Interactive

Interactivity is a wide topic and often involves external systems, sensors or protocols. vvvv brings them all together and connects them to realtime output.

We Live in an Ocean of Air / Marshmallow Laser Feast

Crowd Tracking

For capturing interaction with crowds, vvvv supports the following tracking systems which give you positional data (and more) per visitor in large spaces:

• Augmenta
• BlueIOT

Further, a range of depth sensors and lidars is supported that allow you to create custom solutions, see the Devices section in the packs browser for all options.

Media Server

When off-the-shelf media servers don’t suite your needs, create your own with vvvv. All the components typically needed (video, audio, realtime graphics, lights, lasers) are there for you to customize and tailor to your specific use case. Combine with your own idea of a UI and finally export your media server as a windows app for easy deployment.

Elbphilharmonie / Schnelle Bunte Bilder

Audio, Video, Lights and Lasers

• Image sequence playback (.dds files for best performance/quality)
• Video playback based on Microsoft Media Foundation
• Projection Mapping support via multiple thirdparty integrations
• Shader based image effects (TextureFX)
• Multichannel audio engine with VST3 audio plugin integration
• Support for protocols to control stage lights
• Support for Lasers plus a set of nodes to generate paths with blanking

Rapid Prototyping

vvvv is made for rapid prototyping. A quick setup, effortless iteration, limitless connectivity and simple deployment are key to building any realtime media application.

Quick Setup

Getting vvvv up and running takes less then 2 minutes. The download is minimal, there is no signup or registration procedure and no copy-protection that would prevent you from installing vvvv on as many devices you need. Within 2 minutes you have access to the full possibilities of vvvv without any artificial limitations.

Visual Live-Programming

vvvv is a visual-first and fully live-programming environment. While it is possible to develop parts of your applications also using traditional text coding, this is mostly a preference but hardly ever a necessity.

One mode: Runtime

No matter if you “patch” visually or you write parts of your code in C#, any change you make is live. Compilation is happening in the background and you don’t have to wait for your program to restart, think: State Hot-Reload. This allows for rapid prototyping and is extremely benefitial for creating and debugging realtime interactive applications.

Developer Friendly

vvvv is generally developer friendly. One can think of it as a development environment for the .NET ecosystem in which sense it is comparable to Visual Studio and Rider.

The vvvv editor with tool windows

The key difference is vvvv’s focus on visual live-programming which benefits applications that require rapid prototyping or have IO that goes beyond the standard mouse/keyboard/touch-screen.

Multi-language

vvvv is a visual-first development environment. There isn’t much that you couldn’t express with vvvv’s own visual language VL. It combines features known from object-oriented, functional as well as reactive programming and as such is quite versatile.

But that’s not all, vvvv also supports the following text languages:

Extendability

vvvv is not a monolithic software. Its core is rather slim with many optional packs to augment its functionality.

If you’re still missing a feature, here are your options:

• Get in touch, we offer custom feature development, support and consulting
• Help yourself by writing a custom node or an editor extension:

Custom nodes

The simplest way to create custom, reusable nodes is wrapping a group of nodes away in a new node. Do this for a bunch of nodes and create your own reusable pack of nodes which you can share on nuget.org.

Alternatively custom nodes can be written in pure C# or F#. No proprietary plugin-wrapping boilerplate code is needed. Any method written in code is available as node in VL, meaning simple nodes really just take a few lines of code.

If you know how to write code, extending vvvv with your own nodes is trivial.

Deployment

For deployment, vvvv offers full flexibility. Whether you prefer to ship your code as an app or rather have vvvv itself running on premise, it is up to you to decide.

We Live in an Ocean of Air / Marshmallow Laser Feast

Export

The first option is to export the program to run it as normal app (*). It can be wrapped in an installer and handed to clients who don’t have to know anything about vvvv in order to run it.

Like this, apps created with vvvv can also be shared via online stores like: