Ruby-Processing

Are you on a Mac? Ten minutes from now you will be running your first Ruby-Processing animation, mesmerized by a color shifting 3D cube rotating in space. It’s easy.

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a fairly young programming language, conceived in 1993 and first publicly released in 1995. It was created by Japanese programmer Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. And if you’re running OS X you already have Ruby installed. Yup, it’s already there waiting for you. For more historical info see “Ruby (Programming Language)” on Wikipedia. Ruby gained significant popularity with the rise of Ruby on Rails. (Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby.) In fact, web searches for things having to do with Ruby will usually land you on a page that’s specifically discussing the Rails framework. But Ruby is good for more than just building Web sites. We’re about to make a spinning cube with it, right there on your Desktop! More after the jump…

Augmented Reality made easy

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time. Presently, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and “augmented” by the addition of computer-generated graphics. (More from Wikipedia…) This quick guide assumes you have a web cam, printer, and some programming experience. More after the jump…