cool visual effect. […]