Vvvv and integration into other programs

vvvv beta general
1

Hello,
I’m currently researching what technology to use for an multitouch datavisualisation program.
Most of our team are experienced programmers but nobody has done something with graphical programming.
So from the traditional toolkits we would likely choose WPF among other things because it is easy to build rich, customized GUIs with tools like Microsoft Expression Blend.
But for the visualization itself it seems to me that a patch based environment like vvvv would allow to create fast complex visualisations.
So I was wandering if it would be possible to integrate vvvv into another program?
Since I don’t have any experience (beside a bit the tutorial) with vvvv, I really don’t know if the following approach would work, but anyway that would be like I image it:

Create plugin patches that gather the input from the WPF GUI into vvvv and a render plugin that actually renders on a widget in the WPF GUI. So when the WPF program starts, it’s starts also vvvv with the correct patch … I guess that would not be the easiest kind of plugin since it would require a lot of interprocess communication …

So what do you think? Would that be possible or are there already better solutions?

thank you
ernii

2

hello, vvvv is not designed for that. the output of a 3d renderer is directly calculated by the graphics card. this makes it fast, even for high screen resolutions.
but in your case, the GUI must somehow mixed with that. if your application handles the final ouput, you would have to get the vvvv pixels back into your app. this would slow down the thing.

but its worth a try, you should have a closer look at the SharedMemory nodes to share large amounts of data between programms.

but the other way around would have more success, creating an external gui and interfacing it with vvvv.