From the very beginning, processing was created as a development platform with one objective in mind: generative/procedural art. And this objective is a reality not only because of the tools this language offers, but because some additional libraries some developers are providing to this open community.
People from toxiclibs and their incredible set of libraries for processing is an example.
In the following video you can see a showreel of some of the works created using processing and toxiclibs libraries:
TDC 2009 (Thinking Digital Conference) took place last May:
Thinking Digital is an annual conference where the world's greatest thinkers and innovators gather to inspire, to entertain, and to discuss the latest ideas and technologies.
One of the speakers was a very well known researcher in HCI (Human Computer Interaction), Johnny Chung Lee, famous because his works using wiimote controller.
In the following video, Johnny summarizes his work with the wii controller, and then describes what's going on in HCI researching: - Mixed reality devices (e.g. Microsoft Surface, augmented workbenchs) - 3D displays (4D light field display) - Flexible displays, ink paper displays... - Haptics (e.g. touch in the air, vibrating screens) - Tracking the position of the camera using computer vision - Brain sensing (e.g. a car monitoring the human brain to use its answer against dangerous situations) - etc.
With the title Mobile phones get cyborg vision, BBC describes the present and future of some current Augmented Reality applications. It is worth seeing it.
Although we have been able to see a lot of Augmented Reality (AR) applications recently, some even online (based on Flash, for example), it is not common to see some real useful examples. I mean, examples where the use of the AR is really interesting and contributes to the final product.
A good example of this is the U.S. Postal Priority Mail with its Virtual Box application. Visit their website, and see the demo video to get the final idea.
"Which box fits your shipment?" By using AR, the user can print a pattern, and can visually explore if the different box sizes are or not appropriate for the object the user want to send. The boxes are visualized with transparency, so they can visually compare the size of the object to send vs. the box. Great and useful.
I'm still attending to Eurographics 2009 at Munich. Eurographics is the most important conference on Computer Graphics in Europe, and this year, in the education programme, I was showing to the audience the benefits of using processing in an introductory computer graphics course.
There's no doubt that the advantages of processing in a lot of different areas are awesome, but it is especially worth when we talk about teaching computer graphics. I'm still working in processing and learning as much as I can.
If there's something really difficult is to predict the future. Microsoft has tried to do it in this video. What it seems true is that pervasive computing and advanced GUI are going to be an essential key.
This February, from the 5th to the 12th, I have had the wonderful opportunity of being in a awesome country, Finland. In particular, I was invited to teach a short course in Processing, at the Lahti University of Applied Sciences.
It was a very good chance to see what a student is able to learn about processing in just 10 hours. My finish students didn't have any computer graphics background, but all had previous knowledge in programming.
The result has been very satisfactory, actually, I am now correcting an exam they had to solve after the course. Good marks.
It's clear now that processing is a very interesting alternative in any introductory course in computer graphics.
