Introducing Okapi

"Hey Thomas, do you want to meet Joshua Davis?" Thus it began. But let me start from the beginning. In 2007, I saw Joshua Davis present at a conference in New York where he spoke about the concept of digital, generative art. I really enjoyed his talk and hoped that someday we could work together

Fast forward to San Francisco, 2010. I was working with some great agencies to build HTML5-based applications for the Internet Explorer 9 beta launch. Another evangelist (IE9 guru Giorgio Sardo) had worked with was Joshua Davis Studios, who collaborated with Branden Hall to build an awesomely brutal app called Endless Mural. Endless Mural allows you to build digital, generative murals without a plug-in using HTML5 and the <canvas> element. It also runs blazingly fast in Internet Explorer 9 because of its hardware acceleration.

When Giorgio asked me if I wanted to meet Joshua, Branden and the rest of the crew, I jumped at the chance. Among other topics (Endless Mural, Vans shoes, Halloween costumes), we talked about Okapi, the framework that makes Endless Mural possible. Joshua told me that his Studio planned to make the Okapi code available to anyone and everyone. I knew then that I’d found the perfect group for MIX Online to collaborate with.

Enter Okapi

A previous collaboration with Mike Swanson on the Adobe Illustrator to Canvas Plug-in helped web designers, developers and builders build HTML5 canvas-based applications that work across all canvas-enabled browsers. So we already had the science, but needed the art. That’s where Okapi comes in.
The Okapi framework allows you to do things in HTML5 that have never been done in the browser before without a plug-in.