This paper introduces a technique that improves the efficiency of the Open Sound Control (OSC) communication protocol. The improvement is achieved by decoupling the user interface and the transmission layers of the protocol, thereby reducing the size of the transmitted data while simultaneously simplifying the receiving end parsing algorithm. The proposed method is fully compatible with the current OSC v1.1 specification. Three widely used OSC toolkits are modified so that existing applications are able to benefit from the improvement with minimal reimplementation efforts, and the practical applicability of the method is demonstrated using a multitouch-controlled audiovisual application. It was found that the required adjustments for the existing OSC toolkits and applications are minor, and that the intuitiveness of the OSC user interface layer is retained while communicating in a more efficient manner.
Source code for modifying the OSC implementations of oscpack library, Processing (oscP5), and Pd (OSCx) is included in the zipped files below. Each archive contains a simple application to demonstrate the use of the technique. For more information, please see the readme.txt file inside the archives.
Please send your comments and remarks to the first author: firstname.lastname[-at-]aalto.fi
Page last modified July-18-2011.