Hang X, dude? Apple is mostly talking about the Player app, but under-the-hood QT improvements could be meaningful to visualists and live visual apps. Okay, having gotten my rant about Apple’s extreme level of secrecy out of the way (I’m standing by that), we can at least talk about what Apple is saying about QuickTime […]

Free software, a webcam, and some stickers printed on an inkjet can turn any object into a real-world controller. That’s what Paul Rose of Institut Fatima and his team did with a soccer ball (translation for the civilized world: football). The software is powered by the same framework used for the reacTable, but in this […]

reacTIVision is able to work thanks to these alien-looking markers called “fluidicials.” Karsten Schmidt aka toxi has developed software for creating more of these markers, and it generates characters like this “teddy bear” seen here. Computer vision for tracking movement is cool. But add the ability to track actual objects, and you can extend the […]

li {margin-bottom:10px;} Packing up VJ Gear to fit on an airplane can be tricky business. I flew from Portland to San Diego in order to join the Xochi Media crew for Coachella this year – luckily, they’re supplying most of the heavy equipment, so I needed only the essentials, as photographed above. Here’s what I […]

Closing out our (unexpected) Week of Optical Flow feature, Michel from the vvvv forums has ported Andrew Benson’s optical flow implementation to that DirectX-based, Windows-only, free for non-commercial-use patching environment. (Jitter and Quartz Composer, mentioned earlier, each use OpenGL, not DirectX.) Since it is DirectX, the shader uses HLSL instead of GLSL. In technical terms, […]

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 Technique Here’s one start.Peter Nyboer, Max whiz and Livid developer, has run […]

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 […]

Perhaps it’s the church setting for the installation, or the strains of 17th-Century choral composition by Allegri. But Streetwise Opera’s My Secret Heart, binding together reactive visuals and post-Minimalist musical strains, has the feeling of a 21st Century passion play, a digital devotional piece. My Secret Heart is a commission by Streetwise Opera, which develops […]