intoxicating interactive graphics

If you follow my Twitter stream then you may have seen a string of strange videos I’ve posted. This was a series of experiments generated by a new art tool I’ve been building for the past few months. Now it’s time to finally show it to the world.

Project MaiTai

MaiTai lets you visually wire up blocks to create interactive graphics. Think of them almost as animated sculptures. There are blocks for nodes (shapes, images, colors), effects, simple logic, and inputs from the mouse, keyboard, webservices (Flickr & Twitter streams), and realtime sound spectrum from MP3s. Once you are happy with the results you can export it as a JavaFX WebStart app or a Quicktime movie suitable for uploading to video sharing websites.

To try it out go to ProjectMaiTai.org, and click on the download link in the right sidebar. Once the app starts you can try some examples from the ‘samples‘ button in the toolbar. Here’s a taste of what you can create with MaiTai.

MaiTai is fully open source (BSD), and built entirely in JavaFX. The current version uses JavaFX 1.2.1 on Java 6. This version is still very alpha, but you can already do some interesting things with it. Please join the roadmap mailing list to give feedback and suggest new features.

After playing with a few million Wordpress plugins I found one that will show a flickr stream based on a keyword. There were several, actually, which can do this, but only this one let you choose larger image sizes. What you see on the right sidebar is currently searching for the tag quartzcomposer, not projectmaitai, only because we don’t have anything in Flickr yet. I’ll hopefully be able to change that before launch.

I’ve got the website set up and what I hope is the final build for the first release of MaiTai. I’m in Sweden this week for the OreDev conference where I’ll be announcing MaiTai at the end of my session on Wednesday. Now if I can just overcome my jetlag I’ll be set.