I have been considering for some time whether to build a visual effects application for OP-XY. OP-XY would trigger visual effects corresponding to the music on an external screen/tablet. Technically, it would look like this:
The effects application would be a website that receives commands via WebMIDI (no installation necessary). Transmission via USB-C or Bluetooth MIDI, both of which work reliably on tablets.
The effects are triggered via MIDI output from the OP-XY (auxiliary track 3).
I’m interested in your opinion:
Is there any interest?
What could the visualisations look like? Do you have any ideas? Screenshots?
Sounds neat, I am interested! I miss VideoLab from the OP-Z, I thought it was a cool feature and I used it a lot. I have thought about making something similar to what you’ve described, but it’s always been a bit easier just to make a bespoke programme in Godot or Unity to make visuals directly.
I had some thoughts about something that would make it compelling for me:
It’s just responding to MIDI, so there’s no need for it to be OP-XY specific (although presets for the OP-XY could be nice to make it work more easily).
It would need to be opinionated, that is, it would have a bunch of hardcoded visualisations that could be combined and modified. Anything more complex than that (uploading asset packs etc) and you might as well just programme the visualisation yourself. Image and video upload would enable a lot of customisation, this was a nice feature of videolab.
It needs to work offline, which is possible with a Progressive Web App, perhaps images and videos that are uploaded would be stored in web storage (IndexedDB probably? They’re a bit big for LocalStorage).
If you’re interested in writing it in Unity, Klak and MidiKlak are the libraries that TE used for videolab. Not sure how active the development is on them, or if there’s now a better alternative.
Interestingly enough, I thought I read previously about TE mentioning that visual effects integration was a feature coming at some stage, but I can’t find this information now.
I don’t have a OP-XY but I agree that there is demand for a device-independent webapp like this. I created a HTML5 webapp via Unity before (although without MIDI) that runs on itch.io and can be embedded into any website. If that skill is of any use, I’ll be happy to contribute as per my abilities.
