11-17-2004

WOO breakthrough on the EW-flash linkup. The "gum" issue was a minor one after all; seems the sample flash file had it appending all new messages to a variable instead of overwriting the previous ones, meaning that the variable would take up more and more memory at a linear rate. I fixed this by rewriting all of the "incoming += (new item)" lines to "incoming = (new item)" or the equivalent, and it was pretty stable after that.

JJ's code ended up slotting in place fairly neatly, with few modifications needed. Most of what we did last night had to do with adjusting his code to parse the incoming OSC packets. As they come out of EW, the packets have a name (defined in the OSC block in EW as their 'OSC_Command'), and two arguments, both of the input coordinates for each point. The arguments always come as X first and Y second, so it was not necessary to append or modify that data to differentiate them. In the flash, JJ has the movie generating an empty movie clip for each distinct packet, then drawing a circle at the proscribed coordinates. He also has the movie assigning the clip names based on the incoming packet names, meaning that 1) we might be able to 'smooth' the motion between updates and 2) the number of points drawn in flash grows automatically with the number of points sent from EW. I tested this by adding two more transmit subpatches into EW to make a total of five; the flash faithfully drew five circles without any modification.

To do:

Increase the number of transmitted points in EW, while checking for stability. Mostly grunt work; I'll probably use the EW 4.0.0 beta to take advantage of their new interface.

Run EW on the sample video file to check for climbing memory usage, indicative of a memory leak or something similar. This may cause stability issues during prolonged usage... something to keep in mind.

Saturday we plan to try a rough prototype of the system with a live camera feed. I expect some degree of offset in where the points draw in relation to the shadow, due to the necessary difference between the projection angle and the camer viewing angle. This is something that can be worked out in later tuning; right now, we just want to test the system from stem to stern.