BoinxTV adds motion magic with LibOrientator

The guys from Munich (actually Puchheim, near Munich) have done it again. Boinx Software has updated BoinxTV to version 1.8 and created a special new iPhone and iPad app named Orientator (free) to control 3D graphics effects in BoinxTV. Even better, Boinx developed LibOrientator, a library for iOS developers who may want to include features in their apps that enable control of BoinxTV layers.

BoinxTV is a powerful video console app for Mac OS X that provides professional TV effects and editing to humble consumers like myself. I use the app every week for TUAW TV Live, and although I haven't yet mastered most of the BoinxTV toolset, it helps me to combine video from several cameras and other inputs, movie clips, photos, lower thirds graphics and audio into a (hopefully) professional looking video podcast.

What Orientator does is read the values for device motion, the gyroscope, accelerometer, location, magnetometer and other orientation data, and send that info over a Wi-Fi connection to BoinxTV on your Mac. While Orientator is fun for just looking at the readouts of the sensors in your iOS device (as shown above), it's even more useful when used to control video layers in BoinxTV. For displaying apps that don't contain the LibOrientator library and use the special BoinxTV layers, the company suggests simply velcroing an iPhone to an iPad 2 to send the orientation data to your Mac.

There's a full description of how to use Orientator to help record iOS demos and training apps on the Boinx website, and the video below should give you a good idea of how Orientator controls special BoinxTV layers. The update to BoinxTV is available from within the application by selecting BoinxTV > Software Update.