The visualization movement has been building for the past couple of years, ever since Winamp built a scriptable vis engine into its player. Since then, thousands of visualizations have been released, including recent popular additions like Rabbit Hole , Punkie and Valentine Dancer . Visualizations trace their roots back to the European demo scene , where teams of hackers coded small, self-contained packages of music synchronized to video, animation or special effects. They're starting to get everywhere. Visualizations are now built into every new software player on the market, and the visuals can be seen at just about every club, rave and party in the world.
Visualizations are popular with DJs because they simply plug their laptops into a projector.
It's cheaper than lighting systems or lasers, it responds to the music, and because a lot of Vis software is scriptable and new ones are always available, it is infinitely adaptable. To generate the psychedelic graphics in their living rooms, people are plugging their PCs into their TVs and stereos. The emergence of visualizations into the mainstream is heralded by Apple's use of G-Force visuals in the latest iMac TV commercials, Lyman said. It'll have a widespread cultural impact. To some degree, it's already replacing music videos.