ANNOUNCE: Luz First Release v0.5

[Ian McIntosh <ian openanswers org>]

What is it?
===========

Luz is a new concept in live music visualization, focusing on 2D
graphics moving in a 2D or faux-3D world, all with tight music
integration.

Tradeable plugins provide the shapes, behaviors, and visual effects, and
all aspects of all plugins can be easily animated to the beat, time, or
(coming soon) controlled directly using input devices such as keyboards
and Wii remotes.

Some good examples of this style are...

...Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy" music videos (both of them):
 http://youtube.com/results?search_query=gnarles%20crazy

...Moby's "Escapar" music video:
 http://youtube.com/results?search_query=moby+escapar

Luz is written in Ruby.  It uses OpenGL for output and Gtk+ with Glade
for the user interface.


Screenshots
===========

http://gnomecoder.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/luz-gui.png


Where can I get it?
===================

Download the latest here:

http://info.openanswers.org/downloads/luz-latest.tar.gz

No compilation is necessary, just run luz.rb.

Ubuntu users can get all requirements using:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 libgtk2-ruby libglade2-ruby
libgtkglext1-ruby librmagick-ruby1.8 libcairo-ruby


Contributing
============

Luz is housed at Launchpad.net:

 http://launchpad.net/luz

And development related discussion will happen on:

 http://groups.google.com/group/luz-devel

See you there!