pocode is a new open-source C++ library designed by Potion for the production of interactive media across multiple platforms. The frameworks provides a robust, high-performance software infrastructure that allows for the creation of all types of software, from simple visual sketches to elegant mobile apps to entire software applications.

Continue reading.... Pocode – New open-source C++ library by Potion [c++]

Designed and developed by Ivan Safrin, Polycode is a new free, open-source, cross-platform framework for creative code. You can use it as a C++ API or as a standalone scripting language to get easy and simple access to accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, hardware shaders, sound and network programming, physics engines and more.

On top of the core C++ API, Polycode offers a Lua-based scripting system with its own set of compilation tools. The Lua API mirrors the C++ API and can be used to easily create prototypes and even publish complete applications to multiple platforms without compiling C++.

Polycode is made possible by Lua, Freetype, libpng, PhysicsFS, JSONCpp,tinyxml, Ogg Vorbis, Box2D, Bullet Physics and many people and projects which inspired the effort.

More information at polycode.org and github. For full list of features see here.

For more tools, see our new tools page.

–

The color of space by Ivan Safrin using Polycode.

One idea is to use color as a simple, abstract representation of the personal perception of geographical location. My original plan was to map New York City in such a manner, but collecting this kind of information locally seemed like an insurmountable task, so the data was collected via the internet for the entire country using a google form posted to reddit.com, with zip codes serving as geographical anchors to place data into context.

“MNDR – Cut Me Out” Music video.

Official music for MNDR’s Cut me out directed by Timothy Saccenti. Polycode and the Polycode Kinect module were used to capture and render live 3D data from a Microsoft Kinect device for this music video.

For this year’s Creative Review Annual cover, together with Nexus Interactive Arts, Minivegas created a custom application to draw a letter ‘A’ using content from the CR’s website and Twitter feed over the past year.

We decided to make an “A” from CR’s prolific online output. We felt that its form should be implied, discernable by its physical influence on elements from CR’s blog and twitter content. Some of our early efforts were a little abstract, but we settled for wrapping thousands of strips of tape in the loose shape of the “A”. The strips would contain words and pictures from the blog. Using recent blog activity doesn’t cut it for an annual, so with “a little wget magic”, we slurped every article and image from the last year. We got 10,000 unique proper names and places, hashtags and usernames, and about another 5,000 pictures. That’s a lot, even for six images, so the number of comments on a blog post became a metric for how “big” a story and its content ended up in the final image (like a “tag cloud”). To add some dynamics, we ran the scene as a cloth simulation to blow our strips around a bit. Exploding the letter is fun, though in the end the shapes looked a bit messy so we toned that down a bit. Final snapshots of strips in motion were exported for a high-quality render.

You can download the app and have a go yourselves. The app allows various aspects of the image to be adjusted before a final render is downloaded. These include animation properties such as turbulence, vortex, attraction, damping nd stiffness. In addition, the app also includes .OBJ exports allowing the team to import into Maya together with textures and render out with better lighting and shadow effects. The twitter text version was then used for the front cover whereas the images from the site were used for the back cover.

The app was created using MiniVegas’ own proprietary C++/OpenGL framework code-named Atlantis.  The tool itself is a set of user interface components suitable for the rapid assembly of artist tools, which together with a persistent data and parameter system allows artist and programmer to work together on shaping the project’s look without needing to hard-code everything. It is developed and maintained as cross-platform, running on OS X and Linux. In the future they plan to port portions of it to mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.

Read more about the Annual project on Creative Review’s website or Minivegas’ Project Page. For more information on the Atlantis frameworks see here.

Credits
Production: MINIVEGAS / Nexus Interactive Arts
Producer: Beccy McCray
Coding: Dan Lewis / MINIVEGAS
Creative direction: Luc Schurgers / MINIVEGAS
Art direction for CR: Paul Pensom

Created by Dominic Szablewski, Biolab Disaster is a web browser game created entirely using pure JavaScript and HTML5 using his own Impact Game Engine. Interestingly, Dominic has also created a version for the iPhone (iOS) running on 3GS at 60 frames per second.

He writes:
The game is running in its own process and is not using the iPhone’s browser at all. Instead, it’s just using the JavaScriptCore Framework to run the game. All the necessary calls to the Canvas API have been reimplemented with OpenGL-ES and the touch input is passed over to JavaScript to be evaluated by the engine. I of course had to make some changes to the engine, but the game source code is exactly the same as for the web version.

The JavaScriptCore Framework is still private on iOS. So as it is now, I won’t be allowed to distribute the game in the AppStore. But my understanding is, that if I bundle my own copy of the JavaScriptCore Framework (which is part of WebKit and thus freely available) with my game, I should be on the safe side. Let’s see how this works out.

No release just yet but Domonic is working hard to put it all together. For information on the framework and release, check ImpactJS.org for updates.

Play the game here phoboslab.org/biolab/

(via @jocabola)

See also Asaph, another project of Dominic’s, which is a self-install micro-blogging system, allowing you to collect links and images from other pages, similar to ffffound, dropular, etc…

Cinder is a new C++ frameworks created by The Barbarian Group for programming graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry. Cinder is cross-platform, and in general the exact same code works under Mac OS X, Windows and a growing list of other platforms — most recently the iPhone and iPad. Cinder will be made publicly available later this week and we have been given an early access to have a play and if you are interested in trying it out early yourself, see the bottom of this post.

If you are already familiar with other creative code platforms such as Processing or openFramworks, you’ll find Cinder setup quite familiar. Although not recomended for someone just getting started with creative code, Cinder download includes many examples, from simple to more complex to get you started. There is a also a great ‘getting started’ tutorial included by Robert Hodgin called “Hello, Cinder” taking you though setup, image manipulation, influence and particle effects. The framework has been designed to take advantage of platforms’ native capabilities whenever it’s possible, and relies on a minimum of 3rd party libraries. This makes for much lighter, faster applications, and means Cinder apps get free performance, security and capability upgrades whenever the operating system does.

The team have also worked hard to create a library that feels familiar and intuitive to C++ programmers, building on the idioms and techniques the C++ community has developed over its long history. Cinder’s modern internal memory management virtually eliminates leaks, not only of memory but also of resources like OpenGL textures. We make use of the exceptional Boost libraries to fill in any gaps, and always favor techniques built on features which are currently or soon will be standard C++ (such as std::thread orstd::shared_ptr).

Here is a list of features:

Standalone Mac & Pc Applications
Platform-Native Windowing And Event Handling

Screensavers
Create Native Mac Os X And Windows Screensavers

Internet I/O
Load Media Via Http And Ftp Natively

Full I/O Abstraction
Seamless I/O From Flat Files, Memory, Resources And Networks

C++ Core
Internally Reference-Counted Design Prevents Leaks, C++0X Std::Thread For Multithreading

Cocoa Touch Support
Targets The Iphone & Ipad; Provides A Growing List Of Device-Specific Features

Ui Events
Full Keyboard, Mouse (Including Scroll Wheel), Window And File Drag & Drop

Xml Dom Parser
Built-In Object Oriented Xml Parsing Api

Serial Port

Core Classes
Perspective And Orthographic Cameras, Triangle Meshes, Obj Loading, Geometric Primitives

Opengl Core
Multisampled Antialiasing, Dynamic Switching Between Full-Screen & Windowed Modes, Convenience Methods For Rapid Development

Opengl Classes
Full-Featured Classes For Textures, Fbos, Glsl, Vbos, Lights, Materials And Display Lists

Tile-Based Renderer
Render Arbitrarily Large Images (For Print & Other Applications)

Gui Parameters
Gl-Based Gui For Powerful, Convenient Manipulation Of Parameters

Math Primitives
Full-Featured Matrix, Vector And Quaternion Classes

Utilities
Colors, Random Numbers, Perlin Noise (Up To 4D, With Analytical Derivatives)

Geometric Primitives
Poly-Bezier Paths, Polygons, Axis-Aligned Bounding Boxes, B-Splines, Least-Squares B-Spline Curve Fitting

Robust Image I/O
Png, Jpeg, Tiff, Bmp & Others Via Platform-Native Libraries. Preservation Of Premultiplication And High Dynamic Range Information

2D Image Processing
Professional Quality Image Resizing, Edge Detection, Desaturation, Adaptive Thresholding

High Dynamic Range Imaging
Full Support For Floating Point Hdr Pixel Processing In Image I/O, Opengl And Software

Powerful 2D Rasterizer Via Cairo
Full Featured Vector Renderer Exports To Svg, Pdf, Postscript, Eps, Coregraphics, Gdi And A Pixel-Based Antialiasing Rasterizer

Fonts & Text
Font Enumeration, Glyph Path Extraction, Unicode Text Layout And Rasterization, Custom Fonts Via Flat Files Or Resources

Video Capture
Webcam Support Via Platform Native Libraries

Full-Featured Quicktime
Frame Extraction, Native Accelerated Opengl Path, Audio Playback, Fft Analysis, Asynchronous Network Loading

Audio Support
Loading Standard File Formats, Access To Raw Pcm Data And Fft, Microphones

To try out Cinder early, please send us an email at info(at)creativeapplications.net with your portfolio site/past work and we’ll drop you a message with l/p to the site where you can download the framework, read up on the details and watch demo movies of other projects created using this framework. The site is now open: http://libcinder.org

To get started with Cinder on a Mac running OSX, you will need Xcode installed. If you don’t have it, you can download the latest version from Apple right here. Note you’ll first need to create ADC account if you don’t have one, which you can do here. From then on, it’s simple, open one of the samples and “build” in xcode.

Cinder on Windows is designed to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, and works with both the commercial version and the freely availableExpress editions. If you don’t already have it installed, you can download Visual C++ Express here. If you are you using an Express edition of Visual C++ and you have never installed the Platform SDK, you’ll want to do that too – just download and run the installer here.

For more information on Cinder, see http://libcinder.org/ (l/p required)

Created by Chandler McWilliams, Silent is a two minute video made by combining frames from five classic silent films: Metropolis, Faust, Nosferatu, Holy Mountain, and The Dragon Painter and put to the music of Charles Ives’ Hallowe’en. The frames are chosen by custom software that compares data from each of the film’s soundtracks with the data from Ives’ music.

Made using Cinder, a C++ framework, custom software analyzes each film and records the audio (FFT) data and timecode for each frame. The final video is generated by processing an input soundtrack, in this case Hallowe’en, and finding the frames of film whose audio best fits that of the soundtrack.

Silent films were chosen as the source material because of their tight connection between narrative, visuals, and musical score. By using the soundtrack as the central driver of visual imagery, Silent inverts these relationships. This reversal allows forms typically associated with music-repetition, rhythm, movement-to be express themselves visually.

Cinder is a C++ framework developed by the Barbarian Group.

For more information including Chandler’s other projects see brysonian.com

See also Cymatic Ripple [C++, Cinder]

In his attempt to convince multitouch companies to give him their hardware in exchange for better demos or maybe just doing what he does pretty well; making the rest of us drool over his work, Robert Hodgin aka Flight404 has been making these incredible fluid/tactile (destined for multitouch) visuals. Here is a little info:

I am using a velocity map combined with a diffuse/normal/bump map set from FilterForge. The distortion is happening in the vert shader, but the normals are being calculated first outside the shader because I haven’t figured out how best to push that math to the GPU. So much to learn!

Made with Cinder, a C++ framework being developed by Andrew Bell and the team at the Barbarian Group. Real time!!

Created by Branden Hall & Joshua Davis, HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.

Flash has matured incredibly in the past decade, but it has done so in a way that has blocked non-developers from even getting started. The simple fact of the matter is that with older versions of Flash you could learn the tool and how to program ActionScript almost entirely through creative play. With the latest iterations, unless you have a background in object-oriented programming, that method of learning by doing is simply not an option.

To get started, you only the most basic knowledge of programming – variables, conditionals, loops, and functions, for example. As you learn more about programming you can extend HYPE and grow your skills.

HYPE is not just for people who are new to programming. Instead, HYPE is for anyone, regardless of skill, who wants to play with code. Fundamentally, the point of HYPE is to make Flash fun again. We made HYPE to help bring back the playfulness that once defined our community.

For more information and plenty of examples to get started, see http://hype.joshuadavis.com