Via Tinker It Now!, I ended up at Live Control of Open Source Animation in Animata. Therein, real-time 2.5D animation is controlled via a likeness of Mickey Mouse laden with Arduinos. Said gizmo sends data to PureData, relaying data to software called Animata. Animata does the animation sweetness.
This led me down a whole rat’s hole of awesome. Matt Niinimäki is up to awesome things. Animata seems wicked cool — it’s like digital marionettes, except not creepy. PureData, near as I can tell, is like Little Big Planet, but for audio/video. The PureData documentation is dense, but there are good examples and docs included in the application (look under Help→Browser). Pd, so far, has the distinction of being more inscrutable, for me, than Haskell. I can run Haskell programs; I cannot, for my life, figure out how to make Pd patches go.
Let’s enumerate: Arduino is open source hardware with a dandy little programming environment that makes writing embedded programs vastly less onerous than is typical. PureData is visual-patch-language-thing for creating audio-oriented systems with some graphics smarts on the side. Animata does interactive real-time animation. All of these great toys are open source.
Did I mention people are making cool stuff?
