OSCQuery

showstack / protocols / osc-query

Also called OSC Query Protocol, OSCQueryProposal.

A community specification letting OSC-controlled software advertise itself via mDNS/Zeroconf and publish a browsable JSON description of its OSC address space over HTTP/WebSocket, so control surfaces like TouchOSC or media servers can auto-discover parameters.

Device managementOpenVidvoxVerified

Stewarded by Vidvox (community proposal, multiple implementers).

Management Housekeeping, no deadline

Discovery, monitoring, configuration, backups, updates. Useful, and none of it has a deadline of its own.

What kills it. Nothing kills it. That is the problem: with no deadline it has no manners, and it will happily starve everything that does have one. Putting it on a show VLAN is the commonest self-inflicted wound in the industry.

Why this one, and not what the category suggests. Introspection: asking a device what it can do, not telling it to do something.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

What goes wrong

Not a formally ratified standard from an SDO - it's a GitHub-hosted proposal, so implementations (VDMX, TouchDesigner, ossia, VRChat) may support only part of it.

Relies on Bonjour/Zeroconf (_oscjson._tcp) for discovery, which can be blocked or unreliable on locked-down venue networks and VLANs.

Open source implementations

libossia — C++
VVOSCQueryProtocol — Objective-C

Sources

Understand the mechanism

Robots, animatronics and connected things How software talks to software

Something wrong, or missing?

Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, first_published. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.

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Work at Vidvox (community proposal, multiple implementers)? Confirm or correct this entry — it is free, it stays free, and nothing about it is for sale.