Editor's selection
Genie 4, announced October 27, is DeepMind's first real-time world model to generate audio natively alongside interactive, explorable environments. A research preview for trusted testers, it leans on Gemini for scene reasoning and carries the same drift and consistency limits every world model still has over long sessions.
Apple built Shared Space once, for one headset. OpenXR just made the same capability a standard, which means it eventually ships on Meta Quest, SteamVR headsets, Steam Frame, Android XR, Varjo, Magic Leap, and XREAL glasses — without each platform reinventing it alone.
The repository for the Behringer KICK carries the application, the AudIO engine, the hardware communication protocol and a Buildroot Linux layer, licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later. A second repository documents how to build and sign your own firmware for the Pro-800, a synth that shipped years ago. Both appeared in the thirteen days since the organisation was created.
Today in Creative Technology
Most read
Spotlight
Pivi finds conventional song structures restrictive, prefers experimental music's unpredictability, and argues that music and visual art operate on different terms. The interview's useful claim for anyone building installations is that the conditions of playback are not a delivery detail but part of the work.
Read the story →LAS Art Foundation curator Sophie Korschildgen and artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg spoke to designboom about the project's first international commission. The number that matters: a wild-bee specialist recorded 83 species at the Natural History Museum edition last year, against a 30–50 average for areas of Berlin classed as pollinator-friendly.
The MIT Instrumentation Lab's engineering drawings were released under a public records request and archived by the Virtual AGC group. A Calgary avionics engineer turned them into printable CAD, then put a Raspberry Pi behind it running an emulator so exact that he argues it is not an emulator at all.
Research Made Simple
In most 3D pipelines artists specify muscle activation by hand — slow, and with no guarantee of physical realism. A Beihang and UCL team trains an RL controller on a 1D Hill-type surrogate, then drives a 3D volumetric simulation with the same constitutive law, hitting full-body simulation at 18 ms per frame on one RTX 4090.
Read the translation →Just published
What to install this week
Creative Coding
Browser-based livecoding video synth built on WebGL, by Olivia Jack. Live-patch visuals with a few lines of JavaScript-like code, no install required. Watch: Olivia Jack on live coding visuals.
AI & Creative Tools
Node-based Stable Diffusion/video interface. v0.43.1 (Oct 28) added partner nodes for seamless PBR texture generation from a photo or prompt, and AI dubbing with lip-synced voice cloning. Watch: a step-by-step ComfyUI walkthrough for beginners.
Creative Coding
Friendly machine-learning library for p5.js sketches, built on TensorFlow.js. Current release: 1.4.0 (the project has stayed on the 1.x line since its 2024 rewrite, with no v2 planned unless a breaking change forces one). Watch: The Coding Train’s beginner’s guide to ml5.js.
XR / Spatial Computing
The 2025 build line’s headline feature, Point Operators (POPs), brings native point-cloud and particle processing into the node graph. Current official build: 2025.33230. Watch: TouchDesigner for beginners in one hour.
Music Technology
Esoteric livecoding sequencer for procedural sequencers and mangled MIDI. Watch: a guided tour of ORCA’s rhythm and math.
Interactive Art
VJ and projection-mapping software. v7.28 brought computer vision into Wire: Human Segmentation and Depth Estimation nodes power new real-time background removal and depth-based effects. Watch: a beginner’s quick-start guide to VJing with Resolume.
From the editorial team
Testing MediaPipe hand tracking against an old webcam to drive a Hydra patch — more jank than expected.
Related coverage → Just startedFine-tuning a small diffusion model on a week of studio photos to see what it learns about our own mess.
Related coverage → Wrapping upAn ESP32 + contact mic rig that pauses a plotter drawing whenever the room gets noisy.
Related coverage →Festivals, calls, conferences