something in the way

Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams asked visual designers why they write their own software and how it affects their process:

The answers reflect the individuality of the designers and their process, but some ideas are persistent. The most consistent answer is that custom software is written because it gives more control. This control is often expressed as individual freedom. Another thread is writing custom software to create a precise realization for a precise idea. To put it another way, writing custom code is one way to move away from generic solutions; new tools can create new opportunities.

Most of the interviewees are media artists, but there are a couple of names you'll recognize. My favorite, Amanda Cox, uses a Mad Libs metaphor:

Mad Libs is a game where key words in a short story have been replaced with blanks. Players fill in the blanks with designated parts of speech (“noun”, “adverb”) or types of words (“body part”, “type of liquid”), without seeing the rest of the story. Occasionally, hilarity ensues, but no one really believes that this is an effective method for generating great literature.

I'm looking at you, non-programming statistician.

Update: The article isn't there anymore, so you can read the cached page for now.

For people coding for visuals, Processing just keeps getting better. And for people who aren’t … well, you might just want to give it a second look, as a growing global army of people who never fancied themselves coders suddenly start typing up new creations. A new release makes mobile development easier and corrects lots of bugs. But specifically of interest to readers here, powerful libraries for 3D help make Processing an intensive tool for creating visuals. With the aid of running of your GPU, they can also deliver eye-popping real-time performance not normally associated with Java.

Processing 1.5

In a surprise release, much of what’s coming in Processing 2.0 this summer is now available in a stable, general release of Processing 1.5. It lacks the new built-in renderer – OPENGL2 – but does incorporate new features for developing for Android and, via the third-party library GLGraphics, you get all sorts of new OpenGL goodies. (Note: Processing 1.5 = 0196. The previous pre-release version, 0195, is worth downloading if you want to play with the new OPENGL2 renderer and its examples. Both are on the download page, and they can be installed side-by-side.)

Most importantly, for anyone publishing to the Web, you need to download this version now and re-export sketches. Applets were seeming to run very slow in Chrome and Firefox 4. (While I vastly prefer the Java version for things like performance tools or installations, I also appreciate the Processing.js JavaScript fork for Web delivery – but this fix does make applets work pretty well.)

New to Processing 1.5:

• Tons of editor fixes in the PDE development environment
• An essential bug fix that corrects slow performance when exporting for the Web.
• Android development support – in preview builds, but now in a stable build. (I think this is still considered a pre-release feature, but it means you can run the stable build to try it out.) Now go make stuff for phones and tablets easily.

Processing 1.5 is a good start, but for me, the live visual workflow isn’t complete without two additional libraries, toxiclibs and GLGraphics. A new GLGraphics update improves integration with both toxiclibs and the new Processing release.

toxiclibs

toxiclibs represents over 270 classes in 7 libraries, some 25,000 lines of code, written by digital artist Karsten “toxi” Schmidt. There’s gobs of stuff in there. The most useful is a basic set of classes for things like geometries, meshes, and 3D vectors which you’d otherwise have to build from scratch, and which are generally built in fairly standard ways. With elegant math, Verlet physics, and color libraries, and wonderfully-usable API design, Karsten gives you all the essentials in a way that will inspire you to use them and make something truly original. (A full tour is probably a good subject for another post. Just ignore the toxi.audio packages; with the libpd crew, I’m working on something with Pd I think you’ll find more useful and stable.)

I had a discussion with one colleague who felt that, indeed, toxi’s libraries are so powerful that people are simply using it as a crutch. That may be true to an extent: people should prominently credit toxi’s work, and to do otherwise is plagiarism. But with proper credit, I feel that standing on the shoulders of someone else’s work can be a good thing. Digging through toxi’s libraries is like going to school for the sorts of math and geometry that you need to learn to understand 3D generation. For many of these classes, involving essential mathematics operations and 3D modeling, I’d have no idea where to start, would spend weeks or months writing something inefficient, and would come out with something that reinvented the wheel. A lot of the techniques themselves in those 27,000 lines of code weren’t developed by Karsten, either: it’s more like seeing the wisdom of a master teacher, assembled from a wide variety of sources and passed on.

In fact, this is a rant that I should probably invoke elsewhere, but to me received knowledge is the essence of any craft. Composers don’t invent new rules of harmony (well, at least, not tonal harmony). Engineers don’t work out the laws of physics from scratch each time they build something.

And most importantly, because all of this exists in code, you can read and modify anything you find. It’s a black box if you want it to be, but I very often dig directly into the code to understand how things work.

There’s a bunch of documentation and a showcase for great work:
http://toxiclibs.org/

GLGraphics

All of this, though, brings me to GLGraphics. As I’ve been saying for – gee, years now – GLGraphics is the future of Processing. Now, that’s come to pass: gifted developer Andres Colubri authored the new OPENGL2 renderer that is similarly based on native OpenGL calls, and now runs the Processing Android port and upcoming Processing 2.0.

GLGraphics is separate from OPENGL2, but it’s your best bet for work on the stable Processing 1.5 build. Version 0.95 adds compatibility for that latest release, and adds two essential other features:

• An example of how to integrate with toxiclibs
• GLSL shader support, which can in turn be used for complex mesh generation.

See yesterday’s blog post announcing the update:
Processing 1.5 / GLGraphics 0.95

And there should be still more coolness to talk about soon, at least for Mac users, with the availability of Syphon for Processing. Stay tuned on that.

I think I have to hide away in a hole and do nothing but code this weekend. Anyone want to hop on IRC or PiratePad and pass code snippets back and forth?

We've seen sorting algorithms visualized and auralized, but now it's time to see them through the spirit of Hungarian folk dance. In a series of four videos (so far), folks at Sapientia University in Romania demonstrate how different sorting algorithms work with numbered people dancing around and arranging themselves from least to greatest.

See them in action in the video below. This one is for Bubble-sort. They move with such zest.

[Video Link via @shancarter & Boing Boing]

Daniel Shiffman, assistant professor at the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program, talks programming, computation, data, and why everyone should learn programming in this interview by Mark Webster.

It's not just about saving time. There are certain things you can discover and be creative with with computation that you can't by hand. They both go together.

Watch the four-minute interview below. The excitement in Shiffman's voice alone might want to make you learn some Processing (which he wrote a useful book for).

[Mark Webster via @ben_fry]

• What is the Best Way to Learn Flash/Actionscript for Data Visualization?
• Modern history of human communication
• Augmented reality atlas

Kaleido Demo from Agnes Chang on Vimeo.

Part of the beauty of working with code is that it can refine the way you think, challenging you to make design ideas into systems. But what’s often a challenge for beginners – heck, sometimes even for experienced coders – is thinking through the ways in which component parts function and combine.

We’ve seen code systems and visual patching systems, but Kaleido is something a bit different: it uses visual diagrams to loosely reinforce ideas in the code. Because it’s not rigidly attached to the code, you can use it to sketch out thoughts. But if you like, you can also attach sections of code to color-coded modules and immediately jump to bits of code from the visual interface, combining some of the best of visual programming and textual programming.

Kaleido works with Processing, adding an extra, visual pane to the standard Processing IDE. It’s the work of the Design Ecology Group at the MIT Media Lab and a Masters’ Thesis for Agnes Chang.

The always-wonderful designplaygrounds covered the technology recently, found via Processing co-creator Casey Reas:
Kaleido

Getting Started with Kaleido

In my own teaching, I try to emphasize object-oriented coding as early as possible. For me, it most neatly and nearly approximates the way we intuitively think about conceptual problems in general. It helps to systematize design. I’m not entirely sure Kaleido would work perfectly for me in the object-oriented workflow, if only because it seems to assume blocks of code, linearly, define function, rather than inheriting the relationships you create in classes. In fact – speaking to more advanced coders for a moment – maybe there’s a chance to do a sort of UML-for-artists tool that feels more creative and less like a computer engineering project. And I still like using Eclipse. But I could see Kaleido being a lovely addition to the Processing sketchbook, even in my work; I’ll have to give it a try.

Oh yeah, and someone has to try porting it to a non-Mac environment. (That should be eminently doable, by the way.)

The Processing IDE is entirely extensible. If you’re interested in customizing the coding experience yourself, there’s a terrific how-to video by sojama (Andreas Schlegel), just posted, that shows you how. See also his excellent new tutorial for making libraries in Eclipse, too.

processing-tool-template setup from sojamo on Vimeo.

Eloi of playmodes sends in this beautiful, extended (20 minutes) projection mapping performance, for the Ingravid Festival, in Figueres, Spain.

Telenoika Audiovisual Mapping @ Ingravid Festival, Figueres 9/2009 [FULL] from Telenoika on Vimeo.

Created by Telenoika, this performance is a tour de force of established projection mapping techniques and styles: Virtual lighting, 3D augmentation and distortion, edge highlighting and surface painting.

Mixed with lovely sound design, they’ve also added some nice new touches: The “light bulb generation” at 4:12 is lovely, as is the subsequent thunderstorm and electrocution of the building.

What this piece really does, that I’m excited to see more of, is establish a narrative. We’ve got our basic projection mapping building blocks now. Clever people will think of new, cool stuff to do, but while that’s going on, it’s time to start using these techniques to really tell some stories. Not just about things happening to the building or space, but inside it.

Another exciting development is that the “warping and video player software” was developed in OpenFrameworks [on CDMo] by Eloi, and he will be sharing it soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of his other development on the Playmodes Blog.

Elsewhere:
Playmodes/Eloi on Vimeo.
Telenoika on Vimeo.
Ingravid Festival