ofxFX by Patricio Gonzalez

This is an add on for open frame works that allows you to write open gl shaders (abbreviated GLSL). Shaders, as opposed to normal filters or visual effects, are nice because they are really low level, so you can do lots of fancy things all at once. A few examples of what you can do with shaders include, filters, generative stuff, and interactive fluid systems.Gonzalez did this supper cool project where he make a sand pit into a topological map using a shader. This is a link to a sandbox of running example with code. From what I can devine

ofxInteractiveSurface by Patricio Gonzalez (this guy just has all the cool ones)

With this add on plus a kinect you can turn any object into a muti touch surface. I don’t I actually want to do something with this. It is too much about making interfaces. You could orchestrate a situation where inanimate unexpected objects, such as a small garden gnome or a collection of porcelain figurines, become the controllers for an uncanny technologically mediated garden. (just a thought).

Fern Tracker by CVLAB

Their readme file is not informative, but from what I can gather fern is a computer vision library that sees and models images it is trained to recognize by its key features. The system can then determine how far the image is from the camera and the tilt and orientation. I’ve seen two big projects that use similar software; First there was the boards magazine project by Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille. I also saw a project that augmented peoples personal vision with glasses. I could see this software being used to identify all the media people are engaging with within a certain public space. It would also be fun to hide messages within different images.