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March 13, 2005

I've Changed my Mind About Proce55ing

I discovered Proce55ing a little over a year ago, but wasn't impressed at first. My background in interactive 3D and web apps had spoiled me so much that I wouldn't settle for anything less than texture-mapped 3D with shaders and a highly-evolved object model. I was thinking that Proce55ing was just a toy, too underpowered, and not practical for the kind of work I was doing.

This perception changed when I found Toxi's base26, a stunning infoviz app that illustrates the frequencies of common 4-letter english words with real-time 3D wireframe visualization of marching-cubes-style isosurface clusters.

That this was built with Proce55ing shows that the platform is capable of great things. The API supplies very minimal 2D/3D support, so it's up to individual developers to write their own functionality. However, Java is used for scripting so it's possible to leverage OOP and come up with something useful and scalable. Unlike Flash, the frame buffer is open for all to modify. And unlike Director/Shockwave, the 3D engine is pure software. This has all kinds of implications, for example, being able to apply filter & blur effects to a 3D object and layer this with 2D content. But most important of all, it enables old-skool late-90's demo effects that are impossible in Flash w/o massive hacks. For example, an animated 3D water heightfield.

Toxi has lots of amazing interactive art on their site, like this screensaver, and this 3D isometric color picker. These guys are extremely versatile--they even wrote a 3D modelling and animation tool: ReAnimator3D. And their client work is amazing: for example, lateral.net (which is worth a post in and of itself).

Toxi's blog is here.

Posted by Devon at March 13, 2005 01:33 AM

Comments

Posted by: me at March 14, 2005 09:08 AM

Posted by: Devon at March 14, 2005 08:57 PM

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