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previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in November 2018
aaand that was it again..
but before we head off into this happy new year, let's recap what happened on the last mile:
we finished our work on "Ocean Of Air" on time (horray) and it is running ever since December 7th. that is 12 networked PCs + server running a vl+xenko multiuser VR installation without any regrets. if you happen to be in london, treat yourself a visit. click here for infos and tickets.
if you're interested in how we pulled this off, here is the second in a series of blogposts on how we're integrating Xenko with vl.
with the job out of our heads, we took to defining the coming milestones for vvvv and paved the road to vvvv gamma <- must read. and if you're interested in a view more details about the milestone that brought us to where we are now and what more is to come after the initial release of vvvv gamma, then please checkout our new roadmap.
and if you haven't already, then prettyplease fill out the 2019 survvvvey. it takes no more than 5 minutes. promised!
contributions
| horray for 3 new: |
and two updates:
|
| two works in progress: |
and a little tease: rewire-test |
gallery
beautiful beautiful renderings from the pros:
and some more fine stuff:
- De Volharding Augmented by lucidlien
- Constellations by Joanie_AntiVJ
- Θ Theta: Sensory Feedback Systemmontaje by ventolinmono
jobs
these have been announced for a while now. if you're interested, be quick!
that was it for december. anything to add? please do so in the comments!
helo evvvveryone,
you're so lucky! this is to give you something important to do on the internet during these boring holidays and the coming slow start into 2019. please take 5 minutes to fill out our new survey:
https://goo.gl/forms/g3t6gwSwUfZwMOyd2
once is enough. thanks already!
and remember, we've done this before, see The 2015 Survvvvey Results.
Holy patchers!
To answer the often contemplated question of "Where the hell is this all going?" we first have to establish that vvvv is different things for different people. Let's have a look at some of these different perspectives:
￭ vvvv - a generative designers best friend
￭ vvvv - a data visualizers wonder weapon
￭ vvvv - an interaction designer's magic wand
￭ vvvv - the multiscreen solution
￭ vvvv - physical computing covered
￭ vvvv - a projectionmapper's dream
￭ vvvv - rapid prototyping on steroids
￭ vvvv - your procedural lighting desk
￭ vvvv - computervision for everyone
￭ vvvv - stage? show? control!
￭ vvvv - fish feeding for the lazy
￭ vvvv - L.A.S.E.R zzzz!1!!
That's all?, we hear you say...and you mumble on, but can I please has:
￭ vvvv - a tool for machines to learn
￭ vvvv - easy logic for gamers
￭ vvvv - visual scripting done right
￭ vvvv - klickklickklick your mobile app
￭ vvvv - the no-brainer IOT toolbox
￭ vvvv - the final webdev solution
￭ vvvv - an admin's batching buddy
￭ vvvv - robots dig this
￭ vvvv - no controller too micro
￭ vvvv - from sound to noise in one patch
￭ vvvv - any shaders of gray
￭ vvvv - scratch that: kids taken seriously
Well, vl, vl, we hear ya.. and that's exactly why at the heart of it all, we have always been, and will continue to work on:
￭ vvvv - a multipurpose toolkit
Introducing vvvv gamma
When we started working on VL, we never thought about creating anything different than vvvv. We had our issues with vvvv and wanted to solve those. But mostly we loved it and wanted to keep the good things we still enjoy about it. Essentially we set out to rewrite vvvv to make it better, nothing more.
So it is our great pleasure that we can finally annouce the impending release of what we've so far been referring to as "VL standalone":
For a start, vvvv gamma will focus on 3 main scenarios:
- 2d interactive motion graphics using VL.Skia
- computervision using VL.OpenCV
- controlling devices, ie. everything IO (Midi, UDP, OSC, RCP, HTTP...)
Frankly it will be gorgeous and above all shine through the following features:
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So beta vs. gamma, really?
Nope, don't think vs., we prefer to think ♥!
Here is how to read this: Over the past years we've been R&D'ing a next generation visual programming language that we dubbed: VL. And we still call it that: VL is a programming language, just like c#, that now happens to power two of our products:
- vvvv 50betaX
- vvvv gamma 2019.X
While for vvvv beta, VL is just another language it supports, for vvvv gamma, VL is the core. As such, both beta and gamma will continue to profit as we progress with VL. We are well aware of the fact that gamma is not going to replace beta for everyone anytime soon. We're therefore commited to support both equally for the foreseeable future.
If you're interested in a few more details regarding how we'll be polishing vvvv gamma for its initial release, please head over to our roadmap.
What will gamma cost?
We're still working this out and will update you on licensing early next year.
Wait and what about Xenko/3d?
As we've previously reported from our lab, our initial efforts of integrating the Xenko 3d engine couldn't have gone much smoother. We have helped realize a complex multiuser VR project within just 4 months besides our research and now know that this is certainly the way for us to go forward. VL.Xenko will complete vvvv gamma to a fancypantsy interactive 3d authoring environment.
We're confident to be releasing an initial public version of VL.Xenko before 2019.Q4 and we have some ideas for a prerelease phase that we'll announce soon.
Thanks for using vvvv, thanks for your feedback on VL, thanks for your patience, thanks for the licenses you buy which makes this journey possible for all of us.
Have a nice holiday, get some rest, because 2019 will be the year of the vvvv desktop!
yours,
devvvvs.
This was long requested and it's finally here! Latest VVVV.OpenVR can use vive trackers without HMD (head mounted device). There is a dedicated pose output on the Poser (OpenVR) node and you can request the serial numbers of all connected devices.
Here is how to get started with high-performance 6DOF positional tracking for as little as $230 bucks. Minimum hardware requirement is one base station and one tracker. Although two base stations are recommended for much better tracking stability.
Features:
- No HMD required
- Use up to 62 trackers (64 minus base station and the null HMD)
- Trackers can be connected via USB cable or wireless via included USB dongle
- Trackers can be identified by their serial number
In order to get the trackers running without HMD you need to do the following steps:
1. Activate the 'null' driver
Find this file on your drive:
SteamDirectory\steamapps\common\SteamVR\drivers\null\resources\settings\default.vrsettings
- change "enable" to "true".
Then open this file:
SteamDirectory\steamapps\common\SteamVR\resources\settings\default.vrsettings
- change "forcedDriver" to "null".
- change "activateMultipleDrivers" to "true".
SteamDirectory is usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam.
Also make sure to disable the "SteamVR Home" on startup. Otherwise it will try to render into the null HMD and consume 100% of one CPU core:
If SteamVR was running, close and restart it.
2. Connect the trackers
When SteamVR restarts, you can connect a tracker or controller without the HMD. Follow these instructions to pair the trackers ("Pair Tracker" is now "Pair Controller"): Pairing Vive Tracker
SteamVR should then look similar to this:
Note: The red “Not Ready” text can appear occasionally but that should be no problem if you are using the null driver.
Calibration
If you don't run the calibration process, the first found vive lighthouse base station will be the origin of the tracking space. If you can live with that you need to provide your own calibration matrix in vvvv and multiply it with the pose matrices coming out of the Poser node.
If you have the vive controllers you can run the room setup normally (no need for the HMD to be connected if you use the null driver).
You can also use the tracker as a controller for calibration, but you need to connect a simple circuit to the pogo pins to be able to activate the 'trigger' button during the calibration process.
More detailed developer info on the pogo pins can be found here: Vive Tracker For Developers
You can download the new OpenVR pack here: VVVV.OpenVR
Open the demo patch 02_TrackersOnlyDemo.v4p in the VVVV.OpenVR\girlpower folder and enjoy tracking!
Big thanks to colorsound and u7angel for pushing.
Please welcome beta38.1,
which basically, only fixes one bug that got introduced with the beta38 release and prevented certain VL patches from loading up.
Sorry about that! Heads will roll in quality management, guaranteed!
Apart from that, you see some new swizzle nodes as well as more help texts for nodes in our core library. Also, the VL splash screen is not top-most anymore.
And if you haven't already, now is a good time to testdrive our two "prerelease" packages that both come with plenty of examples to explore:
And for the very brave there is a lot of good stuff ready for testing in the work-in-progress section in the forum.
That's about it,
for now,
Yours,
devvvvs
Who maarja, id144
When Wed, Dec 12th 2018 - 12:00 until Thu, Dec 13th 2018 - 17:00
Where Perte de Signal, 5445 avenue De Gaspé, Montreal, Canada
Me and Andrej Boleslavský are happy to invite you to experience our VR project DUST at Perte de Signal in Montreal soon.
Perte de Signal fb page https://www.facebook.com/events/736995296651764/
Dust website http://vrdust.org.uk/
Dust trailer https://vimeo.com/210757167
Photo by Mario Hernandez
Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council
Welcome back to the second sneak peek into our adventures with xenko. Together with MLF we've been busy patching the first project done entirely with vl and xenko: Ocean of Air. So far the combination works superbé, and you can experience that for yourself until the 20th of January, if you are in the London area. Alongside the project we explored the xenko code base and now that it's live, we can give you some more insights into our research.
In the last blog post we used predefined entities to set up a little scene graph. This time we will dig a little bit deeper.
Having primitive objects like Box, Sphere, Plane etc. is nice for casual patching and quickly visualizing something. But you will need more sophisticated objects for the final output of your project. What you want to do is designing your own objects that are specific to your use case.
Luckily, game engines have quite similar requirements and came up with a good solution, and they call it entity/component/system, short ECS, which is also the latest hype in Unity. Xenko has a good documentation page if you want to go into detail. But for now let's stay on topic and keep two things in mind:
- Entities are the nodes in the scene graph
- Components are the features/properties of an entity
We found two appealing ways to create custom entities that can also be combined with each other in any way that suits you. You can either patch them or design them in xenko's game studio using their prefab workflow. Here is a simple example for both cases:
1. Patching Entities
Let's look inside the BoxEntity from the last blog post:
As you can see, it adds a BoxComponent to the entity on Create (white) and exposes parameters like Color, Transformation, Enabled etc. as input pins on Update (gray). This is more or less an arbitrary choice of how the BoxEntity is designed and it will probably change a bit before it becomes official. The patch is also an example of how vl's process nodes work nicely together with the entity component model. Each instance of an entity or a component can be represented by a process node and connected with each other in an understandable way.
In the patch we saw the EmptyEntity node, which is a general entity object that contains nothing more than a TransformComponent, hence the transform input pin. To make something useful with it, we add more components (e.g. model, material, audio, physics etc.) to it. There are many of them and you can combine them as it suits your use case. The big advantage here is, that the components are able to interact with each other via the common parent entity and that the scene graph system automatically processes them in an optimized way. This is where it gets interesting!
Let's say we want the box from the patch above to emit a sound from its current position. In order to do that we only have to add a SpatialAudioComponent to the same entity as the box component:
Since the SpatialAudioComponent and the BoxComponent have a common parent entity they will share the same transformation. Also, if an entity has child entities, the children get transformed by the parent. We could use that feature to add an AxisEntity to our custom entity:
Again, there is no need to connect the input transformation to the AxisEntity since it gets added as a child to the main entity and gets transformed automatically.
Here is what a little scene could look like:
Let's add a second one and let them rotate in the scene to hear the spatial audio effect. Aaaaaand action! (works best with headphones):
2. Prefabs
There is also a super easy way to design custom entities in xenko's game studio and use them in your patch. Suppose we have a 3d model with animation and skinning imported and edited in game studio. All we have to do now is to create a prefab from it and give it a meaningful name:
Learn more about xenko's prefab workflow here. Once we have that it's as simple as this to use it in your scene:
Ridiculous!
And finally we will start the walk animation:
Starting the animation is also patched in this case, but let's save that one for another post.
Conclusion
The entity component model of xenko works very well together with vl's process node feature. VL's automatic recompile and instant stateful hot reload allows to dynamically combine and configure entities and the scene graph in real-time while the application is running. You can combine different workflows with each other, simple primitives, custom patched entities or imported prefabs. There is no right or wrong, just build up the scene in a way that suits your way of thinking and the requirements of your project.
We still have only scratched the surface here, there is much more to come.
Yours,
devvvvs
Who id144, dvj_jenda
When Sat, Dec 15th 2018 - 10:30 until Sun, Dec 16th 2018 - 17:30
Where National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace, Dukelských hrdinů 47, 170 00 Praha 7- Holešovice, Czech Republic
<WORKSHOP> #8 w/ Andrej Boleslavský
➖ Mixing Reality using VVVV toolkit ➖
Workshop is intended for artist, designers and developers to get started with VVVV, the platform for visual programming used for real-time motion graphics, video, audio and ever VR.
Andrej will introduce the basic concepts of the VVVV; an environment designed for creative use, which allows fast and flexible runtime editing without syntax errors. If you never tried programming - here called patching - you will love VVVV. If you tried programming before, you will love it even more.
➖ Instruction for participants:
- Workshop is aimed at interaction designers, digital and new media artists
- No previous knowledge of programming is required; the workshop is for beginners.
- Bring your own PC with Windows 10 or MacBook with Boot Camp
- 3-button mouse with scrollwheel
- Latest vvvv version and addonpack installed
Andrej Boleslavský (SK/CZ) is an independent digital artist purposing technology in the fields of new media art, virtual reality, light installations and physical computing. His work also maintains a strong fascination with the entanglement of nature and technology. In his collaborative works with digital artist Mária Júdová he explores the boundary between physical and digital. He has developed many interactive installations and lectured on open source and creative coding tools. In addition to his work he is actively involved as a technologist for other artists and interaction designers. VVVV is his tool of choice since 2008.
➖15. - 16. 12. 2018
10.30 - 17.30 – Veletržní palác, National Gallery in Prague - Dukelských hrdinů 47
➖ entry: 1700,- / 1300,- students
➖ reserve your seat at klara@lunchmeat.cz
➖ capacity is limited
➖ please note: workshops will be held in English
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
<ARTIST TALK>
In his short artist talk Andrej Boleslavský is going to tell us more about his creative work as an independent digital artist purposing technology in the fields of new media art, virtual reality, light installations and physical computing. He will lead us through his latest projects he's been working on as well.
15. 12. - 11:00 - 11:45 – Veletržní palác, National Gallery in Prague
// FREE ENTRY
MORE --> INPUT #8 Artist talk w/ Andrej Boleslavský
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
<INPUT>
// An intensive series of new media workshops and artist talks presented by notable artists focused on the intersection of art & technology.
// Experience the artists through different perspectives as lecturers, workshop leaders and their new media practice (performance, installation, video art)
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
<INFO>
// more info on www.lunchmeat.cz/input
// organised by Lunchmeat z.s
// co-funded by Ministry of Culture, Czech Republic
// supported by Prague College
previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in October 2018
dezember!
one week to go for the opening of We live in an Ocean of Air which you normally wouldn't have to care about but in this special case, how this connects to you through this blogpost is, that this is the first fully vl + Xenko project we've helped to realized. if you're in london between December 7th and January 20th, go see it, it is good, promised! if not, let's hope that everything goes well, because then the thing should go on tour and maybe come a bit closer to you.. here is a little teaser:
but that is not all:
- we also found time to prepare this update for vl's 2d drawing library Skia.
- and if you're into history, checkout our newly built roadmap.
next up: we're going to evaluate where we are with vl-standalone and xenko after this above mentioned project and we should have an update for you by the end of this year. and everybody yayy.
Jobs
looking for a job at where it all once started? here are two opportunities athttp://meso.design
Contributions
one new: Opticalflow3d by timpernagel
one updated: VAudio by tonfilm
several works in progress announced:
a tease:
kinect-pipet-direct-mode depth-pipet
and something in chinese:
watch
Gallery
and remember you can always find much more fancy new stuff appearing on vimeo and sadly even here.
that was it for november. anything to add? please do so in the comments!
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