Perfume Global Site — openFrameworks examples

Motion-capture studies for openFrameworks 0.12.1. The six examples from the 2012 Perfume “Global Site Project” now use the programmable OpenGL 3.2 renderer, ofApp, member-owned state, and mesh-based drawing. Two new shader studies turn the bundled motion into luminous ribbons and animated contour fields. The G1 Motion Lab adds a Unitree G1 kinematic-reference study, with an original-human-skeleton overlay and explicit validation status.

Start with the shader studies

Example	What you see	What you learn
Motion Ribbons	Fine luminous trails following the dancers	Vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders; expanding a line into a ribbon
Motion Field	Contours and halos around moving joints	Passing motion to a full-screen fragment shader

These are actual application captures, not concept images. The studies recenter horizontal root travel to keep the three dancers legible; they show the recorded poses rather than reconstructing the original stage formation.

Both use the existing bundled BVH samples and need no external addons or audio downloads. The shader guide explains the rendering stages and where to start editing. Companion studies are available in the Processing repository.

Stewardship

The perfume-dev organization was founded by Daito Manabe in 2012 and has remained under his stewardship since launch. He continues to oversee maintenance of this repository with project collaborators.

Perfume is a Japanese artist group. Manabe's documented collaboration with Perfume goes back to the 2010 Tokyo Dome performance, which credits his programming. The later 2020 “Time Warp” project credits him with creative and technical direction and sound-effect design. Across multiple Perfume projects since 2010, his roles have included creative direction, technical direction, programming, and sound-related design, including sound-effect design. For the 2012 Global Site Project, the Agency for Cultural Affairs award record credits Manabe with planning, direction, and programming, and records the many artists, choreographers, designers, programmers, engineers, producers, and supporters who made the project possible.

This stewardship statement does not replace individual authorship. Historical and third-party credits are preserved in CONTRIBUTORS.md, the per-example README and LICENSE files, the Git history, and vendored source notices.

Included projects

Directory	Purpose
example-bvh	Standalone BVH playback and three bundled sample motions
example-sync-sound	Synchronised BVH, audio, and motion-trail rendering
example-pen-graphics	Ribbon-like graphics generated from skeletal motion
particle-motion-example	Particle forces driven by tracked joints
motion-visualization	Long-exposure-style joint trajectories
marching-cubes	A metaball surface driven by skeletal endpoints
example-motion-ribbons	Geometry-shader ribbons following the bundled motion
example-motion-field	A joint-driven fragment-shader contour field
example-g1-motion-lab	G1 robot reference playback, rigid-link meshes and source skeleton comparison; no robot control
ofxBvh	The bundled BVH loader and player used by every example

Build with openFrameworks 0.12.1

Download the official openFrameworks 0.12.1 macOS release, then place this repository at the standard openFrameworks application depth:

export OF_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/of_v0.12.1_osx_release
git clone https://github.com/perfume-dev/example-openFrameworks.git \
  "$OF_ROOT/apps/myApps/example-openFrameworks"
cd "$OF_ROOT/apps/myApps/example-openFrameworks"
./scripts/build-all.sh "$OF_ROOT"

The script builds all nine applications in Release mode and runs the ofxBvh boundary/malformed-input and marching-cubes lifecycle regression tests. An individual application can be built with, for example:

make -C example-bvh Release OF_ROOT="$OF_ROOT"
open example-bvh/bin/example-bvh.app

To render every example in a hidden test window and save PNG evidence:

./scripts/smoke-all.sh /path/to/captures

The GitHub workflow builds and runs regression tests on macOS, then independently builds and renders all nine examples in a clean, digest-pinned Ubuntu 22.04 container with Mesa llvmpipe and Xvfb. The container isolates OF dependencies from the hosted runner's preinstalled compiler SDKs. This supplies a real software OpenGL context where hosted macOS runners cannot provide the required pixel format. The openframeworks-rendering artifact contains screenshots, application logs and the OpenGL context report. Render failures fail CI; the shader studies are captured at two motion timestamps to check that their output changes. Local capture also requires a desktop OpenGL context, even though the test windows stay hidden. The build/capture scripts support macOS and Linux.

The checked-in Xcode projects were regenerated from the openFrameworks 0.12.1 macOS template. They use relative paths and expect the repository layout shown above. If you put the repository elsewhere, use the Makefiles with an explicit OF_ROOT, or update the projects with the openFrameworks Project Generator.

Motion and audio data

example-bvh is ready to run with its bundled A_test.bvh, B_test.bvh, and C_test.bvh files. The two new shader studies read those same files. The other five historical applications first look for the original Perfume Global Site assets in each application's bin/data directory:

bin/data/
├── Perfume_globalsite_sound.wav
└── bvhfiles/
    ├── aachan.bvh
    ├── kashiyuka.bvh
    └── nocchi.bvh

Those original full assets are not duplicated in this repository. When they are absent, the maintained examples fall back to the bundled A/B/C motion samples and a silent internal clock, so every application can still be built and explored from a clean checkout. Startup logs identify motion fallback, and an on-screen notice identifies silent-clock mode.

Dependencies and licenses

ofxBvh is kept in this repository and referenced as a local addon. The historical ofxMarchingCubes source required by marching-cubes is vendored with provenance and its LGPL-2.1-or-later notice under third_party/ofxMarchingCubes. Application and addon license terms remain in their respective directories; the two examples by Atsushi Tadokoro retain their original copyright and MIT license notices. See LICENSES.md for the component-by-component license index; the repository does not apply one blanket license to every directory.

The maintained example code uses GLM vectors and mesh drawing. ofxBvh retains its older public vector/matrix types so existing addon consumers continue to compile; its example rendering supports the programmable renderer. The vendored marching-cubes dependency retains its upstream public interface and attribution.

Robot reference study

G1 Motion Lab displays the same A/B/C recordings adapted to a pinned 29-DOF Unitree G1 model. Geometry comes from the robot asset, not a procedural humanoid. Computation is separate from the lightweight viewer; there is no CUDA, Python, learned policy, or robot SDK in the application.

The separate remote reproduction kit records source/model hashes, explicit coordinate conventions, dependency versions and the independent full-frame export gate. It does not provision cloud resources or automatically install or publish generated motion.

The source-motion transform and complete original-frame pose checks are separate from rendering checks. The warning KINEMATIC REFERENCE — PHYSICS NOT VALIDATED is always visible. A reference that looks right is not evidence of balance, self-collision clearance, feasible torque, or safe hardware operation. The first independent gravity/contact experiment did not pass its collision gate; this example does not send any actuator commands. Model geometry retains its Unitree BSD-3-Clause license; the new viewer's MIT license does not relicense the original or derived performance data.

All three bundled references now pass complete 40 Hz pose checks. See the measured results and physical limitations for the exact scope; no hardware execution is approved.