The new MPMP 1.7 release has now a second backend for Windows based on libVLC.

After a lot of headache what kind of solution i should use for  Windows 7 compability i decided to use the libVLC as it supports a lot of more codecs then Media Foundation. (And Microsoft made it absolute complicated to find code for the right solution as they changed their API over the years a couple of times.)

This is a huge step on Windows as now you could use MPMP also for Windows 7, have better streaming support and on top of that you get a Youtube player!

The only drawback is that you don’t have the same performance like MF but for HD playback it is not a problem. Only for 4K you need a more decent GPU.

After three months of hard work i finally released my crossplatform video solution for Unity3d.
With this solution we Unity3d developers have now a unified video platform with a unified APIs and the best native performance.

There are several video plugins right available but there was no solution that gives you the best performance on all major platforms or you have to buy several expensive plugins and hack them together. So i decided to make my own solution to have the full control over such a complex system. I try to improve the system as much as i can over time and i’m open to user feedback.

More info here or at the Unity Assetstore !

Finally I’m a Asset Store publisher for my development platform of choice (Unity):

UniOSC : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17658

JACK4U : https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/19291

monoflow’s metablobs :  https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/26804

It was a hard work but working with Unity makes so much fun. If you want to alienate Unity  for music visualization these assets could be very useful for you.

To get up do date with openframeworks I made some audioreactive demos to show what you can do with this great framework.

I had a long list of very cool demos/examples from others and made some remixes of their work. It also was a good exercise to transfer older code to the latest 0071 version and to convert  code to compile with VS2010. Most of the examples you get on Github are cool but only act as a starting point for own extensions. As an old multitouch dude the first obligation is to add TUIO support so you can play in an interactive way with the system.

My first demo is a remix of the Binned Particels Example from Kyle McDonald:

The Original example has no color and only has some mouse interaction, so I decided to extend this demo with TUIO input, audio forces and some color/blend stuff for better visual appealing.

The next demo is a remix of the great MPM Fluid from Grant Kot (Golan Levin OF implementation):

You can achieve a lot of  behaviours when you play with the different parameters.

The next one is my own implementation of a 2d metablob/metaball shader in openframeworks. (Don’t know exactly where I got all the code inspiration, but it’s based on some work from Adrian Boeing) :

As you can see the shader implementation make it posible to render a lot of blobs with a high framerate.

The last one is a remix of Memo Aktens MSAOpenCL  addon. Thanks to Matt Gingold who made some WIndows addition to the code, otherwise I had stumbled right at the beginning to get the example running on my PC as the original code is only for Mac. Anyway it was hard to do because it’s based on OpenCL:

I always dreamed of some particle system where you can move 1 million particles in realtime.  It’s not so easy to get into the OpenCL development and it’s a lot of trial&error as you have just limited debugging capabilities. But now I have some feeling how to think in the “OpenCL way”.

Finally I made a video from my studies with Unity3d. The video should show the capabilities of Unity for interactive visualization. Thanks to the guys from uniTUIO for their work. I extended the library with an Arcball and native WM_TOUCH binding.

After working on the back-end site i ‘m now dealing with the front-end for multi-touch applications. After some research i come finally to the incredible MT4J framework. As I’m a real java fan i pleased to see that this framework exists and it’s absolutely brilliant! I don’t know what this guy is doing all the time but he is a master of software architecture & openGL . It’s impressive to see what performance boost you get if you work with openGL in the right way.With this framework your are able to concentrate on the interaction design and you could integrate stuff from processing, so there are a lot of code floating around the web you could use.

It’s a big argument to stay on the java platform.I know most of the people love Flash, but java is in my opinion generally the greatest platform you can develop with. You got eclipse, processing,server&database stuff, openGL with jogl and a lot of physical computing code with wiring for the arduino board. And the language itself is a thousand times better to deal with as with C++.

If you look through the NUI Forum you always see the question about which camera should i use for multi-touch?

The quick answer is: It’s depend on your budget and how much cameras you are trying to use at the same time.

I only have experience with three cameras that most of the multi-touch developer’s use :

PS3, Unibrain Fire-I and the PointGrey FireFly .

From my experience all cameras are sufficiently for the image processing you do with multi-touch and it’s more important to make the right filter settings on your software, or get the right light situation then to deal with the questions like: what’s the right sensor (CMOS/CCD?) . The cameras differ in price so what are the pro & cons of the models?

PS3: This seems to be the camera of choice for most of the multi-touch developers out there, and if you look at the price and it’s capabilities you know why. You get no cheaper camera with the same FPS. But there are some drawbacks you have to deal with: No cs-mount for objectives, you can’t mount the camera on ball-heads for adjustments and if you want to make a multi camera set-up you have to look for some third party driver.

Unibrain Fire-I: A good Firewire camera but with the lack of a real professional housing. There are a tripod mounting kit and some cs-mount adapter, but for the price you should get some more professional stuff.

PointGrey Firefly MV: This is a marvelous camera with an incredible driver suite.  PointGrey has a long time experience with multi-cam setups so you get a professional system, but this has it’s price. The real advance comes with multi-cam set-ups, but  you end up quickly in a 1000$ system only for cameras and objectives.

So for the first steps into multi-touch i prefer the PS3 . For that price you can’t go wrong! If you want to make huge multi-cam setups i prefer a Firewire PointGrey system, but this could change if the CL-Eye Platform (I’m will test in the future) deal with the USB bandwidth problems that most of the times arise with USB systems. If this will work the price difference will be so huge, that you could live with the PS3 drawbacks (no cs-mount,housing) .

I never thought that c++ development could be so much pain. If you come from other languages you are spoiled with a lot of features, but get a punch in your face if you trying to do similar things in c++. As an longtime Actionscripter and java guy, i decided to start some c++ development, because i wanted to do more things with openFrameworks.
The first lesson i learnt is to mess more with the compiler then with c++ as language. I use Visual Studio ,as I’m on Windows and was a little disappointed of some missing features for pure c++ development i used to know from eclipse like refactoring and intellisense. If you develop in c# you have all this features in Visual Studio.
The next big thing are the overwhelming compiler settings i had no clue about. So where do you start from? If you grab some C++ books you always get only information about OPP, what is inheritance and all the other stuff that tells you only some language features. But if you develop your first program , you get stuck with missing libraries, memory pitfalls or weired c-string stuff you don’t understand. (And not to mention the problems with proper linking your program).
I understand people who are afraid of this whole c++ mess.(I always was and be by myself).

After endless google sessions and some c++ books that didn’t covered  the right information i found two useful books:

Windows via c++ : This is a incredible Book about a lot of Windows internals and you get a deep understanding of the operation system you have to know and be aware of if you decide to do C++ development. This book is not like ‘learning C++ in 25 days’ , it’s gives you information about compiler settings, DLL development, process and thread management…., all the topics i didn’t find in other books, but essential for application development on Windows.

C++ for Game Programmers (second edition) The title of the Book is a little bit of misleading, as this is a book to learn C++ as a language and gave you tons of useful info’s about some design decision’s for your code that are general and not only game related. One of the highlights are the chapter about plug-in architecture and information about the STL.

Another treasure i found. Back in 2001 i made my last house tape for a women. When i hear the sound i feel i better should have made a DJ career as i get in the mood for dance. Listen to the track of Jovonn and you know why I love the real deep underground house sound !

House Mix 2001 [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

After digging in my old CD’s i found two mixes i made for my formerly girlfriend. Well the girl is gone, but the music remains. Thanks the Lord.

House Mix 2000 [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download