For Andy O’Meara, creating a trend-setting computer graphics program has been a thoroughly depressing experience.
After launching his program-turned-phenomenon, O’Meara had to ship out on a five-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy.
Last year, O’Meara released G-Force, software that “visualizes” music through an ever-changing stream of trippy graphics that morph and pulse to the music’s beat.
G-Force, and other “vis” software like it, are rapidly becoming the equivalent of flying toasters — a wildly popular and instantly recognizable icon of the times, like lava lamps or disco balls.
But for O’Meara, finding himself at the vanguard of the movement has been anything but uplifting.
Thanks to the Navy ROTC scholarship program that paid his way through college, O’Meara spends most of his time on a nuclear submarine when he could be embarking on a multimedia career.
He has already been offered the chance to join pop star Seal’s forthcoming Togetherland tour, and he signed a lucrative licensing deal with Apple that convinced him he can make a living writing code.
“If I wasn’t in the Navy, I’d be on tour with Seal working on visuals for him,” said O’Meara from his home port of San Diego. “Am I depressed about it? Yeah.”
Interviewed over the phone and sounding profoundly unhappy, O’Meara frequently mumbled and seemed incapable of giving coherent answers.
“I can function,” said O’Meara, “but I’m definitely not jovial.”
As well as the opportunity to tour with Seal, O’Meara said he was informally offered research posts at half a dozen different universities.
“It seems these huge, exciting paths were opening up for me but there were bars over it that was the Navy,” the 24-year-old said. “There were all these fantastic opportunities, but they were blocked off because of the Navy. It’s led to lots of confusion and depression.”
O’Meara wrote G-Force, a free plug-in for popular MP3 players like Winamp, Sonique (also owned by Wired News’ parent company TerraLycos), and Musicmatch, during his last year at Cornell. It took off just as O’Meara graduated with a degree in computer science.
A clubber who is into techno and trance music, O’Meara is also a born-again Christian.
Although he experimented with drugs in college, O’Meara said God had more influence on G-Force’s hallucinogenic graphics than mind-bending substances did.
“I was at the height of my Christian zeal and it just popped into my head,” he said. “It was definitely divine inspiration.”
O’Meara wrote G-Force in C++ on a Mac. It was based on Whitecap, a previous effort.
While G-Force wasn’t the first “vis” software, it is arguably the most influential. More than any other visualization, G-Force is driving the underground art form into the mainstream.
Its distinctive look was heavily influenced by an earlier Winamp plug-in called Geiss, which in turn was influenced by the granddaddy of all visualizations — Kevin “Zaph” Burfitt’s Cthugha, an “oscilloscope on acid” that predated MP3s and visualizations by at least five years.
The visualization movement has been building for the past couple of years, ever since Winamp built a scriptable vis engine into its player.
Since then, thousands of visualizations have been released, including recent popular additions like Rabbit Hole, Punkie and Valentine Dancer.
Visualizations trace their roots back to the European demo scene, where teams of hackers coded small, self-contained packages of music synchronized to video, animation or special effects.
“Visualizations are becoming ubiquitous,” said Ian Lyman, creative director at Sonique. “They’re starting to get everywhere.”
Visualizations are now built into every new software player on the market, and the visuals can be seen at just about every club, rave and party in the world.
Visualizations are popular with DJs because they simply plug their laptops into a projector. It’s cheaper than lighting systems or lasers, it responds to the music, and because a lot of Vis software is scriptable and new ones are always available, it is infinitely adaptable.
Lyman predicted visualizations will soon be standard features on car audio decks and portable MP3 players that can be plugged into the TV.
To generate the psychedelic graphics in their living rooms, people are plugging their PCs into their TVs and stereos.
The emergence of visualizations into the mainstream is heralded by Apple’s use of G-Force visuals in the latest iMac TV commercials, Lyman said.
“The visual style is beginning to cross over,” Lyman said. “It’ll have a widespread cultural impact. To some degree, it’s already replacing music videos.”
Because it is free, it’s hard to determine how widely G-Force has been installed. O’Meara estimates that Whitecap and G-Force downloads top seven million.
Apple recently licensed G-Force for its iTunes audio player, which is having a tremendous impact on its popularity. O’Meara was paid a “sizeable” sum, but declined to say how much.
And, as is typical for the world’s biggest PC software seller, Microsoft copied G-Force’s distinctive graphics for the latest version of the Windows Media Player, which could bring visualizations to far more people.
O’Meara is clearly aware that the wave is breaking while he’s literally underwater.
On top of the missed opportunities, O’Meara feels isolated and lonely in the Navy. He misses female company.
“It’s impossible to meet women on a submarine,” he said without irony. “And the all-guy thing gets really tiresome.”
“It’s hard,” O’Meara added. “It’s definitely a different world. It’s been a tough adjustment, but I’m getting there. It’s hard to keep optimistic in the Navy. I’m trying to make the best of it.”
