The Glitch Mob is one of the hot summer tickets for electronic music, and they’re fortunate enough to stage a massive live visual spectacle alongside the show. This week’s a perfect time to consider all that visual goodness, with the release of their latest original music, “We Can Make the World Stop” on EP. So […]

It’s been caught in the shadow of (perhaps well-deserved) controversy over Final Cut Pro X, but Apple’s Motion is worth a look, whether or not you’re even a Final Cut user. (Final Cut Pro X is not required in order to buy Motion.) At $50, Motion gives you a range of dynamic animation behaviors, real-time […]

Some of us move freely between the real and virtual dimensions, can make dubstep basses just by moving our spine, and shoot flames out of our hands naturally. For everyone else, there’s this. Ryan Challinor, whose day gig is as a developer working on Dance Central, apparently just couldn’t get enough Kinect hacking at his […]

ArKaos is a long-standing name in VJ apps, as one of the tools that defined the genre in the 90s. GrandVJ has been gradually evolving with a more modern foundation, marked by a simple, musical, performance-oriented interface and high-performance playback. Its engine is the same as powers high-end media servers – but at a fraction […]

Resolume, the VJ app – now really a live visual and audiovisual tool – has turned ten. The developers this week look back at that landmark, and reveal the first-ever license owner, the Dutch VJ team Vision Impossible. The original Resolume interface – now available as a free download. They’re making the original Resolume 1.0 […]

Ed.: He’s worked to translate classic hardware like the landmark Rutt-Etra to digital media – in that case, working with its original co-creator. He’s been a virtuoso of Mac visual development, building his own tools and working out an innovative way of piping live textures between applications in ways never before possible. And he’s been […]

Since the days of Paint, computers have routinely taken some gesture of our hand and made it into a graphic. Now that coding is faster and friendlier, it’s possible to make a new tool, learn that tool, and then learn to perform with that tool. We’ve seen it in Joshue Ott’s superDraw (made in Processing/Java), […]

As input device, Microsoft’s Kinect has its shortcomings – largely summed up by saying that you don’t always want to be waving your arms around through space just to accomplish a task. But one place Kinect really shows the potential of mainstream computer vision is in its ability to track the body. And that means […]

Ed. Our friend Momo the Monster (aka Surya Buchwald) joins us for a guest column with a proposal: what if messages sent between music and visual software could be expressive? His idea is simple, but powerful: it’s musical semantics for live visual messages, as basic as knowing when there’s a bass drum hit. Momo introduces […]

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 […]