Prototyping Interfaces – Interactive Sketches with VVVV is now available

June 26 2013

Mentioned earlier on this blog, the book Prototyping Interfaces – Interactive Sketches with VVVV is out!

In short (from Vimeo):

The book “Prototyping Interfaces – Interactive Sketches with VVVV” covers within 280 pages the applied handling of interactive sketches with the visual programming language VVVV. It is divided into two main chapters, a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part concerns the definition and the meaning of the term “prototype” in the designprocess. The practical part of the book branches the basics of the visual programming language VVVV and how to control different electronic components with Arduino and VVVV. Beginning from the use of different sensors and actuators to modern tracking technologies like the xBox Kinect, different examples are explained within a wide range of tutorials.

Unfortunately the book itself is with  €75,- a bit pricey ( Rickard, perhaps we could get a copy for the workshop?), but all the example patches can be downloaded for free from the site.  The software itself, VVVV, is free as well and can be downloaded here (windows only). You can sneak preview a few pages of the book on the VVVV blog.

During my current internship I had the pleasure to work with the 2 guys who started VVVV. They used the software to program our installation for this year’s design week in Milan. The setup was quite complicated, as it consisted of 6 kinects, sound,  and 8 lasers that were custom built for this project. It was super inspiring to see them at work, and I was deeply impressed by what the software is capable of. They also run a small studio, and most of their projects (if not all) are also built using VVVV.

July 3 2013
Miguel permalink

VVVV is sweet, would be even better it if were built on top of OpenGL and able to run on multiple operational systems. But well, not everything is lost, we still get Quartz Composer in OS X.

July 3 2013

Looks like there are more folks who think the same way :)
http://vvvv.org/blog/opengl-running-inside-vvvv

July 8 2013

VVVV is indeed a nice tool and application. For years, I’ve been going back and forth on the benefits and challenges of learning/teaching these visual tools (or others like MaxMSP or Quartz Composer) over code-based tools. They all have a relatively steep learning curve, but after that they seem crazy fast and smooth for the (single) author. Sharing and collaboration work with those tools is generally messy too, à la “wait a minute until I clean my clutter of nodes that only make sense to me”. On the other hand, visual nodes are a neat way to arrange processes and operations, especially as you can get a fast idea of what’s going on, and able to navigation at various levels of details.

I hope to spend more time digging VVVV once I receive my copy of the book :-)

/Camille

July 17 2013

I think the book is in german only for now. I was in touch with the authors and they are planning an english version but it is still in the works. I don’t know what is the current status.

July 18 2013

Yeah you’re right, it is mentioned on the publisher’s site. Stupid I didn’t see that before..

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