This visual programming environment lets you create immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences by building on WebVR, WebGL, & other HTML5 APIs. Vizor implements a Cloud-based drag & drop WebVR visual programming editor to the free open-source Patches platform.
With Patches you get a full implementation including ‘live’ preview, network comms, unlimited undo, data flow visualization, & publishing. A catalog of pre-built patches is available to use as modular building blocks.
The plugin architecture means you get access to hundreds of ways to create, obtain or modify data. There are also scores of methods for utilizing data & ways of structuring logic & store states. You can store, import & export created sequences as JSON. These can then be embedded in an included standalone player or you can simulate them in a bare core instance.
Sequences on an embedded player can be included in JavaScript projects by providing it with values & having it update the graph. This can be deployed on any Web server.
Some examples of available plugins are:
- Cameras – Perspective, orthographic & screen space. Obtain aspect ratio & viewport size.
- Input – Gamepad, VR headset, keyboard, mouse position, button state & scroll wheel.
- Loading assets – HTML5 audio, images, JSON, 3d scenes & HTML5 video. Select files directly from UI or provide URLs to load as strings from the graph.
- Matrices – Translation, rotation, scale & planar projection.
- System state – Initialized, assets started, failed, & successfully loaded. Graphs can emit these signals via plugins to integrate with the global asset load logic when procedurally generating data.
- Text rendering.
- Time – Absolute, frame delta.
- Web Sockets.
- Crypto – Check the current balances of a named CounterWallet.
- Virtual Reality – Camera / MHD / Sensor info. Sensor velocity / acceleration. Full
- Oculus Rift support.
- Various plugins to provide UI for direct manipulation or input of values: Knobs, sliders, input fields for labels & constant values, toggle & action buttons, color pickers, text editors, PRNGs…
- Audio – Get duration & current playback position. Analysis (FFT), gain, buffer source.
- Color – Add, mix, multiply & set alpha.
- Data type conversions. Format or parse strings, compose complex types from primitives, convert between primitive types & split/merge cameras to/from constituent matrices.
- Logic – And, equals, if, if…else, less than, more than, nand, not, or, switch a& xor.
- Materials – Alpha clip, ambient color, blend mode (none, add, sub, mul, normal), diffuse color, double-sided, attach lights, shininess, textures (diffuse, emission, specular and normal maps), z-buffer (use / write).
- 3D – Render scene, render mesh, create instanced meshes (arrays, cubic volumes, using iterated function systems or distribution textures) & record the current framebuffer.
- Audio – Player / Source player.
- Create infinitely nested sub-graphs or loops.
- Create named in-& output proxies in a graph to have them automatically reflected as a slot on the parent node of the graph the proxy is in.
- Create named registers to store values of any supported data type between graph updates as state storage or feedback loops.
Patches is free & open source under an MIT license, & you can access project source & build it yourself at the project’s GitHub page here. Alternatively, you can use a hosted Cloud version of the editor at Vizor here. Vizor is a distributed team with their main offices in Helsinki, Finland.
– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review –
Image Credit: Patches
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