Ossia Score

We look at some weird and wonderful applications in these pages, but those that are related to audio or multimedia seem to be some of the most esoteric. And this is another one. Ossia Score has been in development as a research project for over 15 years. Version 2.0 is a major update to the original vision, but it's already a comprehensive and creative application that looks and feels fantastic. It's also very difficult to describe. It calls itself a sequencer for interactive applications; "applications" in this sense means something that takes input to generate output. Input could be a physical device, such as a joystick or a dataglove, and the output could be triggering different sets of lights, animating a display, or generating musical notes.

The main view allows you to link objects from a huge variety of sources. A source can be almost anything, from scripts written in JavaScript to Open Sound Control (OSC) interfaces and audio effects. OSC inputs and outputs are what enable Score to talk to so many devices and applications; typical solutions will call on other OSC-compatible tools, such as Pure Data and Processing, to build whatever is in the creator's imagination. But you don't have to get into programming if you don't want to, as the UI is purely graphical. Objects are dragged into the main view from a device explorer, where you then link these objects to events that trigger an action. Actions can be customized to operate only when a condition is true or send messages to cue actions in other events. It's like an event sequencer that lets you create dynamic responses to those events, while making those events almost anything you can imagine.

Project Website

https://ossia.io/

Create almost anything with Score, including interactive displays, algorithmic music, and weird input controllers.

Real-time ray tracer

Sol-R

One of the main features touted by Nvidia in its new and expensive GPU architecture is its ability to do real-time ray tracing. For gamers, it will mean better lighting, shadows, and reflections, but it should also have a wider impact on the entire graphics community as they work out how to accelerate their own engines with the new API. Ray tracing, generating an image by tracing the path of a virtual photon through a scene, has been around for as long as computers have crunched numbers. But the mathematical intensity has always made it slow. However, you don't need Nvidia's latest hardware if you want to play around with ray tracing. If your GPU is capable of CUDA or OpenCL acceleration, you can try Sol-R.

Sol-R is a real-time ray tracer. Its viewer lets you switch between a variety of different scenes, materials, objects, and environments. The display is updated as quickly as your hardware will allow. The image will appear quickly. If the scene remains static, post processing adds depth of field, ambient occlusion, and bloom. It's never going to be as fast as Unreal Tournament, but it looks infinitely better, and refresh rates are quick enough to let you interact using your mouse or even a Leap Motion device or Oculus Rift DK1, both of which can be enabled with compile options. And it looks amazing. Ray tracing really succeeds at making the environment part of the image, even when that environment may be behind the viewer. Controls are shown in the terminal output to the application, and you can update the view to switch between scenes, animate the view, or enable the virtual reality (VR) mode. You can easily load your own models and environments, or, if this interests you, see how the code works.

Project Website

https://github.com/favreau/Sol-R

Experiment with real-time ray tracing without having the latest hardware, thanks to Sol-R.