Lightbridge — Reimagining the Live Visual Workflow

01 — What Currently Breaks

Two industry-standard tools,
neither built for the job.

As a hobby, I do live visual performance (VJing). It's a lot of fun, and it lets me connect with artists across mediums I don't usually touch. When I'm performing alongside a DJ, the visuals need to feel alive — reactive to the beat, the energy, the moment. But two of the most dominant tools, Resolume and TouchDesigner, each fail in a different, critical way.

Resolume

Industry-standard VJ software. Pre-rendered clip playback with basic effects. It looks polished out of the box, but I hit a wall fast: no custom shaders, limited audio reactivity, and no way to generate visuals procedurally. I could generate new ideas on the fly, but only within the boxes someone else had already made.

Ceiling too low

TouchDesigner

Incredibly powerful node-based environment. It can do anything — in theory. In practice, building a performance-ready system took me weeks of patching. Tweaking a parameter mid-set meant navigating a spaghetti graph of nodes. Getting it to a place where you could play it live, like an instrument, took weeks, and was still not the live reactive performance experience I was looking for.

Floor too high

02 — Who Is Affected

Me. And everyone else in the room.

It's cool to go to a large scale live concert and watch a really rehearsed, really prepared show that follows a specific setlist. But when a group of musicians are just jamming, or when a group of artists are creating on the fly, pre-rendered visuals don't cut it.

🎬

Me (and other VJs)

I was forced to choose between creative control (TouchDesigner) and live reliability (Resolume). Worst of all, I couldn't iterate on the fly and let my creativity run free.

🎧

The DJs I work with

They want visuals that feel like part of their music, not a separate show running alongside it. Right now they have to over-communicate cues or just accept generic looks.

🎉

The audience

They might not know what's wrong, but they feel it. When the visuals can't keep up with the music, the show feels like a screensaver behind a DJ — not the integrated experience they came for.

03 — The Reimagined Process

So I built it myself.

Lightbridge is a VJ performance system I designed and coded from scratch. I wanted the creative depth of TouchDesigner with the live reliability of Resolume — in a single app purpose-built for performing alongside a DJ. So that's what I made.

What started as a basic chain with a single ring source has grown into a full performance system — 40 sources, 32 effects, projection mapping, MIDI control, and beat-synced modulation.

Lightbridge v0.1.0

Early prototype — one source, basic parameters, no effects chain

Lightbridge v0.4.0

Current build — 3D helix source, stacked effects, dual preview, color palette

Visual Sources

Real-time Effects

120

FPS Target

Output Resolution

🎵 6-Band Audio Analysis

Real-time FFT splits audio into sub-bass, kick, low-mid, mid, presence, and brilliance bands. Every visual parameter can be driven by any band.

⏱ Beat Detection (WASM)

A custom C-to-WebAssembly beat tracker runs in a Web Worker, detecting BPM and beat phase from live audio input — no manual tap tempo needed.

🎮 Modulation Engine

Any parameter can be modulated by audio, beat, LFOs, or envelopes. Link a ring's radius to the kick drum. Shift hue on every beat. Stack modulators.

⚙ Reaction & Decay

Adjustable reaction speed and decay curves let you dial in exactly how the visuals breathe with the music — from tight percussive hits to slow ambient swells.

🔗 Flat Accumulator Model

Sources and effects live in a single ordered chain. Sources composite onto an accumulator, effects process the composite. Order matters — and you can reorder on the fly.

🎨 40 Procedural Sources

From 3D tunnels and particle simulations to fluid dynamics and fractals — every source is generated in real-time via custom GLSL shaders. No pre-rendered clips.

✨ 32 Effects

Bloom, feedback, kaleidoscope, ASCII, pixel sort, color grading, barrel distortion — stack as many as you want, reorder freely, modulate everything.

🎨 Per-Source Effects

Effects can apply to individual sources before compositing, or to the entire accumulated output. This distinction is critical for complex layered looks.

🖱 Projection Mapping

Built-in corner-pin warping, mesh subdivision (up to 8×8 grid), Catmull-Rom smoothing, and per-edge soft blending. Multi-projector setups work out of the box.

🖥 Multi-Display

Output to any connected display. Preview stays on your laptop, clean output goes fullscreen on the projector. Hot-plug detection auto-adapts when displays change.

💾 Venue Presets

Save your mapping configuration per venue. Walk into a space you've played before, load the preset, and you're aligned in seconds.

📷 Clean Output

The output window is a dumb renderer — no UI, no cursor, no overlays. It receives fully composited frames from the main window via IPC at 60fps.

🎥 Performance Sets

Organize your show into sets — each with its own chain, modulation routing, and color palette. Switch between looks instantly during a performance.

🎹 MIDI Control (APC40)

Full APC40 MkII protocol support. Map any parameter to any fader, knob, or button. The physical controller becomes an extension of the software.

🎨 Color Palettes

7-swatch HSB palettes per set. Sources bind to palette channels. Change one swatch, every bound source updates — instant global color shifts mid-performance.

💾 Show Files

Your entire performance state serializes to a single show file. Auto-save, version migration, atomic writes. Prep at home, perform with confidence.

Capability	Resolume	TouchDesigner	Lightbridge
Custom shader sources	✗	✓	✓ 40 built-in
Real-time audio reactivity	Basic	✓ (complex setup)	✓ Zero config
Beat detection	✗ (tap tempo)	Via plugin	✓ Built-in WASM
Live-tweakable parameters	✓	Node graph navigation	✓ Flat sliders
MIDI controller support	✓	✓	✓ APC40 native
Show file / session prep	Composition files	✗ (project files)	✓ Full show state
Projection mapping	✓	✓	✓ + venue presets
Performance set switching	Layer presets	✗	✓ Instant
Time to performance-ready	Hours	Weeks	Hours

05 — Why This Would Actually Work

Because it already does.

OK, so I'm cheating a little bit. I've been working on this for the past 3 weeks. But it's a great case study for a problem in the wild that I spotted and chose to fix!

I built this because I needed it

Every design decision comes from real pain I felt mid-performance — hours spent wrestling with tools that weren't built for live work, not theoretical feature requests.

The right level of abstraction

Resolume was too rigid for me. TouchDesigner was too open-ended. I wanted something in the middle: deep enough for custom visuals and modulation routing, structured enough that I can prep a show, rehearse it, and trust it on stage.

Real code, not a mockup

I wrote this in Electron + Three.js + React + TypeScript, assisted by Claude Code. It includes custom written GLSL shaders, C-to-WASM beat detection, 40 procedural sources, 32 real-time effects, full MIDI protocol, show file serialization, and projection mapping.

The process fix is the product

My old workflow — author in TouchDesigner, wrestle with OSC controls, Syphon into Resolume, be limited in manipulation — is gone. In Lightbridge, what I see is what I perform. The creative tool and the performance tool are the same thing.

Reimagining theLive Visual PerformanceWorkflow