Using OSCQuery In The Control Surface Plugin

Also see the documentation notes for using OSCQuery in VDMX.

The Control Surface is one of the most widely versatile plugins in VDMX, making it possible to create sets of custom interface elements that can be used to control nearly any aspect of your workspace or send MIDI / OSC / DMX to other systems. The Control Surface plugin also has the ability to publish its list of parameters over a local area network using the OSCQuery protocol so that other software can remotely browse and control almost any aspect of your VDMX project.

In this video tutorial we'll be looking at the basics of using OSCQuery protocol from within the Control Surface, and three ways that those parameters can be accessed from software running on other devices: using our free OSCQuery Browser utility, another copy of VDMX and a web browser running on an iPhone. This same technique of accessing publishing parameters can be used with other OSCQuery enabled tools such as Mitti, Mad Mapper and libossia.

The overview of steps from this tutorial are:

  1. From the Workspace Inspector > Plugins, add a Control Surface plugin to the project.
  2. From the Control Surface inspector, add a slider, two buttons, a pop-up button, a color picker, a text field and a 2D point picker.
  3. Use the UI Inspector to adjust interface settings: Make one button into a momentary and configure the pop-up button with menu options.
  4. On a second computer (or on the same computer if only using a single machine to follow along), open the OSCQuery Browser, and observe that the list of parameters from the Control Surface can be browsed and remotely controlled.
  5. On a second computer, in VDMX, the OSCQuery Client plugin is used to create interfaces that remotely access the published parameters from the first computer.
  6. Webpage control: Go to VDMX Preferences > OSC > OSC Query and click the URL for "Interactive HTML Interface" – a web page controller will appear in a web browser. Load this URL on mobile devices, tablets and other computers on the local network to control published parameters from VDMX.
  7. VDMX and the web controller support the optional 'bi-directional' communication part of the OSCQuery specification – note that as we adjust parameters within one device / application, the values are updated in the displays of other software to match. This feature can be disabled at the top of the web controller for low bandwidth situations.

Tips and Notes:

The basic parts of the Control Surface: Setup inspector, main interface with controls and the UI inspector for adjusting settings of individual interface elements.

Go to the VDMX preferences > OSC > OSCQuery to find the Interactive HTML Interface link.

A Control Surface plugin and corresponding web controller views (in dark and light stylings) on a Mac.

The corresponding interface viewed in Safari on an iPhone.