Looking for some nerdy way to celebrate 22.02.2022 ? Well, why not tune into everyone’s favorite palindromic visual dataflow multimedia development environment for Windows? (How’s that for a crowd-pleasing teaser?) And the timing is right for other reasons, too…
As I draft this ingenious prose, the folks of vvvv are about one hour out from the 17th worldwide meetup – that’s 20:00 German time, meaning I guess something incredible can be coming at 20:22 (or if you’re a little to our east, even better, 22:22).
There’s some other reason to have our eyes on vvvv, though.
FUSE – visual patching for your GPU
The big news is, vvvv gamma is coming into its own, with a release misleadingly titled 2021.4.6. (That’s okay; I can’t quite escape 2021 yet, either.)
https://vvvv.org/blog/vvvv-gamma-2021.4-release
What seems worth the attention here is not only usability and performance gains, but the full integration of FUSE, a visual patching approach to GPU shaders. I love code, but this is simply revolutionary. Here’s how to get started (from September, but now the build seems ready for the rest of us):
Now, looking back to September, it seems I thought it was revolutionary then, too, but like so many revolutions, this one required a little waiting. That overview meanwhile goes into detail about why this is especially cool, even compared to any attempt to do something like this before:
VL.audio – more audio in your vvvv
But wait – there’s more. VL.audio, the long-awaited open-source audio engine for vvvv, is also approaching something stable. What makes me believe that? Well:
Breaking: VL.Audio approaching stable
Best of all, there is a set of buffer nodes in there. (Some day, I believe Pure Data will have a proper working buffered audio object in vanilla, even. Cough.)
I don’t think vvvv will replace tools like Max any time, but this does look like a very capable audio engine for mixing media, and coupling that with vvvv’s unique set of powers is good news.
vvvv gamma has more, too – it’s a powerful toolset ready to do any 2D, 3D, CV, VR, AR, ML task you throw at it, just about, with very nicely optimized performance and the ability to ship as an executable. Free for non-commercial use; reasonable license for those paid gigs, may you be blessed with them.
Best place for getting started:
Download, etc. – and yeah, this remains one of the really good reasons for running Windows (apart from getting lost in too many video games):
https://visualprogramming.net/
Correct pronunciation: vvvv, obviously. (What? Here, example: “Bob Moog was not really much of a vvvv user.”)
Plus, users are doing great things. I’m not the biggest projection mapping fan – maybe you feel similarly jaded – but add pinball and you’ve got me:
And this clever machine learning-based project:
Plus, this just happened: