openFrameworks is an open source toolkit designed for

creative coding Creative coding is a type of computer programming in which the goal is to create something expressive instead of something functional. It is used to create live visuals and for VJing, as well as creating visual art and design, entertainment (e.g. ...

founded by

Zachary Lieberman Zachary Lieberman is an American new media artist, designer, computer programmer, and educator. Early life and education Born in 1977, Lieberman holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from Hunter College and both a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Design and Technology ...

Theo Watson Theo Watson is a British artist and programmer. His art work includes interactive video, large-scale public projections, computer vision projects, and interactive sound recordings which have featured in museums and galleries across the world i ...

and Arturo Castro. OpenFrameworks is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and built on top of OpenGL. It runs on Microsoft Windows,

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

, Android and Emscripten. It is maintained by its founders with contributions by other members of the openFrameworks community.

History

The 0.01 version of openFrameworks was released by Zachary Lieberman on August 3, 2005. By February 2006, Lieberman was using version 0.03 with their students at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. According to its authors, openFrameworks was developed for

"... folks using computers for creative, artistic expression, and who would like low level access to the data inside of media in order manipulate, analyze or explore. That audience we felt was significantly underserved by the current crop of C++ libraries."

Artists and projects

Several notable artists have used openFrameworks in their projects. Co-founder Zach Lieberman used the toolkit for his 2006 ''Drawn'' project, in which visitors can create painted ink shapes and then interact with them. Co-founder Theo Watson has used openFrameworks for their projects ''audio space,'' where visitors can leave spatialised audio messages in a room and hear messages left by previous visitors, and "Laser Tag." In 2010, Lieberman, Watson, Graffiti Research Lab and others working together as "Free Art and Technology" used openFrameworks for the " EyeWriter" project, a low-cost eye tracking system originally designed to allow paralyzed graffiti artist Tempt One to be able to draw using his eyes. In 2006,

Cory Arcangel Cory Arcangel (born May 25, 1978) is an American post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is best known. Arcangel often uses the ...

used openFrameworks to create the video projection ''Colors'', taking the 1988 film of the same name and playing it one horizontal row of pixels at a time, over a period of more than 33 days. In 2012, Petros Vrellis created an interactive version of Vincent van Gogh's "

The Starry Night ''The Starry Night'' ( nl, De sterrennacht) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Prove ...

" using openFrameworks. Terry Cavanagh's indie video game "Super Hexagon" was originally created in openFrameworks.

License

Openframeworks is released under the permissive

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

. The libraries used by the framework each have their own licenses.

Related projects

OpenFrameworks' emphasis on creative coding is similar to the

Processing Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming ...

language in that both projects present a simplified interface to powerful libraries for media, hardware and communication. openFrameworks's main difference from

is that it is written in

, instead of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

. Users will find many similarities between the two libraries, for example what is beginShape() in Processing is ofBeginShape() in openFrameworks. The openFrameworks wiki includes an article for people coming to openFrameworks from Processing. Another similar project is

Cinder Cinder is an alternate term for scoria. Cinder or Cinders may also refer to: In computing *Cinder (programming library), a C++ programming library for visualization *Cinder, OpenStack's block storage component * Cyber Insider Threat, CINDER, a ...

, which is also a C++ library framework for creative programming. The primary difference is that openFrameworks has a larger number of dependencies on open source libraries, allowing advanced programmers more control and transparency, while Cinder is more dependent on libraries built into the operating systems it sits on top of, which generally means updates and bug fixes are more frequent and reliable with openFrameworks.

References

External links

*
openFrameworks forum
��traditionally the best place for questions & announcements
openFrameworks documentation
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Openframeworks 3D graphics software Application programming interfaces Free computer libraries Software using the MIT license Creative coding