Make mind-bending, interactive 3D projects with TouchDesigner and Python

3:40pm - 4:05pm on Saturday, October 7 in Madison

Suby Raman

Audience Level:

Beginner

Watch:

https://youtu.be/IlURHtP7svg

Overview

TouchDesigner is a programming platform for creating real-time 2D/3D projects with tools like the Kinect and Oculus Rift. Fortunately for us, it uses Python as its built-in scripting language! I’ll give a demo of TD and leverage Python to generate interactive 3D media using data from Websockets.

Description

TouchDesigner is a free programming platform that makes 2D/3D programming accessible and fun to users of all levels. It easily pulls video data from tech like the Kinect, Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and streaming internet video. Because it uses Python, you can leverage the entire ecosystem of Python tools to push your art to the next level; everything from simple parsing of TCP messages, to transforming 3D geometry with numpy, to complex signal processing with scikit. Not only that; TouchDesigner allows Python programmers to create complex, portable user interfaces for any project.

I’ve been using TouchDesigner to develop interactive dance visualizers using the Kinect, and I’m excited to show what it is capable of. I’ll give a high-level overview of how to start working with 2D/3D data in TouchDesigner, and I’ll demo a simple project that uses real-time data from Websockets to generate 3D media. All of you in the audience will contribute!