Today, the use of vvvv has spread worldwide and it is a widely-used professional tool from VJ-sets to product prototypes, from artistic projects to award-winning stage presentations on international trade fairs.

Driven by a diverse and high profiled community of visual artists and other software creatives vvvv beta has been maturing over the past decade to an industry standard when it comes to interactive environments.

NODE Forum for Digital Arts, is vvvv’s “real-life” platform for informational interexchange, which has by now grown into one of Europe’s biggest media arts festivals.

visit vvvv.org

Background

vvvv

Initially developed by MESO as an in-house tool to create real-time media installations, vvvv amassed a global community that continuously develops the visual programming software further. MESO and many other professional studios became key drivers for avant-garde projects, produced many innovative installations with vvvv and engages in a mutually beneficial relationship with the creative software developers.

Being able to program in real-time and produce complex reactive media environments while operating on a graphical interface was the challenge set by the team of early vvvv developers Sebastian Oschatz, Max Wolf, Sebastian Gregor, and Joreg.

Over the past decade, design as well as art affiliated disciplines have profited from an extended repertoire of digital tools and rising technologies, with vvvv being one of the trendsetters in the field of creative coding. This is due in part to its graphical interface, which makes it appealing for designers who are used to iterative solutions.

read the meso story

The NEXT Generation of VVVV

vvvv gamma
visit visualprogramming.net

vvvv has been rewritten from scratch over the past 6 years to overcome some fundamental limiting restrictions of the vvvv beta environment. The result:  vvvv gamma is a visual-first live programming environment for the .NET ecosystem.

Besides staying true to its nature inherited from vvvv beta of being a an easy to use and quick prototyping environment, vvvv gammas programming language VL comes with modern features, combining concepts of dataflow and object oriented programming:


Define your own datatypes (Classes and Records)
Composed Datatypes (Spread of Spread,..)
No more binsizes needed!
Loops to iterate within one frame
Generics
Delegates
Reactive programming
Async data processing (multi-threading)
Easy caching of expensive operations

 

vvvv gamma’s visual programming language is called VL (Visual Language) and combines metaphors from dataflow, functional and object oriented programming.
 

In vvvv there is no need to write any code, unless you really want to. You can literally use any .NET library directly in a visual way! To give you an idea of the areas vvvv can be helpful in, here is a list of buzz words vvvv is often associated with:

#generativedesign #interactiondesign, #datavizualization, #computervision #rapidprototyping, ,#physicalcomputing, #projectionmapping, #audiovisual, #realtimeanimations

vvvv gamma was released in early 2020 providing all language features and a core librarty that integrates highlevel usage of OpenCV, Skia based rendering, Midi, Firmata and many dataflow control nodes. So everything you need to learn the environment and enable yourself for the future of visual programming. 

The development team now focuses on integrating the Stride Game Engine as its 3D engine. We are awaiting the release within the runnind year 2020 just before the next  NODE Forum for Digital Art edition. Be sure to be informed and expect workshops, webinars and courses here at the NODE Institute.