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vvvvhat happened in July 2020

Previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in June 2020

Boooom!

Right in the sommerloch we finally have an earlyaccess release of VL.Stride. For now, this is limited to owners of a vvvv gamma license. So if you always thought about supporting the development of vvvv, now is a good moment. Insert coin, get a vvvv gamma license at 20% discount and get access to the VL.Stride preview right now!

Further:

vvvv gamma 2020.1.7 bugfix release is out!
The promised wrap-up of support for depth cameras is available. All repatched from scratch with full source code access for you.
There is a first preview nuget out for the much-simplified handling of OSC in vvvv: Try VL.IO.OSC.

Coming up: NODE20

Wtih many things now falling into place for vvvv gamma, we're really happy to have NODE20 - Second Nature coming up soon (October 2nd-8th). This will be a full week of interesting discussions, sharing knowledge and learning about the future of visualprogramming (as we like to call it). Hope to see all of you there! If you haven't already, watch the recording of the 5th worldwide vvvv meetup where you get a preview of what's going to happen during NODE20...

Contributions

A new work-in-progress

VL.SuperMonitor by sebescudie

Updates

The continued series of vvvv beta tutorials by takuma
A big update to Demolition Media HAP Player by lev

Gallery

SOLID by F3

Jobs

Always keep an eye on the vvvv job board
There are often some more on dasauge.de
If you need a vvvv specialist or are one yourself, check out this listing of vvvv specialists available for hire

That was it for July. Anything to add? Please do so in the comments!

joreg, Saturday, Aug 8th 2020 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 0 comments

VL.Stride EarlyAccess available now!

Dear patchers,

it is with great pressure (or was it pleasure?) that we want to give, into your caring hands, a preview of what is to become VL.Stride, the new 3d rendering library for vvvv gamma, based on the opensource Stride 3d engine.

High-level and Low-level

The first thing you need to know about VL.Stride is that it offers you two ways of working with it:

High-level: Work with models, lights, materials, textures (think: industry-standard Entity-Component-System)
Low-level: Work with shaders and GPU resources directly

If you're coming from vvvv beta and you worked with DX9/DX11, then you've been using the low-level approach: It takes more effort to use because you need to know about shaders but it allows you to do anything with the graphics API. If you worked with a game engine before, then you've used the high-level approach: It is easier and more intuitive to use as you don't have to know about shaders to achieve shiny renderings, but it is more specialized.

Fear not, both ways of working can be combined without any drawbacks. It is only that beginners will get a very gradual learning curve with the high-level approach and pros can combine them depending on the problem.

What's available right now?

Everything. Including the full MIT-licensed VL.Stride sources. You get access to daily builds, github issues and the VL.Stride-EarlyAccess chat-room for your questions and feedback.

While like this everything is accessible for you down to the bones of the Stride source-code, not everything is yet conveniently usable out-of-the-box. For now, we've concentrated on the high-level workflow. So what you get is:

VL Cornell

Plane, Box, Sphere, Cylinder, Cone, Capsule, Donut and Teapot primitives with instancing options
Ambient-, Directional-, Point- and Spotlights (with shadows) and Skybox, see Stride docs on Lights
Simple PBRMaterial and a range of nodes to patch your own materials, see Stride docs on Materials
PostFX, see Stride docs on PostFX
Graphics Compositor, see Stride docs on the Graphics Compositor
Textures: TextureReader, ImageToTexture, TextureToImage and a few TextureFX
HTMLTexture and VideoTexture via separate packs: VL.CEF and VL.MediaFoundation

Also, beware that at this stage we're still doing one or the other rename of nodes and pins. It is a preview after all!

What's next?

A lot is still to do. From smaller tweaks to whole topics that need to be tackled. The following is an unordered list of things that we'll try to prioritize within the next weeks following up to NODE20:

Keyboard, Mouse and Touch nodes
Control over shadowmaps for lights
More ready-to-use materials
Non-blocking material patching
More TextureFX
Entity Picking
Model/Asset loading
Project loading
Physics
Text Rendering
Low-level shader coding
VR
MainLoop control
Improved multimonitor handling
Executable export to work with VL.Stride

How to get it?

This EarlyAccess is intended for commercial users of vvvv gamma. If you have a license already, check your inbox. Otherwise, get a vvvv gamma developer license now (for the still 20% reduced price!) and get your access right away. How cool is that!?

If this can't convince you to financially support your favorite visualprogramming environment now, simply hang in there until September, when we've planned to make this publicly available for everyone.

Thanks

A couple of people believed in the development of VL.Stride from the beginning and substantially supported its development. We bow before you:

joreg, Friday, Aug 7th 2020 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 3 comments

NODE20 - Second Nature

When Fri, Oct 2nd 2020 until Thu, Oct 8th 2020

Artwork by andand.xyz

Patchers worldwide!

Since our initial announcement you may have noticed, the world has changed. It took us a while to adapt to those changes, but here we are, NODE20 is going to happen:

http://20.nodeforum.org

Experiment

The main challenge we see with this mostly online edition, is how to realize the levels of intimacy we reached at the previous NODEs. Unfortunately, current constraints don't allow us to do what has always been at the core of NODE: bringing as many of us together in meat space for some quality time.

But "constraints" is also what we like to embrace as challenges, so with NODE20 we're hoping to make the best of the given situation. It will be an experiment that will certainly not work for everyone. On the other hand the online focus has the potential to involve so many more people than only those who are privileged enough to be able to travel to Frankfurt.

In Progress...

What you don't know, is that behind the scenes there is already a team of about 20 people (NODE all-stars with the help of some new faces) working since months to raise money (not easy in corona times) , negotiate contracts, design websites, curate programs and think about how we can make this special version of NODE more than a passive online-stream.

We have two ideas that we hope will make the difference:

All participants will be connected via the Festival Hub
Work is underway to realize an interactive online-conference experiment, we call the Emergency Broadcast Studio

Theme

The title #SecondNature is set. The core idea remains the same: Let's explore art-making and digital creative practices in times of ecological crisis - a crisis that is, in large part, fueled by our technology needs. How seriously do we as a community of digital creators take our share of responsibility? How can we rethink our practices, challenge our industries, and empower others to do the same? A first step is the critical examination of the go-to tools and processes that have become our ‘second nature’. From imagination to implementation—if collapse is to be averted, rewriting our Second Nature will be key.

Curators Jeanne Charlotte Vogt (NODE) and Alexander Scholz (HOLO) are keen to hear your input. They prepared this form before corona hit. Thank you for those who already filled it out. You are still invited to share information about your practice and how you relate. https://forms.gle/N9Xbxsnxj7aCPRPG6
Over the coming weeks, the curation team will reach out with more ideas and notes on how we will address the topic together with you. Your ideas are welcome, see below!

Workshops

We're curating a series of about 25 online workshops and lectures. The first bunch is already confirmed. Many more are still to come!

If you want to offer a workshop, please send us a proposal. If you're missing a workshop on a specific topic, please send us a request.

We want as many people to share their knowledge during NODE20, so even if we don't choose your proposal: Every participant of NODE20 will be able to announce their own lectures/workshops on the spot, unconference style.

And even after NODE20 there'll be the chance for everyone to run their workshops or courses via The NODE Institute. So please definitely make yourself heard. We want to know what you can share!

Help

Want to help? We are looking for volunteer support in the following areas:
1) Frankfurt on-site professional support for the conference production
2) Preparing Polls / Questionaries for the conference
3) Generate ideas and setup tools to contribute to the festival theme
4) Online support for workshop moderation

Please get in touch via: david.bruell@nodeforum.org and use our chat room: Towards NODE20

Curious and want to know more? Join us for the 5th worldwide vvvv meetup where the makers of NODE20 will answer all your questions.

Already convinced? Get your tickets.

joreg, Monday, Jul 27th 2020 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 0 comments

Revvvvamped support for Depth Cameras

Still life with cactus

In a quest to get more basic things working out of the box with VL (ie. using vvvv beta>=40 or the all-new vvvv gamma), we took on to support your favorite depth cameras. Most of the cameras and their APIs share basically the same features as a baseline and then some of them have a few extra features. This means that using them in vvvv works mostly the same for all of them.

You have the main device node that you connect ColorImage, DepthImage, PointCloud, Skeleton,... nodes to, to get the desired info out of them. See the help patches coming with the packs for details.

Here is a list and comparison of all available depth cameras with links to the respective packs on nuget.org. To learn how to use nuget packs with vvvv please watch HowTo use Nugets.

Kinect

The original Microsoft Kinect or the XBOX 360 that was released a bit later.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Created with support by chaupow.

Pros

everyone has one at home
good enough for quick prototyping
can connect multiple to one PC

Cons

no longer produced
complicated cabling
skeleton tracking requires T-Pose to initialize

Kinect v2

The second version of the Microsoft Kinect.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Created with support by ravazquez.

Pros

everyone has one at home
quite robust and performant skeleton tracking

Cons

no longer produced
complicated cabling
can only connect one per PC

Azure Kinect

The third version. AzureKinect.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Get the VL pack for skeleton tracking on nuget.org.

Pros

easy cabling
does not require extra drivers to be installed

Cons

to this point rather slow skeleton tracking as compared to Kinect v2

Orbbec Astra

Orbbec Astra.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.

Pros

easy cabling
small form factor

Cons

requires extra license for skeleton tracking

Intel RealSense

Intel RealSense.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.

Pros

easy cabling
smallest form factor
highly configurable
built-in depth image filters

Cons

Skeleton tracking for now only in connection with Nuitrack (see below)

Nuitrack API

Nuitrack is a piece software that works with all of the above cameras and provides skeleton, hand and face tracking.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.
Created with support by ravazquez.

Pros

a unified API for all of the above cameras

Cons

requires extra license for skeleton tracking
can only handle one camera at a time
weird setup and configuration

Leap Motion Controller

The Leap Motion Controller device provides hand and finger tracking.
Get the VL pack on nuget.org.

Pros

for precise and close-up hand and finger tracking

Cons

Please help us improve this list of pros and cons. Know any other or disagree with some mentioned, please add them in the comments! This could eventually grow into a page of the gray book.

joreg, Monday, Jul 27th 2020 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 0 comments

5. worldwide vvvv meetup

When Tue, Jul 28th 2020 - 20:00 until Tue, Jul 28th 2020 - 22:00

Hey vvvvolks,

it's Meetup Tuesday again: July 28th 8pm CET we will have our 5th online meetup for vvvv users around the globe and it won’t be the last for sure. Prepare your family and cool the wine. Members of the community will entertain you with fresh projects and shiny patches.

Want to join with your presentation?

We could have one or two more demos/presentations! Anything more or less related to vvvv, yourself and your projects. Share some thoughts, share your funny fails. Share what you are up to.

Please get in touch via meetup@vvvv.org and let us know what you want to present. We'll then get back to you and organize the streaming tool etc. We are looking forward to this! a_a_a_a david joreg sebl

Here is the plan: We'll be using again a video-conferencing platform for moderators and presenters and will be streaming out to evvvveryone via youtube and possibly other channels as well. Updates on how to use the back channel will be given. Live stream link will be provided here!

Takuma Nakata

Location: Kyoto
takuma
https://takumanakata.com/

Freelance computational (visual | spatial ) artist based in Kyoto/Japan. Grew up in Brazil, Senegal and in Indonesia, deeply passionate in converting virtual phenomena to a physical experience. Adobe Creative Residency 2019 - 2020. Well know for his growing set of really good vvvv tutorials.

NODE20 Q&A

Location: Frankfurt
david katzenfresser
https://20.nodeforum.org/

This is not a project presentation, but David and Johannes will introduce you to this years NODE edition.
There's too much to say about it... in short it's about what and how will happen when and what is so special about it.

In the second part, it's up to you to ask questions about NODE - this time we try to integrate participants into the video stream for fun!

VL.STRIDE Demo

Location: Berlin
tonfilm

Tebjan will give us a first glimpse into the reworked version of the upcoming VL.Stride 3d library. He will patch some nicely shaded objects in the new system and demonstrate the ease of use. After that we'll have a physics simulation and more advanced gpu topics on the screens.

sebl, Saturday, Jul 25th 2020 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 1 comments

vvvv gamma 2020.1.7 release

Right,

here is the fifth bug-fix release for vvvv gamma! Available for download and purchase. Now!

Again no real highlights other than fixing a few nasty buggers. So be sure to update, there shouldn't be a reason not to. If you disagree, please let us know in the comments here or in the vvvv gamma forum.

For the full list of changes, see theLog of Changes.

Happy patching!

joreg, Tuesday, Jul 7th 2020 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 0 comments

vvvvhat happened in June 2020

Previously on vvvv: vvvvhat happened in May 2020

It happened so,

that we have just released vvvv gamma 2020.1.4 and vvvv beta40 which includes latest VL. So beta and gamma are now finally using the same version of VL again. Is this still confusing anyone?

We still owe you the promised round-up of developments regarding depth cameras but meanwhile already started work on some networking libs. Please check our work in progress on VL.IO.TCP, VL.IO.WebSocket and VL.IO.HTTP.WebServer. And there is also a library to use tablets now: VL.Devices.WinTab.

Have you ever wondered how a visual language is being designed? We invite you to join our discussions and help us design the future of visual programming.

Too bad we didn't yet manage to show some of our progress on VL.Stride. It is coming along nicely. Hoping to have some demos out this month.

If you missed it, please checkout the recording of the 4th worldwide meetup where david talks about progress on the upcoming NODE20, mburk and a_a_a_a give us a preview of the NODE20 keyvisual they are working on, nisidis talks about his work in progress of integrating VL with Blender, called VL.Ender and where dottore demonstrated his latest developments on his UI widget library VL.Elementa.