almost there

Students over at ITP in NY, are presenting their Big Screen class, literally. 6 million pixels and 120 ft long, they build an edge blended wall that's 8160x768 and powered by 3 Mac Pros: ITP Big Screen is Big

More interestingly is the the use graphical coding language, Processing, to power all of their graphics. The use of Processing has really picked up recently. You might have run across Flight404's Solar before.

It really illustrates the great democratization of everything video. For graphics, open source is definitely taking (or taken) over. Curious to see what else Processing leads to...

Augmented reality is pretty hip word if you're a mograph/vfx hipster. What's even crazier is that people are doing it in real time. Kineme, the makers of many awesome Quartz Composer add-ons, demos the ability to digital shift reality with the digital: Kineme Quartz AR Toolkit

Technabob post an article on how two German shops, Buzzin Monkey and die agentour GmbH, created an add campaign involving a printed ad campaign. You take the magazine, head over to the interweb, and hold it up to your video camera and the site and a Mini Cooper appears attached to the magazine: Augmented reality hits newstands

What mograph guru, wannabe, jedi, hipster, or pro doesn't want some free textures? Head on over to Lost & Taken to check out a great listing of texture laden websites at their "2008 the Year of the Texture"

Create Digital Motion has a great blurb today about MomentFactory, the people behind Nine Inch Nails last tour: LEDs In the Sky...

Also make sure to check out Wired's posting from a few months ago, looking behind the scenes as well: NIN Dazzle's with Lasers, LED and Stealh

Merry Christmas from the Birmingham Apple Store Back of House team!

Many of you are probably pretty familiar with Element Lab's Versa Tube [most notibaly first recognized in the background of Coldplay's Speed of Sound video]. It's basically something to the effect of a florescent light bulb, but full of LED lights. Point is, they aren't cheap. I heard this summer from a band's manager that this church in GA took PVC pipe in 1m sections and front projected them. Gotta love ingenuity!

iDEA NATION: PVC Tubes

But this begs the question, what really impresses people?

Got a cool shout out from my buddy Josh over at his site, Creative Worship Tour, for some animated lyrics experiments I did about a year ago. Check it out now!

Been reading up lately on Display Link. It's basically video over USB and wireless USB in a semi-nutshell. An amalgam of manufacturers have jumped on board, producing everything from LG's usb-based display to things like Gefen's USB to DVI widget.

DisplayLink devices can even support internal grid/display mapping capabilities. Curious to see where this lands in live production environments. How about a Mac Mini driving 4 additional displays? Maybe?

Haven't been able to find any real testimonials of people trying to push 30 fps 480 or even 720 content down these things though.

Display Link Products

PS, my favorite, a 4.3" touchscreen display, goes for about 150 bucks. Yes, you too can turn your desk into the Space Shuttle cockpit with these things

Fudge Graphics just threw up this cool tutorial that gives you a visual guide of what layer blending modes look like... check it out HERE.

i have this weird liking for controllers. not video game controllers, but something that you could feasibly use to connect back to your comp to trigger anything. PVP, vidvox, coge, motion, quartz compositions or anything else that you can think of.

I started with an old school gravis gamepad [basically a usb ps one controller]. I then found a universal game controller to usb adapter at my local wally world for under 10 bucks which opens up a whole world of options. This allowed us to map guitar hero guitars as midi devices and almost any game controller.

An Apple Remote [for those Macs that use to come standard with them] can be purposed with a simple Quartz comp, turning it into a simple MIDI controller.

I thought I'd throw together a small list of some cool devices that can be somehow used to trigger stuff:
NES Controllers
Apple Remote
Nintendo Wiimote
Guitar Hero Axe

More 'professional' line of controllers:
Korg Nano Controllers
Behringer line of various controllers

I figured that a good dose of links is always something that people like to see. I've thrown together some of the many sets of links that I have concerning Quartz composing.

Beginning VJ App, Quartonian
Open source VJ app, Coge
Add on Modules
Quartz Projects/Forums
Quartz Wiki
Moving VJing forward
General Quartz info