Exercising the odot language in Graphics Animation Applications

One of my jobs on the odot language development team was developing a diverse set of applications and tests to give feedback to the language design team (mainly John MacCallum) on affordances and difficulties with the language.

This example digs back into knowledge acquired in my early career before I found a way to focus on music technology. I was doing a lot of computer graphics - plotting libraries, GUIs, cad tools and so on. These were the early days when the core concepts had been worked out and companies like SGI were just starting (we had one of their first machines to play with in my university).

The idea of this patch is to use OSC packets to describe objects, mostly platonic solids, organize them into a display list and hand them off to openGL to render via their Jitter interface. You can think of these objects as signals-functions of time. Their properties are computed from an incoming "time" variable. This point of view is a rich way to handle compositional challenges and mirrors the time machines we did in OSW and CAST.