25/09/2026
Exploring New 3D User Interfaces for our free Plugins
(and below some more thoughts)
Our free "Test-Balloon Plugins" are very technical. The user interface follows what we are usually using in our R&D and evaluation softwares.
As our plugins are free, and effort has already been substantial, it has been a restriction that our plugins use simple user interfaces. This is perfectly fine for users that spend enough time, moving controls, carefully listening to what happens, as we do in our R&D lab.
But plugin users often use dozens of plugins and do not spend enough time to explore all the possibilities. So there is a drive to simpler plugins (like one-knob plugins). But that is neither satisfactory.
This week we had a new intern (high school graduate) starting to work at Illusonic to bridge his interim year. He broke his hand and so he can't, as he planned (and it is mandatory here in Switzerland), do this military service before going to university.
His task now here is to explore new user interfaces for some of our plugins, using 3D graphics.
Quite impressive how quickly he got results using Blender to define the 3D models of loudspeakers and subwoofer. Then importing those models into JUCE for rendering the scenes within a plugin.
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Here some "philosophical" thoughts from our founder Christof:
– this is a great show-case to bring-in youngest-generation type of thinking and working and demonstrate it within our company
I have lived through several levels of this:
– while I wrote several million lines of code before Linux and open source, I was amazed how younger people were eloquent in using Linux, shell-scripts, Python etc.
– then we had an intern, a Linux guru from Italy, doing an AI DSP task here, again I was stunned how differently he worked and how efficiently he used open source and Python
– and now this intern, not even from university, I am stunned how quickly he gets stuff working, also with help from AI
That's all great. But what about my skills? It is important not to forget this saying "Shoemaker, stick to your last".
While newer generations of people can generate stuff, which amazes me. But if they are put exactly to the tasks I am faced with and payed for (solving complex acoustic and audio signal processing problems), they could not do exactly what I am doing, their skillset is elsewhere. (Good news for me!)
Good to stick to "Shoemaker, stick to your last", but use the power of the new stuff to extrapolate results and efficiency.
