A Touchy Subject
TouchDesigner is a touchy subject for me. I learned it in my senior year course called “Current Topics in Interactive Development.” Sounds super interesting, right? I was excited to learn about new developments in web and fullstack development, about new infrastructure being built around AI like MCP servers and markdown skills.
Instead, I discovered it was up to the discretion of the professor what we would learn. And we learned TouchDesigner.
As a Tool, It Is Interesting
As a tool, it is genuinely interesting. It is a visual language for creating immersive visualizations for audio, video, and data. It allows for custom scripting, connecting tons of components together to go from a few inputs to an immersive output.
It certainly has its uses. I can see how someone that is extremely experienced in the ins and outs of TouchDesigner can make fantastic visualizations. Some of my classmates mapped location data to maps of the world to create visualizations about natural disasters, health, and more. It was fascinating seeing what some people made, especially knowing how difficult it is to work with.
As a “Current Topic”? No.
As a “current topic,” I strongly disagree with it. I believe that it is falling behind modern tools. It is a tool based on visual programming of inputs and data to get a desired output and implement interaction.
In the current age we are in, you can do the same and more via programming in languages like JavaScript, Python, C#, and others. Three.js, WebGL, p5.js, Processing, Unity, Unreal... the list goes on. All of these give you more control, more flexibility, and a skillset that transfers directly to industry.
And if it is the simplicity you are looking for, or a lack of programming knowledge stopping you? Prompt it.