New year, new initiatives For the new year, we’re going to be unveiling a few new initiatives. The first are regular online workshops. They will be on a number of topics around immersive installations and interactive technology, including many TouchDesigner-focused workshops. They will be short (2-3 hour) deep dives on single topics including a short…
What is starting from scratch? We often hear bakers or chefs talking about making things “from scratch.” They use this term when they make all of the recipe from the base ingredients and didn’t use any pre-made elements. Usually you pay more to have something made from scratch and it takes longer to make. Over…
What’s so special about working on-site? Working in your office and working on-site for an interactive project are two different beasts. I find it interesting that they’re never really talked about separately. The environments are different, the schedules are rapidly evolving, and they each have unique challenges. After having just come back from finishing a…
Open office hours chats After a great Open office hours last weekend, I wanted to summarize two of the main topics discussed. It always surprises me that most of the open office hours chats revolve around career and business questions. Here are two of the general things I end up telling folks. Find a niche…
What is open office hours? We had a successful holiday give away last year of some free consulting time, where people got an hour of our time to chat through their work, a potential project, or get some TouchDesigner help. To continue the benefit of that, we held an open office hours, where we made…
Designing with rules If there’s one thing I wish I could tell all immersive designers getting involved in immersive media and interactive technology is that they’ll be far more successful if they created rules instead of designs. Unfortunately, real-time systems aren’t magic. Immersive installations are built on rules. Sometimes many of them in complex chains that…
What is a real-time installation? In the slew of sexy project write-ups and press releases about interactive and real-time installations, it can be hard to tell just what exactly a real-time installation is. I found a number of different definitions for the term, ranging from: relating to a system in which input data is processed within…
The time between gigs Every once in a while you’ll get a moment to breathe between a few projects. These moments can feel few and far between and you may want to try to catch up on sleep. If you have enough energy, there are 4 powerful things that you can do that might help…
The problems of speed Speed is a valued skill in programming. Working faster can often correlate to being more cost effective, shorter development timelines, and more iterations. These are all good things but they lead to developers becoming tired and trying to take shortcuts to save time and energy. Shortcuts are a good thing in…
What’s hot? There are new technologies coming out almost every day. Product Hunt is a testament to this. In all the noise, it can be hard to find the trends to focus on. This difficulty is compounded when you’re working in a smaller niche portion of the tech industry, like immersive media. There are two…