The art of Processing

While reading some papers yesterday about ambient visualization I happened to stumble across a programming language/environment called Processing. It was created from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab (the same place that John Maeda a.k.a Mr Simplicity works) and it basically acts as a “sketch-book” style programming language. Since it’s written in Java it runs on a Java platform which makes it run faster than its scripting language equivalents.

If you go on the site there are a lot of cool examples showing some neat demos. If you go to the exhibition you can see what I mean (the Yo soy la Juan demo is visually stunning).  When I’ve got enough time I’m gonna give it a go myself, see if it is as good as it looks.