Omniversity of Manchester

Around 10 years ago Processing was released (2001), marking the acceleration of international interest into merging design/art, with powerful computational graphics and hardware. In this time VVVV, openFrameworks, Processing, Cinder, Jitter, and the many other tools have been employed and crafted to satisfy this  desire to rapidly create prototype and deploy ideas in the fields of Visual Arts, Architecture, Informational Design, Visual Music, Interactive Performance, Physical Computing and Advertising Media.
VVVV (first released 1998) is a unique tool initially created by MESO, Frankfurt to create ‘Digitial Interiors’. It is now publicly available and free to use for non commercial purposes.

VVVV is powerful toolkit of media technologies, boasting a glut of built in functionality, tools and examples. You can safely presume that you can get it to interface with almost anything you want, it can generate almost anything you want. There aren’t any other media toolkits that can perform so much ‘out of the box’, having you projecting kinect tracked video onto buildings or controlling robot arms from twitter in days rather than weeks. The true power of the tool lies within the elegance within which it makes its features available. In the opinion of this author, it can usurp all other platforms in terms of development speed, power and flexibility.

Real World Examples

VVVV has been used for :

• Long term installations (>3 years runtime)
• Quick installations (<10mins to develop) Vast installations (>50 projectors)
• Deployed installations (>50 units)
• TV shows (The X Factor)
• Hosting websites
• Making my mobile phone ring when the postman arrives if I’m at the cafe downstairs (1 hour development)
• Almost anything

Learning Outcomes

This is a 2 day course, run on Saturday and Sunday.
You will learn:

• A hands on ‘by the seat of your pants’ tour of VVVV’s features and how to get started with each bit. Create a mental map of the VVVV landscape through experience, so every bit of new learning can be hooked onto an explained element of the system.
• Be able to work with VVVV and a projector
• Be able to map content from inside your computer onto real world objects using a projector
• Understanding of VVVV fundamentals

What you need to be familiar with

You should be proficient with computers (know how to operate, setup, fix your mums).
Any experience with coding or visual based development environements will come in super useful (Flash/ActionScript, Javascript, C/++, C#, Visual Basic, Objective-C, Python, Arduino, Max/MSP, etc).

Software and costs

All software is freely available for learning/non-commercial purposes, and copies will be distributed with the course materials on the day.
We will be using the latest version of VVVV at the time of the workshops (currently 26, which can be downloaded from http://www.vvvv.org/downloads)

Equipment you’ll need

You will need to bring a PC Computer (ideally a laptop) with:

Intel Apple Macs are fine, but you must use Bootcamp. You CAN NOT use virtualisation e.g. Parallels, VMWare, VirtualBox.

Tutor Biography

Elliot Woods is ½ of international interaction design studio Kimchi and Chips, with works featured in Wired, Engadget and the BBC. He is a european and international protagonist of the projection mapping scene, creating tools and techniques that have been employed in multi-million dollar marketing campaigns and niche art projects alike. Elliot taught a full time projection mapping course at NODE 10 (VVVV’s own forum of the digial arts) and has taught primary school pupils, university students and full time proffessionals the art and techniques of projection mapping.

To prepare for the course...

Further information about vvvv