3DsoundSurge Interview: LAVA and LAVA Producer


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Interviewed:

MB = Mike Barnes; he is the Senior Brand Manager for LAVA!
Alan S = Alan Seefeldt; he is the LAVA! Engineering Technical Lead
Date: May 21,2000

Update: LAVA is now known as Oozic. A more important change is that it's now only available as part of the software bundle of several Creative products. That is the option to download it is not available anymore.

we get to the interview we figured we should offer a very brief intro to LAVA, based on the info that you will find at LAVA.com.

lava1.jpg (3752 bytes) LAVA! defines the next dimension in Internet Music Entertainment: Interactive 3D Music & Video. It enables the playback, production and merchandising of Internet Music enhanced by awe-inspiring realtime 3D visualizations. The free LAVA! MusicVideo Player, which debuted at Woodstock '99 in the Emerging Artists Pavilion, was initially available only to Sound Blaster Live! customers. The enhanced LAVA! MusicVideo Player, available for download at www.LAVA.com, now supports any PC-based sound card. A LAVA! MusicVideo is an environment made up of 3D objects consisting of textures, images and colors that move to the music. Using a combination of sophisticated audio analysis developed at the Creative-EMU Technology Center, the LAVA! MusicVideo Player, when used in combination with a graphics card that supports Open-GL, offers a new way of experiencing Internet audio and musicians a powerful medium for promoting MP3 and Windows Media content. Cutting-edge internet music providers have already begun to endorse LAVA! to showcase their premium artists. To go along with LAVA, LAVA Producer was just recently released. LAVA! Producer is the first of a new generation of advanced visual authoring software for the PC creating a new dimension of audio-visual entertainment and putting all this power within the reach of the home PC user.

LAVA! Producer offers MusicVideo Scene authoring and packaging features, including:

Scene Object Replacement and Scaling - Starting with any LAVA! Scene template, the LAVA! Producer allows users to quickly select and replace 3D models from an extensive library to create totally new 3D Music Video Scenes. Its simple, ultra-intuitive interface allows you to scale the objects to any size on the fly, to construct infinitely unique and stunning visuals.
Integration with the Video Blaster® WebCam - Connect up this easy to use PC camera from Creative Labs and directly snapshot images onto LAVA! objects which are automatically and instantly "cropped & dropped" into a LAVA! scene in real-time.
MusicVideo Packaging through MP3/MV3 Locking - Secure your audio and custom visuals via unique file association protection to prevent alteration of your objects and images and use with other audio files.

LAVA! Producer is available for on-line purchase and digital download from the lava.com store for US$29.95.

So let get to the interview. As we noted above, in this Q & A we will be hearing from Mike Barnes (MB) and Alan Seefeldt (Alan S), Mike is the Senior Brand Manager for LAVA! (one of his like 9 titles). When you read his stuff you have to imagine him talking with a really cool British accent. Alan is the LAVA! Engineering Technical Lead, but he should really be known as the "Grandfather of LAVA!.

3DSS: Thanks again for taking the time to do this interview. Perhaps you can start out by telling our readers a little about LAVA! (including in general how it works) and LAVA! Producer and your backgrounds and roles with LAVA.com?

MB: The origins of the term LAVA! comes from its underlying technology (Live! Audio Visual Animation). In essence this means LAVA! listens to an incoming audio source, intelligently analyzes it into control streams and generates a 3D "music video" based on user-defined object meshes, images and text – and of course, it does all this in real-time.

As for me, I’m currently the Senior Brand Manager for LAVA!. My background is in electronic musical instrument design (including Yamaha Research & Development in London, and E-mu Systems Inc.), film sound-design (MGM’s Stargate) and software/soundware Product Marketing. LAVA! stems from a desire to create a new kind of artistic medium with its root in music but with a sophisticated aesthetic component.

Alan S: I’ve worked on LAVA from its inception and am currently Technical Lead for the program.

3DSS: So how did you ever come up with the idea for LAVA? I remember seeing a beta version of the program (with no name) during my visit to the EMU/Creative in late April ‘99 and thinking it was something I would like to have! How far along in development was the program, or should I say programs, at that time?

Alan S: The idea for LAVA came out of a project that I worked on in a computer graphics class during my Ph.D. studies at MIT. At the time, my area of expertise was audio signal processing, so I devised a project combining this area with computer graphics. The end result was a program that automatically generated in non-real time 3D animations that were synchronized to music. The following summer (1998) I went to work as an intern at the Creative Advanced Technology Center and showed some people the results of the project. One of my co-workers, Alan Peevers, thought the animations were very cool, and we started discussing a real-time version. It seemed like a great fit since Creative sells both sound and graphics cards. By the end of the summer we had a prototype application running, and I continued working on it remotely from school with a growing team of developers. During the winter, enthusiasm for the program grew, and Creative decided to productize it as LAVA. So, what you saw in April was about nine months from the very start of development.

MB: The LAVA! technology was a collision of audio and graphics research projects at the Advanced Technology Center in Scotts Valley. Myself and Kevin Shepherdson from Creative Corporate Marketing brainstormed most of the Marketing concepts and application software specifications. It was a real "skunkworks" project.

The Woodstock debut, Winamp plugin and more -->

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