There is a dimension beyond that which is known to VJs. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge, between that semester when he was totally doing great at math and the one where he started to fail Calculus. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an dimension we call … the z axis.

Yes, three-dimensional visuals are here. And people look super cute and mod in those 3D glasses.

We covered the possibilities of the third dimension recently:

Next Projection Frontier, Going 3D? Head Tracking, Stereoscopy

Fortunately, cameras were there to capture the party at Thunderdome, a visual event in Boston. Check out the video at top. See also:
www.myspace.com/onemanleaves

Now, the next challenge: how do you get 3D visuals at live events to work better, to work so well that people can’t resist putting on the glasses, but can move around the space — while drinking — and still see the 3D transformations properly?

Discuss, ye great scientists of the eyes.

Scan Processor Studies (excerpts pt.1) from Brian O'Reilly on Vimeo.

The ghost in the analog machine breathes again, digitally.

Here’s a beautiful set of work posted by Brian O’Reilly, who working with original Rutt-Etra scan processing from decades ago has re-conceived the work in digital realms. The 21st-Century invention takes place in software, but with a certain analog flair, as “complex real-time feedback networks” and filters process their earlier counterparts. Thanks to David Lublin at Vidvox (makers of VDMX) for the tip. Full description:

The SCAN PROCESSOR STUDIES are a collection of works by Woody Vasulka & Brian O’Reilly.

The full work is of total approximate duration of 45 minutes, with sections of various lengths, textures, and dynamic qualities.

The project first started while Woody and I were working on different commissioned projects at the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe Germany). He and Steina on the exhibition MINDFRAMES and Garth Knox and myself on the DVD and performance SPECTRAL STRANDS: FOR VIOLA AND VISUALS. Woody, Steina, Garth and I spent many nights screening works for moving images, playing music, and cooking, enveloped in the huge ghost town mood the ZKM’s kitchen took on at night. During this time there were passionate discussions about video synthesizers (mainly my love for the Sandin Image Processor), and how Steina’s VIOLIN POWER had a huge influence on Garth’s and my new series of works.

The source materials were generated by Woody using a Rutt-Etra Scan Processor in the 1970’s and sat on a shelf for years, having been recently digitized. Woody came into my studio one day and asked me if I would be interested in using them to work on a collaboration, and the project began from there…

The works use sources excavated directly from the output of the Scan Processor, as well as further manipulations using Tom Demeyer’s ImX software, developed with input from Steina. Extensive editing and layering and additional augmentations were done using Phil Mortons IP. The Sound was generated (mostly) by custom software developed by Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan and myself called NETHER GENERATOR, which sets up a number of complex real time feedback networks filtered and processed by various means.

SCAN PROCESSOR STUDIES was first exhibited as an installation in the ZKM’s MINDFRAMES exhibition.

The source materials from Woody’s original experiments with the Scan Processor have also been used in conjunction with further processing on my part to create the base materials for other works, including a three screen version of Woody’s piece GRAZING and the work LEVEL & DEGREE OF DARK.

GVJ08 from XPLOITEC on Vimeo.

With all the coverage of guerrilla projection and projection mapping outdoors, last week I asked the CDM community what safety and legal considerations came into play with this work. It’s well worth reading through the full comment thread:

Can Mobile Projection Get You in Trouble? How Do You Plan?

Some of the highlights:

• Generally, while projection is only light, the use of the building face is considered the use of private property – this seems to be true around the world.
• Some countries even have specific legal restrictions on commercial use or projection in general. (Some localities require specific permits.)
• Highways are a primary concern; being near a roadway is considered a safety issue.
• In true guerrilla fashion, a lot of you tend for the hit-and-run approach – and find that, so long as you stay clear of the roadways, few complain.
• Because digital projection often references graffiti, people may see it as such – even though it leaves no permanent mark.

My favorite quote, from Riley: “I got stopped and interrogated by the police, not for the projections, but because they saw the glow of the laptop screens on our face. They thought we were looking at child porn on open wifi.”

More comments after the jump, including stories from the designers of the beautiful outdoor and guerrilla work featured in the videos here.

// LA VALLA TRÀNSFUGA from hector agusti capdevila on Vimeo.

Eloi Maduell of Telenoika writes (see the beautiful Valla Transfuga above):

Here in Spain we’ve been doing "visual attacks" as we call it from 2005 and never got a serious problem. In fact one of our motivation to do so was to know which law could be applied to us in this cases. What we get to know is [as some others mentioned above] :

• if it’s close to a driven way, it could distract drivers and cause accidents. if by bad luck something tragic happens they could come to you.
• if you’re projecting into someone else building, just the owners of the building could call the police for it. In Barcelona it’s understood somehow as painting a graffiti on the wall [even you leave no trace] it’s kind of a using private property without permission. But usually you always need to have a denunce from the building owner.
• in Barcelona dynamic publicity is still not permitted, so that’s why many LED-ed building can’t show they visual games …
• we always work as a guerrilla and we always plan who is going to talk to the police, who’s gonna hide the latptop and run away … etc . We love to do it fast and hard … We don’t want to play visuals on street, but use video projections to communicate, shout and talk about what’s not on TV …

Here some examples of our works :
// Transgenick Attack
>Talking about risks of GMO projected on the walls of supermarkets. All materials recorded inside the supermarkets the day before.
http://www.vimeo.com/3403253
// La Valla Transfuga
> Reusing an advertisment poster which was forgoten one side of a road. We give live again to this with a full day of audiovisual poetry, all made in-site.
http://www.vimeo.com/3339273
// Rehabilitació
> Talking about the urbanistic speculation [big sport in Spain] and the mooving which old people is pushed out of their houses to make new buildings. Created by Sala/v school.
http://www.telenoika.net//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=357&Itemid=156&lang=es
// Stop the War on Gaza
Reports of massive demonstrations on the streets of Barcelona to shout : Stop War on Gaza. Later 2008.
http://www.telenoika.net//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=736&Itemid=153&lang=es
// This Crisis is not ours
Demonstration on Barcelona streets to shout against the created financial crisis … The crisis is for banks and the system, not for people …
http://www.telenoika.net//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=732&Itemid=153&lang=es
We always use some kind of mobile [supermarket kart, or bike+kart to transport stuff] and we get power from generators.

From the guerrilla perspective, here’s heikki r of xploitec:

For our Guerrilla VJ Unit (a van with two dynamos [or whatcha call these thingies that charge the car batteries], one for the van and another for bigger batteries running the beamers), we had to declare to the police the driven route and got a recommendation to not go to the centre of the city.

This happened in Helsinki, Finland in conjuntion to us participating on a festival focused on street/youth culture.
Apart from this, we’ve never been had to face this.

Still, what struck me as kind of prejudice, or a preset mindframe or whatever, was that at the same time the national broadcasting company (with whatever other parties involved) was allowed to temporarily to put up a rather big and bright (like 100 to 1 compared to our light power) led screen in the middle of the busiest downdown crossing to promote the European singing contest and blaze out colorful motion graphics on it night and day.

The notice we got from the police said that us beaming out of our van creates a danger scenario where the car drivers as well as the pedestrians too are ‘hypnotized’.

As a side notion just the general light coming from the beamers (in the car) was considered to possiblly momentarily blind people. Unlike the headlights of our van or other cars.

Same as with anything yet unexperienced this just seems to be a transition phase into a society where this’ll turn into an everyday experience rather than the novelty it still seems to be.

Well, i guess that any recent film set in the near future illustrates, and thus possibly also makes it more probable too, the use of moving imagery in public space. To an excess to underline media power or this or that.

2penny documentation of these activities if bored at work:
http://www.vimeo.com/6515353
http://www.vimeo.com/6515847

I’m actually pleasantly surprised that the Americans seem to have comparatively few problems, perhaps thanks to our more spread-out Yankee landscape.

That said, detronik has a nice comment that I think really gets at the heart of what this can mean as a social/political activity in the city:

Here in the streets of Detroit things can be perceived quite differently at night. Detroit’s streets can be very volatile and my concern is not impairing drivers perception but keeping a watch out for overzealous authorities, police gang squad, homeland security, and possible carjackers. Detroit has been in quite a turbulent state, so much of my imagery is relative to social identity. I have been doing what I call Vision Assaults for some time now. I equipped my ford escape with a fairly high lumen LCD beamer and a high wattage inverter so as to mobilize the projection. I have no plate on the vehicle but opted for a temporary plate in the window so nobody can get my plate easily. I have one window masked off so I can start my projector, warm it up, then when the time and place is in range, I open the window to launch the image upon the target. It has been most effective, however I have had quite a few close calls including two police pursuits and a few street chases from unfavorable opportunists.

All of this illustrates to me why it is important to sometimes escape the shelter of clubs and galleries. Even the challenges these artists face are deeply connected to the way in which they interact with the social texture of the city. I look forward to hearing other experiences.

Kineme MultitouchPatch from George Toledo on Vimeo.

First up, for Mac users, there’s the new Kineme MultitouchPatch, which uses trackpads and the new Apple Magic Mouse for up to eleven simultaneous points with position, velocity, and angle. Unfortunately, those of us with earlier MacBooks are out of luck, but anyone with a newer Apple laptop or the new mouse can go play. (Thanks to Lee Grosbauer and others for the tip!)

Yep, that’s right: got a Mac, $69, and a nearby Apple Store? You + Magic Mouse = Cheap Multitouch.

http://kineme.net/release/MultitouchPatch/1.0

There’s no question this will be useful, especially with the ability to drop Quartz Composer compositions into something like VDMX and go play.

For broader applications, though, you need a way to handle all the possible multitouch input sources, from mice and trackpads to displays and camera tracking mechanisms and whatever else you happen to imagine. And there’s no reason to be stuck with one platform (cough, Mac) when you can use them all at once.

Python and Java users have two very powerful options, each of which has been under heavy development recently.

PyMT – A post-WIMP Multi-Touch UI Toolkit from Thomas Hansen on Vimeo.

For Python, there’s the awesome PyMT, a framework for multitouch that also includes easy tools for making gestures, widgets, and interactions. You can really produce things rapidly. Recent releases have added native support for Windows input on a lot of these affordable Windows-based solutions out there.

http://pymt.txzone.net/

For Java, and built in everyone’s favorite friendly coding-for-artists environment Processing, there’s MT4j. It’s been tested under Windows and Linux, but with some interested parties on the Mac, shouldn’t have any trouble working there, too. It’s got a scene graph and flexible use of any input, including camera tracking of touch and objects, easy widget library, OpenGL… and the list goes on. The important thing is the ability to use whatever you like as an input and graphical output, with lots of goodies to cut out the work of reinventing the wheel just to bang out a prototype.

And yes, it has the most ghetto-fabulous system for multitouch I’ve seen yet: grab a cheap Windows PC, plug in two mice, and rock the hell out. Use two wireless mice on multiple channels, and you’ve got a recipe for awesomeness, complete with… oh, crap. I’ve run out of hands to play my keytar. Maybe I can have someone stand behind me operating the mice while I blaze through my keytar solo.

There’s really no reason this has to be limited to Microsoft Surface / reacTable-style tables with objects on top of them. Multiple touch points are obviously ideal for any graphical or expressive application. They could be on the display of your laptop or tablet, or a projection, or whatever. I’ll be looking at some specific applications of MT4j soon.

http://www.mt4j.org

More resources:

Sparsh is a framework for providing multitouch from a variety of hardware, also built in Java. It uses a gesture server + gesture adapter + device driver model, works with any OS, and can be interfaced with both C/C++ and Java. That allows easy access to basic gestures and custom gestures in a way that’s hardware-agnostic.

On the NUI Group’s superb forum, there’s a discussion of accessing the new touch APIs in Windows 7.

Ah, clothes. You’re so warm, so good at preventing us from being naked and sunburnt. But you know what the passionate visualist really wants from clothes: we want a display.

The GalaxyDress is the latest creation of the fashionista-scientists of CuteCircuit, the smart-wearable design collective founded by Ivrea-trained designers Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz. The design breakthrough, naturally, comes from the LEDs, which are tiny, thin, and most important for applying them to fashion, flat. The dress has also found its way into one of my all-time favorite museums.

The Galaxy Dress is the center piece of the "Fast Forward: Inventing the Future" exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The museum is celebrating its 75 years and has commissioned the GalaxyDress for their permanent collection.

The GalaxyDress provides a spectacular and mesmerizing effect being embroidered with 24000 color LEDs, it is the largest wearable display in the world. Constructed using the smallest full-color LEDs that are flat like paper and measuring only 2 by 2 mm.

Not that I’m entirely averse to wearing dresses (I did go to Sarah Lawrence), but now I think we need a GalaxySuit to go with this.

In all seriousness, I have no doubt that, just as visualists go beyond the screen with clever projection mapping, wearable technology and textiles will also prove a canvas for digital art and visuals.

CuteCircuit showed off more of what they’re working on in wearable tech on The Gadget Show (though you may need to dig through to find them). And you can catch a lot more work here:

http://www.cutecircuit.com/news/

This is of course not the only wearable display in existence (though it is higher-resolution than others I’ve seen). Via comments, Felix Turner points to the terrific LED suit worn by Bunny from the audiovisual band Rabbit in the Moon. His photo:

Finally, “mixing” doesn’t have to be synonymous with “S-Video/composite”: DVI-grade mixing at affordable-by-human prices is coming. We were already thrilled by Toby *Spark’s effort to lead a community-driven DVI hardware mixer effort. But tantalizing as the teaser was, it led to still more questions.

Toby has followed up with an extensive Q&A on his site. (Expect more details via CDM soon, as well.)

dvi mixer q&a

Among the highlights:

• Additive blend is planned(!)
• Tap buttons are coming
• DVI-D and VGA both will work
• V2.0 features may include goodies like Ethernet/OSC/MIDI and multiple processors

There’s also a good note here about resolution. Dual-link and higher resolutions are out — for now. But, really, is anyone complaining at this price? This is a huge leap from the current state of things.

Higher resolutions: The hardware can only go so high. There is a bandwidth limit and a line length limit, so while it can do 1920×1200, it can’t do 2400×600 which is actually fewer pixels. I’d love it to be otherwise, I have a major project that really needs that Triplehead at 800×600, let alone the requests for 3072 x 768 I’ve had! Still, triple 640×480, dual 1024×768 and straight 1920×1080 are such a leap from 720×576. Addressing this seems the obvious next step for a version two of the processor.

What’s remarkable to me is that the basis for all of this is existing, off-the-shelf hardware. Be sure to review the full text of Toby’s Q&A, plus our original story. This could be the start of something big.

We’ve been blogging mobile projection and projection mapping and projection on buildings pretty endlessly. But here’s an interesting question — just how “guerrilla” can you get before your projector gets you in trouble? A reader asks about a project in New Jersey on buildings he doesn’t own, apparently without permission. At what point can the building make you stop — when the light gets in their eyes? What sorts of efforts have been necessary, projectionists, for you to get permission? What logistical issues have you encountered, as far as placement, distance, and power?

If visualists are to take over the world’s architecture, we’d better have a plan. Open thread begins … now.

Sune spoke about how audio-linked visuals can be “jumpy”, which is often the case. But Internal Thinking shows that random, fast-moving, erratic elements can be combined with smooth control and precise performance to create remarkably subtle work.

Vadim used vvvv, Blender [on CDMo] and Meshlab for creation, and the superb Fraps for capture.

The fantastically gritty music is Growls Garden, by Warp records artist Clark.

Vadim’s Blog.
Vadim on Vimeo.

Unreal Engine 3, by way of the Unreal Development Kit, is now available free for non-commercial use. That means that not only are its capabilities for games accessible, but all sorts of other possibilities for art, visualization, and, yes, live visuals. Unreal is scriptable, customizable, and powerful, making this pretty massive news. The feature list is deep as you might expect. Among the highlights:

• Video support
• Programmable shaders, particle effects, and many other goodies
• Physics support, via PhysX
• A UI for managing and editing assets and content
• Animation and cinematic features for making it easier to add motion
• Artificial intelligence
• Scripting language

Networking support means that adding OpenSoundControl messages or other integration with performers and music and visual performance tools is equally possible.

With the free release of the UDK, Epic is also releasing additional documentation, like the full source code for the sample Whizzle game, seen here.

The license is fairly liberal. It’s not remotely open source — any modification to the engine itself is prohibited. On the other hand, even as an advocate for open source, there really isn’t anything in the open source domain quite like this. That doesn’t necessarily mean Unreal Engine is your best choice for every project, but if you really want a full-blown engine — with all of the AI and graphics eye candy and whiz-bang features — without paying some massive license fee, the UDK stands out. True, you can’t reverse-engineer anything, but the appeal here I suspect would be having all of these hard tasks done for you. Commercial licenses are reasonable, too, starting at US$99.

If you do want open source, though, you can get a previous-generation engine in the form of the Quake 3 project. And for live visuals, that might be more than sufficient. Other options would be looking at open-source game frameworks like OGRE and jMonkeyEngine. For experimental work, sometimes having less in the engine can be useful.

But that doesn’t take away from this being big news. It’ll be interesting to see if folks in the performance and creative communities give this a go. And for independent game developers, it’s utterly huge.

If you look at this framework, let us know what you think and what you make (or what you make of the alternatives).

http://www.udk.com

Thanks to Orubasarot for the tip!

Updated: The awesome Unity 3D has a free license, announced on Halloween, as noted by a number of readers and Blender Nation. It’s “free as in beer,” not open source, as is Unreal Engine. But Unity is also built on open source technology (Mono, which gives it its cross-platform savvy and elegant coding), and integrates with tightly free tools (Blender). The good news is, you can use Unity for commercial projects as well as free ones. And Unity is especially modern and artist-friendly, a favorite toolkit for many of those working with 3D engines for the first time. The bad news is, in exchange for the commercial capabilities, the free license does not include all the capabilities – most notably for us, video is missing. Then again, it’s free to try out and evaluate, and if you do need to grow, you may decide to pony up for that commercial license. Anyone with some Unity experience, I’d love to cover this (and Unreal) for CDM; get in touch.

Unity license and version comparisons

Commercial and free projects alike, it’s an insanely good time to be a developer in the 3D and gaming worlds. Business in the game industry may be sagging and you may get a lot less sleep as an artist, but we do really have some great gifts on the tech side.

Live at home from Sune Petersen on Vimeo.

Sune also had some great thoughts in his email about performance, which I’d like to share:

This year I have begun a collaboration with a friend of mine, who is making music, to try to see how to make visuals and music as part of the same project, and now I have bumped into a wall.
How to go about doing that?
The technical aspects of linking my VVVV-patches to his ableton arrangements is not the problem, the problem is that we are both used to thinking in a way where music is first and then there is usually some sort of inspiration coming when listening to the music and then some visuals can be created.

Fact is that the way your visuals are being made makes the “sound” of your visuals, it is possible to see what software is being used to make the visuals, just like you can hear that people are playing a guitar (remember arkaos tunnels?). To me that is not really a problem as long as the “tune” you are playing is good.

In preparation to this collaborative project, we have begun making some DJ/VJ sets where we don’t link our computers… nor do I have an audio input since I find that most audio responsiveness is too straight forward and often too “jumpy”.
We have done this lately and with the great flexibility of VVVV the performance can easily scale from one projection up untill so far 3 projections but more is on its way.

This DJ/VJ setup has made me realize that what I really want to achieve is to create an instrument that I can play, just like a guitar player in a band plays his guitar. This introduces the risk of being
off beat and making errors and I definitely need to improve my sense of rhythm but I feel that I am much better connected to the performance when I play the instrument instead of “programming” it. I have some times felt that I was just a spectator of some of the too automated performances I have previously made. This way of performing is really engaging. That is also why I am on stage with the DJ when performing.

What now remains is to continue developing this instrument, I have this “rule” that whenever I make a new performance I make one new feature, this way the performance evolves over time.

I hope I did not lose you in this long email, I suppose that when you write about something about which you are passionate, long texts appear.

I hope you don’t mind me “spamming” you this way.

One new feature per performance is a rule I can definitely get behind. Likewise for VJs getting out there on stage!

We all complain from time to time that the visual community isn’t getting the pay, props, or profile of the eardrum-botherers. Getting on stage and making audiences aware that there’s an artist in control of their retinas is a great way to improve the lot of visualists everywhere.

Finally, I really hope that nobody out there considers sending their work to us spamming! We do receive a lot of email, so Peter and I don’t always post everything that hits our inbox. I’m sure that most of you would agree that we could probably work on a slightly increased posting frequency though. We’re working on that, but we do need your help, so if you’re out there and making awesome stuff, then tell us about it.