The open coding tool Processing has many, many libraries. Some deserve special mention. So I’m going to shift into infomercial mode for a second. Imagine video images of knives cutting through concrete blocks, etc.

Tried searching used book tables for math books because you can’t work out how to do vector math for illustration and the last math you remember is (barely) how to add?

Clueless about whether or not your sphere is intersecting your spline?

Wishing you could export an OBJ file?

Wait! Don’t waste valuable CPU cycles on sine and cosine calculations when your Processing sketch could run much faster with a lookup table! Don’t manually calculate pixels to mm conversions or wave generators!

Karsten Schmidt’s toxiclibs does all this — and more! It’s not just one library — it’s a whole bunch of libraries, each sharpened to slice right through one specific task.

Act now, and you also get tastier-than-ever particle physics using verlet integrators. (No clue what that means? You don’t read this site enough! It’s like other particle systems, only more awesomeish.)

It slices! It dices! It sorts color palettes! It spells color colour!

How much would you pay for this kind of useful library? $100? $200? $500? What, do you think this is Flash? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) It’s free — free as in beer and as in speech. In fact, someone go buy toxi a beer.

Ahem.

Okay, I promise never to do that again. If none of that made any sense, go pick up Processing. And try those lookup tables — they really are a good thing. If you were a CPU, you wouldn’t want to keep calculating sine and cosine functions, either.

http://code.google.com/p/toxiclibs/

Side note: of interest to CDMotion readers, you’ll notice that JMF video support library is not there. That’s no loss — no fault of toxi’s, Java’s JMF library from Sun has long been abandonware and falls squarely in the “scream and run the other direction” category. I hope to revisit the issue of how to make video work right with Processing over the coming weeks. And having talked to folks at Sun, I am optimistic that, after years of waiting, video on Java is finally getting back on track. I’ll be talking more about that soon.

Any time you see something with a lot of Web buzz, you expect someone to be negative – and perhaps that’s healthy, having someone to play devil’s advocate. But I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed by the rants over on musicradar.com. First, Chris Vinnicombe said watching the video was like “being spoon-fed a large helping of bathos with a boredom chaser.” (Ouch.) I’ve always been intrigued by the range of emotional responses – boredom included – visual can prompt. Like any expressive medium, it’s as easy to elicit hate as love, even with the same work.

But now musicradar.com is calling in the “expert” to complain more, and, oddly, because they just don’t like the aesthetic:

Is Radiohead video “half-baked”?

3D World magazine editor says the video’s raw data is “a bit like serving the eggs and flour instead of the actual cake,” and says the work to distort the data further is “not really that groundbreaking,” though he does give it credit for being Radiohead-esque. Now, maybe this is the fault of the ad campaign and Web buzz, but I never really thought the “camera-less” angle or the newness was so important, so much as the increasing aesthetic of digital rawness in visuals and the fact that the code and data are open. Indeed, I think the video will be more of a success if the fan-made videos wind up going beyond the original. We’ll see.

Even as a blogger, I find the obsession with “newness” in general to be blown a bit out of proportion. A technique is a technique; it’s usually not until a technique becomes old that it reaches its full potential. (See: photography.)

If nothing else, the negative reaction demonstrates some of the gulf between the live visualist/generative graphics scene around tools like Processing, and the “serious” / pro 3D scene involved in industrial work. By contrast, different music communities are often more aware of the aesthetic interests of each others’ output (not that music doesn’t have plenty of divisiveness all its own). But perhaps “industrial” and “art” producers can do more to share what they’re doing.

Just days into Radiohead’s experiment with providing data and code for a visualized music video, fan responses are already starting to appear. I’m not sure just how much of Thom Yorke’s face people will want, but the first results do look impressive – and indicate the talent and skill around the world, waiting to be discovered. If there’s any question of the merit of putting the code and data out on open source, this should answer that; it seems the video may well be more than just a gimmick.

Here’s a nice deconstruction below, found in a post at GreatDance’s “The Kinetic Interface” blog. (Could be a good blog to watch if, like me, you’re interested in the meeting place of dance and technology.) It’s the work of “j4mie” (Jamie Matthews), who has a couple of experiments going and more at his personal site. I enjoy seeing these things come together.

I’m a huge fan of Processing, but there’s no reason you have to use that tool exclusively – data is data. Peter Eschler writes via CDM comments that he and Michael Zoellner have ported the data to the real-time X3D / instantreality platform, as a system of particles. That means, in short, you can put Thom’s face up on interactive walls and poke him in the cheek and make his face disintegrate. (And to think, some people doubted this would revolutionize the fan/artist relationship.)

They call the results, shooting and melting his face, “Atomizing Thom.” To translate the data, they had to write a quick Python script that could reformat the CSV data in something X3D could work with. Full documentation on Peter’s and Michael’s sites:

radiohead’s ‘house of cards’ data in real-time 3d [i.document] And with some further updates: Atomizing Thom’s virtual copy [pyjax.net]

I’ve been meaning to familiarize myself more with this platform, so perhaps this will provide an excuse. Here’s one sketch below:

Back to Processing, though, none other than original Processing co-creator Ben Fry weighs in with some thoughts on the

project and the ins and outs of the code written by music video Director of Technology Aaron Koblin.

Radiohead - House of Cards

Parsing Numbers by the Bushel [writing | Ben Fry]

In the latter post, you’ll find Ben delving deep into the particulars of how code is parsed in Processing – very useful if you’re working on your own data visualization code.  Here’s my short translation: you can cast an entire String[] array, not just an individual String. That’s something that comes up quite often, so I may have some additional examples of this soon if that doesn’t make sense, ye Processing coders.

I’ll be talking to Aaron later this week; stay tuned.

And if you work up a sketch with the House of Cards data — rough or polished — we’d love to have the scoop here on CDM, so let us know.

Updated:

exiledsurfer points to Processing and OpenFrameworks templates for interpreting the Radiohead video code. The OFW code is only partially finished; to me, Processing should be easier to work with, but of course if you’re already working with OFW you may want to go with that environment.

I was a bit remiss in not contextualizing Martin Böttger’s work with his other generative 3D forms. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the potential of 3D – not because I’m especially talented with it, quite the opposite. I’m drawn to the expressiveness of 3D the way someone longs to play a cello. Martin has done some great stuff in making 3D forms in Processing, as well as in actual physical space. No fancy 3D printers here – think folded paper and hand-made installations. I imagine this would be a great way to learn coding in 3D, to actually do more work with physical objects. I’m teaching up at MassArt this summer, so maybe we’ll get to experiment with this a bit if students want to go that direction.

http://www.flickr.com/people/tsaworks/

There’s lots of good stuff in Martin’s Flickr feed, and as always, I thoroughly enjoy seeing things in various states of completion – like looking through sketchbooks.

If you’ve got some 3D modeling / generative work you’d like to share, feel free to drop us a line!

Who would have imagined seeing a music video on Google Code? Welcome to the new age of data visualization.

Radiohead’s new video uses 3D images capture from two scanners – one a close-proximity 3D scanner from Geometric Informatics, another a multiple-laser array for the “exterior scenes” rotating in a 360-degree pattern. That yields just data, not anything you can look at, so the artists created the video itself using the open-source tool we love so much, Processing (site | CDM tag).

Cool so far. But the interesting part is that the tools and data are open-sourced and/or freely available:

View the data visualization in 3D and navigate with the mouse

Download the data in CSV form and do stuff with it using Processing source code and instructions

There’s a remix-friendly license in there, and a YouTube group to follow the results.

All the relevant links, plus the video itself:

RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS [ Google Code ]

It’s also striking to notice that, despite the new-fangled technologies, the face stuff is remarkably similar in actual visual effect to the Rutt-Etra video synth (see also stories on Rutt-Etra restoration, Bill Etra restrospective). The process is entirely different: the Rutt-Etra processed the image directly via raster manipulations, whereas the Radiohead video is really a visualization of 3D data. But in some ways, I find the 1972 effect more appealing, and the visual relationship I believe is intentional.

Then again, part of the power of data visualization is that you can make it look like whatever you want. So it’ll be interesting to see how these techniques evolve.

Director: James Frost (Zoo Films)

Director of Photography: Von Thomas (Zoo Films)

Director of Technology: Aaron Koblin (whose work we’ve admired at the MOMA Design and the Elastic Mind show, via the now-defunct Yahoo Design Innovation Team, and elsewhere)

Joshue Ott/superDraw +Ezekiel Honig live at monkeytown from superdraw on Vimeo.

I’m very excited about the music lineup we have planned for this Friday in New York at the CDM-curated evening of live audio and visuals – but the visual lineup should be a big draw, too. If you’re in New York, come say hi (and if not, hope to have more details on these projects for the rest of the planet soon):

• Joshue Ott creates live visuals with his homemade superDraw generative illustration tool
• Paris (Voltage Controlled) and Don Miller (No Carrier) create glitchy, lo-fi visuals from custom-created 8-bit visual software on Nintendo and Commodore systems
• vade and Mary Ann Benedetto will visualize and reinterpret geeky things (possibly the Linux kernel, data packets, or both) using custom code and Quartz Composer stuff — we should even see a free release of some of those tools in time for the gig, so stay tuned to CDM
• Bill Jones creates live cinematic worlds inspired by sci-fi noir

Where: The Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City (map); head to the main door, on your left is the entrance to Penn Pavilion and you should see a table there.

When: Friday, July 18 2008 – performances run 11pm – 2am

Cost: US$10 at the door. First come, first served. (free if you have a conference badge)

We Are Hacks: Music and Visual Performance at HOPE, NYC – Preview

http://www.thelasthope.org/

Facebook event page (RSVP if you’re coming! Also on Going.com)

Above: one of my favorite videos from superDraw (Processing-based) by Joshue Ott above, though it’s even better to see it in person with the live drawing capabilities. Below: all-custom 8-bit-style software generates visuals, via Paris.

Function Field System - PureData/GEM from Paris/VoltageControlled on Vimeo.

Nokia / Friends / Heathrow Terminal 5 from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

The insanely wonderful crew at Sheffield, UK’s Universal Everything send along a lovely new project – just in time to help ease any unpleasant thoughts about air travel. As part of an installation for Nokia, Universal Everything created a series of projected animations. My favorite is this generative visual of people of different shapes and sizes being whisked along by a people mover (click through to Vimeo for the full HD versions):

Universal Everything / Nokia / Heathrow Terminal 5 / 2008 from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

A procession of diverse characters glide by on a travelator - friends, families, kids, lovers, rugby teams, fat couples, thin models - celebrating the diversity of people seen at Heathrow T5.
Every character riding the travelator is unique, using generative software to create an ever-growing population.

Perhaps I need a mobile version I can take with me through less-lovely airports or during gate hold delays.

It’s really brilliant stuff, and demonstrates that the aesthetics of generative visuals can cover quite a gamut. But by now, I’m bet you’re already wondering what’s powering the very-nice physics interactions, built in Processing. I’m a big fan of the traer.physics library for Processing, but you won’t get results like this — in fact, part of what I like about traer.physics is that it’s often unpredictable once you set up a dynamic system! Processing virtuoso toxi had the same experience, so he adapted a different approach to physics via a technique called Verlet integration, what is commonly seen in "ragdoll physics" and cloth. It’s a technique prized for its relative stability, which the alternative Euler physics techniques tend to lack. (Darnit, I wish I paid more attention in math class, but that’s another story.)

Toxi has been building his own library. Bits of it are on toxiclibs on Google Code, although there’s a little reorganization going on over there so I don’t see a download. I’m half tempted to try implementing this just to better understand what’s going on under the hood. Anyone offer hourly math tutorials? I can barter. I could teach you to make really good burgoo and mint juleps.

Here’s another example of Toxi testing the library, which contains some other visualizations that let you see better how the physics algorithms work:

CDMo reader Memo writes:

I’m just rushing out the door off to Glastonbury to set things up.. I thought you might be interested in this little (!) project…

Glastonbury 2008 PI Teaser (Webcam Piano + Psychedelic Fluids) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Everything is entirely camera driven and realtime. Originally started this app in processing, but realized I needed as much power as possible so switched to C++ / OpenFrameworks. Not using the GPU as much as I’d liked due to time restraints, v2 will be fully GPU hopefully ;)

Anyone going to Glastonbury? Drop in and play Memo’s piano for us. Working on your own (little!) project? Contact form’s to the right.

CDMotion contributor vade has posted the first release of his v002 Screen Capture tool, which allows video from the screen (including video, 3D — anything output to OpenGL) to be routed between applications. It all happens on the GPU, which means it’s very, very fast. In vade’s words:

v002 Screen Capture allows you to capture your desktop, or a portion of it to a texture and further process it. This can be used to bring in other applications output or windows as a source input to VDMX or other Quartz Composer compatible patch hosts.

Screen Capture is fully GPU accelerated, and therefore is very fast.

Sample Processing, 3L, Modul8, Jitter, GEM, or any application, and mix them in VDMX, or your Quartz Composer patch host of choice.

Right now, the release is Quartz Composer and Mac-only. (Quartz Composer plug-in support means it’ll also drop nicely into software like VDMX.) But there’s an open call to port this to other environments (Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, and such). It may even be possible to replicate the basic technique on another operating system, though the implementation would have to be reconsidered.

We’d love some feedback, so have at it! Especially interested in Processing support; see the thread on the Processing forums.

v002 Screen Capture Quartz Composer plug-in download

CDMotion contributor vade sends word of some experiments he’s been doing with inter-application video sharing. The basic idea: start with live imagery in one place (like a Processing sketch, for instance), and feed those visuals into another app for adding effects, mixing, and output (like VDMX). Naturally, you’d want to do this without a performance tax.

vade’s solution – Mac-only – uses live visual capture to send the output of one tool to another, all on the GPU. Performance looks great, but the big problem is that the window has to stay in the front. Still, I can already imagine uses for this.

Source-ry [abstrakt.vade.info]

That’s just one approach, though. Could we eventually even have a full-blown inter-application visual routing solution, one that might work between apps, platforms, or computers? I can imagine a few approaches that might work, though performance is always the challenge.