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Who Will Young, Damien Schneider
When Wed, May 15th 2019 - 20:00 until Wed, May 15th 2019 - 20:00
Where Quays Theatre, The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester, United Kingdom
Brand new audiovisual performance on the way from me and Damien Schneider. Featuring body movement by Sean Murray
15th May - The Lowry, Salford Quays, Manchester - Ticket cost is 'pay what you feel'
thelowry.com/digital
jojojo IO,
one of the more important features for quick prototyping in vvvv always were the IOBoxes. Here is an update that finally brings the vl IOBoxes up to par (and beyond) with what you were used to from vvvv beta.
Support for Spreads
Most notably missing so far was proper support for spreads. Sorted. When creating an IOBox via "start link -> middleclick" you now always get an interactive IOBox for the supported primitive types: ints, floats, bool, string, path, color, enum, even if they are spreaded or spread-of-spreaded or...
Or configure your own, by first creating a normal IOBox via right doubleclick and then configuring its type (middleclick it) via the Inspektor to a Spread type:
Key to spread IOBoxes is that you can directly set their count, without the need to open an inspektor. By default they now show a maximum of 5 entries and add a scrollbar to show more. If you want to see more, you can change the "Maximum Visible Entries" count via the Inspektor.
To quickly modify a constant spread you can also insert/remove slices when the inspektor is active:
Same as with other editors, the spread editors also work on inputs of a node to quickly tweak values:
And you can now specify defaults for input pins that are spreads:
Override values temporarily
Mostly useful for numbers and bools, in vl you can override upstream values directly, by manipulating an IOBox that sits in the middle:
Numbers
What we're used to from beta: Entering values via formula now also works:
Vectors
Vectors now allow you to change all components at once:
Also the Inspektor now shows all properties that you get on a float IOBox, so you can now also configure e.g. a vectors precision.
Strings and Chars
Both can now optionally show non-printable characters:
Colors
Color IOBoxes now also show you transparency:
Paths
Paths finally can be reduced to smaller sizes and show proper path ellipsis, ie. preferring to keep the last part of the value visible:
Click the little O icon to open the current file/directory with their associated program. ALT+click the icon to show the file/directory in the explorer.
Matrix
For completeness:
This is it for now.. Available for testing in both latest alphas and gamma previews.
We are very lucky to host the first vvvv gamma workshop at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel. Joreg and Tebjan will give a 3 hour introduction into the vvvv future. Since we use vvvv a lot at the university, it makes totally sense to check out, what we can do with the next big thing.
There are still some seats left.
Where ? - Prototyping Lab, Werkstattgebäude
When ? - Thursday 18th of april, starting 2pm
In case you don't want to patch but just listen to what will come, you are invited to the evening presentation. The boys will give us a making-off presentation of Ocean Of Air, the first ever project realized with vvvv gamma and the upcoming Xenko 3d engine integration. (sentence stolen from the other news post ;)
Where ? - mainbuilding,ZFM Medienseminarraum EG
When ? Thursday 18th of april, starting 7pm
See you there
When Wed, Apr 24th 2019 - 19:30 until Wed, Apr 24th 2019 - 23:00
Where Retune Studio, Glogauer Str. 21, 2nd Backyard, Berlin, Germany
Here we go,
vvvv berlin meetup #8 is happening at a new location!
Spektrum Berlin sadly is no more. If you ever enjoyed a vvvv meetup or another event there, please consider donating!
Meanwhile the fine people of Retune Studio offered us their space, which we'll gladly occupy next week.
We'll have tonfilm giving us a making-off presentation of Ocean Of Air, the first ever project realized with vvvv gamma and the upcoming Xenko 3d engine integration.
Also we're happy to have m9dfukc talk about "Bodies In Motion" he recently helped realize:
And as always, feel free to bring your project/notebook/questions or whatever you want to share with the community. We have space and time for spontaneous discussions and presentations!
If you feel like, please rsvp on our Getogether page!
previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in February 2019
it is out!
as promised, we released vvvv gamma into the wild. not exactly the full 1.0 release we had hoped for, but at least as a preview that you can download and testdrive. we're eagerly awaiting your feedback and bugreports in the dedicated gamma forum and are regularly updating the download link in the announcement post with the latest preview release.
one of the freaky new features recently introduced in vl are input and output pin-groups. when previously the usage of dynamic pin-groups required writing c# code, it is now a breeze to add them to your own nodes with just a few clicks.
and a release candidate is up for our computer vision library VL.OpenCV, which is now using latest OpenCV 4 and comes with a lot of howto patches that you can conveniently access via the help browser. note that when using gamma, VL.OpenCV is already included, no need for a separate nuget-install!
next steps? polishing gamma to a proper 1.0 release by holding on to our roadmap.
Contributions
a firework of new and updated contributions this week. take your time to check these out:
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new: Struct by woei Preset Manager by joao |
updated: Player (DX11.Texture) by woei SceneGraph by woei Ivans Project Template by bo27 Barcode1d (Texture) spreadable nodes by bjoern |
and the great yhy, one of the winners of the golden quad 2015, who also happens to be a youtube celebrity with over 1000 subscribers, who brought us 100+ tutorials on vvvv that have a total of ~50k views, is at it again: as of this writing, he has already produced 8 japanese vl tutorials: vvvv講座(VL編)
Gallery
two teasers:
- one by polyrhythm
- another by domj
and a reminder:
the vl/xenko powered installationhttp://oceanofair.com got extended once more and is still on show in london until may 5th!
Jobs
a vvvv handler is needed in Milan in April.
plus mentions of vvvv in job postings on:
that was it for march. anything to add? please do so in the comments!
General Status
As you know, efforts have been going for the last year and a half into bringing a computer vision nodeset to VL.
The goal was to incorporate as many of the features covered by the world renowned ImagePack; contributed by Elliot Woods some years ago; while bringing in as many new features and improvements as we could.
In the winter of 2018, after setting a roadmap and having patched a decent initial nodeset, we happily announced the pre-release version of VL.OpenCV.
Since then, listening to your needs and constant feedback, we have tried to polish every corner, fix every bug, document every odd scenario, add plenty of demos and specially we tried to give you a clean, consistent and easy to use nodeset.
At this point in time, we are happy to announce that the goal has been nearly met. Most of the features available in the ImagePack made it into VL.OpenCV with the exception of Structured Light, Feature Detection, StereoCalibrate and some of the Contour detection functionality. At the same time, newer features such as YOLO, Aruco marker detection and others have been brought in for you to play with.
So what's next? Even better documentation and loads of examples!
In the mean time, here is a summary of the new things that have been brought into the package in the last couple of months:
CvImage
The new CvImage wrapper around OpenCV's Mat type allows for some optimizations, specially when dealing with non-changing images.
CvImage allows nodes to run only once when the image has changed, significantly reducing CPU usage
Cache Region lovvvves CvImage!
Since it is now possible to detect if an image has changed, CvImage is a perfect candidate to benefit from Cache regions.
Cache regions can now make proper usage of image inputs and outputs
Renderer
The Renderer was re-built from the ground up to improve usability and to fix bugs and issues. Title, Render Mode and Show Info features were added. Renderer also remembers its bounds on document reload.
New Renderer implementation introduces Title, Renderer Mode and Show Info pins
Histograms
Histogram analysis has been added to VL.OpenCV. A useful tool in many scenarios.
Histograms allow you to analyze pixel value tendencies per channel
Homography
Homography and reverse homography are now available in VL.OpenCV.
Homography (vvvv used only for point IOBox)
Stereo Matchers
Two new Stereo Matchers were added, these allow you to create a depth map from a set of stereo images. For more see the StereoDepth demo patch in VL.OpenCV.
Depth map obtained from a pair of stereo images
Serialization
Serialization support was added for CvImage and Mat types, allowing you to use CvImage as part of more complex data structures which get serialized with no effort. This can be a heavy operation so make sure to trigger it when needed only.
For a hands on demonstration check out the Serialization VL demo that ships with VL.OpenCV.
Breaking Changes
As part of this final effort to clean everything even further and make the nodeset consistent and properly organized, we needed to rename and move a few things around which as you can imagine means the introduction of breaking changes. We understand this is an annoying thing to cope with, but this was basically the reason why we chose to keep this pack in a pre-release state until we felt confident with its structure and approach.
In summary yes, you will get red nodes when you upgrade your VL.OpenCV projects to the latest version, but in most cases it should be as easy as to double-click and find the node in its new category.
An exception to this are the nodes that got renamed, which we list below:
- Reader (Intrinsics) -> IntrinsicsReader
- Reader (View Projection) -> ViewProjectionReader
- Writer (Intrinsics) -> IntrinsicsWriter
- Writer (View Projection) -> ViewProjectionWriter
- GetByteArray -> ToByteArray
- GetValues -> ToValues
- GetValues (Custom) -> ToValues (Custom)
- FiducialTracker -> FiducialDetector
- Update (FaceRecognizer) -> FaceRecognizerUpdate
- VideoFile (Append) -> VideoWriter (Append)
- VideoFile - VideoPlayer
- Merge -> Join
Summarized Changelog
General
- Introduced a new wrapper for Mat called CvImage
- Cache region additions to improve performance on non-changing Images
- ImageReader re-implementation
- Renderer re-implementation
- VideoIn re-implementation
- Reintroduced "Supported Formats" output pin on VideoIn node
- Upgraded to VL.Core 0.95.37
- DirectX/OpenCV transformation documentation and cleanup
- Added Blocking, Reactive and HoldLatestCopy versions of VideoIn node
- Added Blocking and Reactive versions of ImageReader node
- Reimplemented Extrinsics as a data type
- Stabilized VideoFile Source node and moved from Experimental into Sources
- Added Serialization support for Mat type
- Added Serialization support for CvImage type
New in VL
Nodes
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Demos
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New in vvvv
Nodes
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Demos
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Remember that in order to use VL.OpenCV you first need to manually install it as explained here. Also, until we move away from pre-release you need to use the latest alpha builds.
We hope you find good use for this library in your computer vision projects and as always, please test and report.
Up until now VL had a rather rudimentary support for pin groups. Only nodes following a certain pattern had the option to have a dynamic amount of input pins. For simple nodes like a plus or a multiply this worked out fine, but for others it either felt like a hack or it was simply impossible to use at all. A node having a dynamic amount of outputs was never supported at all.
Pin Groups by Index
This all changes now by introducing proper support for pin groups. So let's jump right into it and have a look at the definition of the very famous Cons node:
As we can see the pin inspektor is showing one new entry called "Pin Group". This flag has to be enabled obviously. Then we annotate the pin with type Spread. This creates pins with the name "Input", "Input 2", "Input 3" etc. on the node.
If we now look at an application of the Cons node we can already see a couple of nice new features:
- It's much faster. To build the input spread it can make use of a spread builder allocating the needed memory in one go, compared to the old Cons node which concatenated one spread after the other, leading to a total of 8 copies.
- The returned spread will stay the same as long as the inputs stay the same. This is done by keeping the generated spread for the input group in an internal field. When building up the new spread each slice will be compared to with the one from before. And only if one of those slices change a new spread will be allocated.
Pin groups are not limited to inputs, they also work for outputs which brings us to a new node called Decons - deconstructing a spread into its outputs:
Pin Groups by Name
Cons and Decons are examples of using a pin group as a Spread. But there is another variant where the group gets annotated as a Dictionary<string,*>. Instead of addressing the pins by index, they get addressed by their actual name. Let's have a look at two other new nodes again called Cons and Decons but residing in the Dictionary category:
Pins can get added as usual with Ctrl - +, but what's new is that those pins can be renamed in the inspektor UI giving us the ability to quickly build up dictionaries.
The patch of the Cons building up a dictionary compared to the one building up a spread only differs in the type annotation of the input pin.
Apart from Spread and Dictionary the system also supports pin groups of type Array, MutableArray and MutableDictionary. According Cons and Decons nodes can be found when enabling the Advanced view in the node browser.
Creating Pins from within a Patch
So far the pins of a pin group have always been created by the user interface of the patch editor. Things get really interesting though when creating them from within the patch itself:
Imagine the string being an expression of some sort generating inputs for each unbound variable. The possibilities are endless :)
The nodes needed to create and remove pins can be found in the VL category after adding a reference to VL.Lang - the patch from the gif above can be found in the help folder of the VL.CoreLib package.
More information on those nodes will be covered in an upcoming blog post. Until then you can try these new pin groups in our latest alpha downloads and happy patching,
yours,
devvvvs
previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in January 2019
say vvvvhat?
right when we have only one month left to the announced release of vvvv gamma, february cut us short of another 2 days...had we only known that.. so where are we?
we've finally added support for Regular Expressions to the nodelibrary of vl and finished one important step of UX improvement we describe in: Application vs. Definition.
also a lot of work happened in the VL.OpenCV library which we now consider to be in a pretty mature state and shall therefore release it as a proper (ie. non-prerelease) package soon.
but most importantly we've announced the pricing for vvvv gamma which has faced some criticism as you can read yourself in the comments. being aware that this would not be an easy topic, we consulted with a couple of longterm vvvv users, to get some outside views on our thinking before the announcement. from the public responses we now got, we understand that this was not enough. our attempt to keep the announcement simple and compact backfired with quite some missunderstandings of the terms that we presented. we appreciate your feedback. please add your thoughts and also feel free to contact us via mail if you don't feel like adding to the public discussion. every thought helps us clarify the discussion.
so, less than a month left till the announced release..we make very good progress but still this is going to be tough...
also last call to take part in the 2019 Survvvvey. we've reached more than 300 participants and will be closing it and releasing the results soon!
Contributions
| quite a couple new things: | and one update: |
Gallery
and some more fine projects:
- Second Litany for List I Ljosi by StiX
- Red Square (Engineer) by eps
- NoiseSignalSilence by quadrature
- Forest by boplbopl
- EQ Teaser - kinetic wall by u7angel
- IBM Flux – data driven art installation by onformative
- CARL LAEMMLE by schnellebuntebilder
that was it for february. anything to add? please do so in the comments!
Since a while, VL comes with the idea that you can organize node and type definitions in your VL document.
But now, we want to give you back another, alternative way to look at things - an organization structure, which is more intuitive and also well known from vvvv beta: The application side of things...
And also, we did this in reaction to the feedback we got from Link festival:
You want to be able to navigate the running object graph, where it's about the instances of patches, not about their definitions. You want to be able to navigate into a running patch and see the values that flow in this instance, not in another instance of the same patch...
Also, typically you approach your project top-down and just add more details to it since this is the basic idea of rapid prototyping: patching a running system that you incrementally grow and modify.
So we took the chance to shift the focus a bit so that in VL you again get confronted with the application side of things first.
The Application Side of Things
This is what you know from vvvv beta: a patch can contain a sub-patch - you navigate into it and inspect the values flowing. You go outwards - to the caller - via "Ctrl-^". With the ^-Key we actually refer to a key at a certain position on the keyboard.
In VL this now is just exactly the same. Navigating into a process node shows you the right values. Ctrl-^ brings you back to the caller. So you are basically navigating the living node tree of the application. In VL it's been hard to think in these terms, but now it's the default. We also made sure that this works when navigating between vvvv beta and embedded VL nodes.
Also, try to use the back and forth mouse buttons if you happen to have a 5-button mouse. Ctrl-MouseBack will bring you to the calling patch and Ctrl-MouseForth will travel back into where-ever you were coming from.
Every VL document comes with an Application patch, which will open by default. You can start patching right away. A bit as it is like in vvvv beta.
Patching top-down never has been easier. Creating an Ape simulation from scratch:
You can run many applications at the same time, e.g. several example patches in addition to your project app. The application menu lists all documents that actually make use of the application patch.
The Definition Side of Things
Definitions in vvvv beta basically correspond to the .v4p files, in VL you can have more of them per document.
Library developers or more advanced users will of course still want to organize types and nodes and approach them from the definition side. This is like saying "There is one idea of a wheel, but if you feel like you can instantiate three of them".
For an overview of the definitions, each document comes with a separate Definitions patch - basically what's been the document patch.
Here you see what happened during patching top-down: on the definition side, we now have two Processes.
That's where you would from now on also place your Classes, Records...
Navigation within the current document structure works with Ctrl-Shift-^, Ctrl-Shift-MouseBack, Ctrl-Shift-MouseForth.
When navigating into a patch like that you will see some instance of the patch or maybe none, if none is instantiated or currently running. In this case, you will not be able to see any values.
If the patch is not yet inspecting a particular instance it will wait for the moment an instance gets executed and then attach to this particular instance.
Some more minor cleanup
We took the chance to clean up some bits in the node browser and the patch explorer as well.
The application patch e.g. now doesn't offer confusing options, but basically only shows the properties stemming from pads, the Process Node Definition now is called that way (was "Order"), Process Nodes in the node browser look a bit like process nodes in the patch, choices like "Input", "Node" appear at the top of the list of choices in the node browser...
That should be it for now!
Thanks, yours devvvs
helo everyone,
here is to talk about numbers once again.
We recently introduced you to vvvv gamma and what it will initially be about, but also what you can expect from it in the future. Now is the time to inform you about the licensing options we have planned for it.
Trust me, when I tell you that this is the most rewritten blog-post we ever published. Creating a suitable licensing model seems far more complex than creating the software itself. So initially this resulted in rather complex models that we were only able to boil down to the below by talking to some long-term commercial users and incorporating their (sometimes contradicting) feedback. So, many thanks to those who listened and engaged in a discussion with us!
Continuing the T.R.U.S.T model
Foremost it is important for us to keep our (pattern pending) T.R.U.S.T model, which means:
- No copy-protection
- No feature limitations
- No mandatory registration
- We trust you to declare your commercial use of vvvv correctly.
That's the world we want to live in. We don't believe in any form of copy-protection or artificial feature limitations that usually only restrict honest users. Others will always find a way around such restrictions and thus not be bothered anyway. We're all grown-ups here. If vvvv helps you make a living, then help us make a living by providing vvvv for you. How simple is that?!
Education must be free
Same as above, this is what we believe in. In the end everything always comes down to education and equal access to it. We don't want to be responsible for anyone to not have the pleasure of learning vvvv.
There are commercial educational institutions that could make us a lot of money indeed. But also we're smart businessmen and know how to cash in on the free drugs we hand out now, later.
Further it is in the interest of any professional user of vvvv to quasi support the free educational use as this keeps the flow of new talents steady. WinWinWin.
Gamma over beta
So why not simply keep the existing licensing model? Indeed, to make this clear: The licensing for vvvv beta will not change! As long as you're not interested in vvvv gamma, everything stays the same for you (but you're missing out! Just sayin...).
But then, regarding vvvv gamma, there are a couple of reasons to adapt the licensing model:
- The existing model is simple to explain, but just does not fit well to different use-cases. We've heard of people not using vvvv for certain smaller tasks because they didn't justify a whole license
- With its possibility to export executables, vvvv gamma becomes a different type of product. It allows you to distribute and run your projects as self-contained programs without the need to install and run vvvv on every machine. Like this, vvvv becomes closer to more traditional development environments where it makes sense to charge per developer seat rather than per executable that was created with it
- By still offering the edit-while-running workflow, vvvv gamma at the same time stays the same product and needs to keep existing licensing options
- Too often we heard the phrase "I told the client to buy the license" as an excuse and even partly as a complaint that it would be our fault that we don't have means (dongle, ...) for the client to understand they need a license. But this was never our intention. We're doing business with you, not your clients!
So bottom line up front: vvvv gamma is more and therefore requires a more defined licensing model.
Types of vvvv gamma licenses
Having said all this, we want you to declare your use of vvvv gamma using the following licenses:
In other words: the idea is that every commercial devvvveloper will have an Editor Plus license and that is it. With it you can work on and export as many projects as you please. For cases where you want to run the vvvv development environment also on a device in, say an exhibition, to use the advantage that you can e.g. remotely maintain the program while it is running, you need additional Editor licenses for each device. This is comparable to how you'd buy a full license for each PC running vvvv beta so far. Obviously you can still use your developer seat license also in an installation/show, as long as you're running only one instance of vvvv and don't need the license to work on another project at the same time.
If you're not working on projects that will be deployed as executables, then you can stick to the Editor license also during development.
And finally, the Product license, which is similar to the vvvv beta OEM license. Only now it is in addition to the Editor Plus license every developer needs who is working on a product.
Pricing per size of wallet
Another thing we wanted to improve over the beta licensing model is the fact that we understand that vvvv is used in quite diverse financially potent scenarios. To accommodate for all of those on an individual basis is not really feasible. But at least we thought, we can add an option on either end of the default "professional" user.
Glossary
- SME: Small and medium-sized enterprises
- NPO: Nonprofit Organization
- FOSS: Free and open-source software
Payment options in detail
Different use-cases also demand different payment options. Here is what we have planned:
Perpetual
- Buy once, use forever
- Includes one year of updates
- Can be converted into a subscription within the first year
Subscriptions
- With a subscription you are always eligible for using the latest available version.
- With a yearly subscription your are saving 30% from the second year on.
- Automatic renewal of subscriptions at the end of the period can be canceled at any time.
- When canceling a yearly subscription you can keep using the last version that was available within your subscription period.
- When canceling a monthly subscription and you have had that subscription for at least 12 months, you can keep using the last version that was available within your subscription period.
- A subscription that was canceled cannot be continued/updated at a later point. A new subscription will have to be started instead.
One Off
- These are for using the vvvv development environment in projects temporarily
- Includes updates available within the covered months but must not be used after the covered months have passed.
Conclusion
Accommodating the various requirements of all types of users and use-cases is a tricky task. This paired with trying not to completely disregard the pricing politics of "the competition" but also adding our own ideas and still balancing an economically viable solution didn't make it any easier. We still hope that we found a way that can be sustainable for all of us.
We are aware that the above may leave some questions open and we are ready to further refine the fine print and add examples to make it easier for everyone to declare their licenses. Please help us do so by asking your questions in the comments below, so we can understand where we need to get more specific.
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