04.07.08
Processing BETA
I came across an amazing tool this weekend called Processing. It allows you to generate images or video using programming methods and data. This is nothing new, but its simplicity and ease of setup makes it the digital equivalent of a sketchbook. Granted, you still need an understand of programming to use it (the script is similar to Javascript), it doesn’t have a drawing GUI, but its far more lightweight than building a program from scratch with C++ or putting something together in Houdini (which, as a sidenote, is finally releasing a mac version).
So far, people have been using it in a wide range of projects that go from visualizing bursts of Yahoo search queries to making flocking imagery for music videos (as show in the picture). Another very interesting aspect is the ease that you can access video, even directly from a webcam. This makes it ideal for testing out analysis techniques without a lot of overhead. Overall, it’s a very cool program, and you should definitely download it and try out the list of samples included at the very least.