Patricio González Vivo and Jen Lowe Teach the World Shaders

Patricio González Vivo and Jen Lowe’s incredibly versatile open-source project, The Book of Shaders, has been published in twelve languages and applies to various environments, including Processing, openFrameworks and Three.js. The online book and toolkit have revolutionized the creative environment since their initial publications by teaching the world about the transformative power of fragment shaders. These short programs offer enhanced control and faster rendering to creative coders, game developers and engineers alike.

Lowe and Gonzalez Vivo spoke to this author (Peter Bauman) about their book, saying:

Patricio González Vivo: After finishing my MFA, I got my first job. At the same time, I was still teaching a class at Parsons.‍

Jen Lowe: He needed materials for teaching that class. Then we thought, “If you’re going to write the materials, why not make a big open-source book that’s available to everyone?” Back then, there was not anything I’m aware of that made shaders accessible.‍

Patricio González Vivo: Shaders was this very niche knowledge. There were a lot of industry trade secrets between computer science, PhDs and very specific people working in the game industry. This knowledge was very gated. By then, I had been working with OpenGL and shaders for four years. Through the friction of having to learn everything and research how things were working, I decided that it would be awesome to democratize this knowledge. By then, Jen was pregnant with our first son so I had extra anxiety.