Cinder is an open source software tool for professional creative coding. It's primarily a C++ library used by design and technology companies all over the world for developing physical installations, mobile apps, music visualizers, screensavers and completely new categories of projects.

Cinder was written originally as an in-house tool for implementing the iTunes visualizer for Apple and later the augmented reality issue of Esquire magazine. When Cinder was started, it was difficult to find a development platform suitable for projects like these. Several hacker / hobbyist frameworks already existed, but they weren't designed for professional C++ development.

Additionally, while high-end game engines are quite powerful, by necessity they are too high-level to be appropriate for the more customized, smaller scale development that client-driven creative coding requires.

The engineering team originally reflected the efforts of 3 developers at its agency of origin. However Cinder is currently entirely an open source effort, and at the time of this writing the source code on Github reflects well over 30 formal code contributors, with countless others having located and fixed bugs, contributed documentation and written tutorials.

While Cinder is still under constant development, it is available publicly and is very actively used.

Because Cinder is designed for creating high-end projects, its users are primarily professional developers who work in collaboration with teams of visual designers, interaction designers, user experience specialists, 3D artists, creative directors and the like. Our industry has honed the broader craft of interactive design primarily through high-end Internet experiences, and for many of its users, Cinder has served as the vehicle for applying those skills to new contexts including application and experiential design.

Cinder's development community is global and a growing number of professional creative coders earn their livings using Cinder, some exclusively so. Because the software is open source, it's controlled by its community of users. Cinder is licensed with a very permissive license (the Modified BSD License), which allows the code to be used in any manner, including closed source commercial projects. This provision is often a necessity when doing client work, but it's been our experience that trusting our users to contribute back on their own terms has been much more fruitful than trying to dictate those terms.

Cinder itself was written from scratch, so in that sense it is a new technology. However Cinder is designed to cooperate with other open source libraries, and its users connect it with all manner of hardware and software. In fact, some of the most innovative new hardware is shipping with Cinder support built-in; including Intel's innovative new time-of-flight depth camera is a good example.

Because Cinder is not a commercial endeavor, it's not a candidate for traditional financial funding. However its lead developer is employed as a Technology Research Fellow by its agency of origin with the mission to focus entirely on contributing to the open source codebase. Additionally, other technology group is devoting professional development resources toward Cinder's support for new technologies like the Surface.

We expect Cinder's development to continue accelerating as its user base grows; one of the key advantages of open source. Some items on our short-term roadmap include realtime stereoscopic rendering (for immersive displays like the Oculus VR), DirectX support, and realtime 3D positional audio.

In addition to countless noncommercial projects, Cinder has been used for client work by a growing list of ad agencies, visual effects companies, hybrid production companies, traditional design firms and a new breed of tech/design firms. Furthermore, technology companies as well as academic institutions all make use of Cinder in their research & development efforts.

We think Cinder is an exciting example of the ad industry not just reacting to but actually leading tech innovation. It has been incredibly gratifying to watch Cinder grow from a tool focused on a single ad agency's needs into a technology used by a long list of companies and individuals working in nearly every facet of the technology/design intersection.