GSoC '09 pyMT ideas

[Tiago Serra]

Hi guys,

We wanted to apply to GSoC this year and we had some ideas on which
we'd like to receive initial feedback.
We're currently developing a game for a science museum using pyMT that
will be ready next month. Its purpose is to lecture kids on Darwin's
theory of evolution. It's basically a round table with creatures that
evolve through time in which the user has to influence them through
mating :1, and create viable descendants that will survive in an
ever-changing environment. Of course when it's ready everyone here
will be the first to see it ;)

Ok, back to GSoC. Since we have plans to create more multitouch apps
in the future and we *love* pyMT, we wanted to contribute to it
through our current efforts and with some nice GSoC add-ons.

Our GSoC pyMT enhancements ideas goes like this, please feel free to
comment/flame: :p

- Widgets: more widget types (Nothing new I know.. but keep reading,
you'll understand why)

- UI: other kinds of high-level events (double tap, 2 finger gestures
(ex: zoom), 3 finger gestures (ex: tilts in 3D apps), gesture
patterns, etc)
- UI: use OS native apps inside widgets ( I believe fxprog talked
about Fbo to accomplish this? )
- UI: layout containers.
There is a great opportunity here to create a UI prototyping
tool inside pyMT. pyMT UI builder tool to create UIs within pyMT ;)
- UI: Smarter input device:
- Swype (smarter keyboard) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmH0vwLu51c)
- OCR writing
- Text editing patterns (some Apple patents pending here...
"Pan left with 2 blobs deletes whole word" for instance)

- Web: Support for remote web-service access (ex: REST)

- Logging: "Tasks/Sessions of user interaction to quantitative data
and visual analysis of such data" (The developer who wrote this has
exactly the same goal as we do I believe: Usability testing and
Interaction design prototyping on steroids)

- Multimedia:
- A simple music creation/sound synth app (Seth, I'm totally
dreamy about this...)
- More simple games

- Productivity:
- Simple windowmanager/applicationlaucher (could we use
pycompiz to turn a standard window manager into a more interesting
launcher?)
- GIS app (fxprog talked about modestmaps. That would be
awesome! Shame Gmaps is not yet supported though...)
- Web frontends (again, with RESTful APIs)

- Network: Make pyMT aware of multiple TUIO clients. This could
provide a couple of benefits:
- We could easily make a distributed MT space. A
single pyMT app that several MT surfaces can use simultaneously
- We could avoid having to do video-stitching on the
tracker and use two trackers instead

Thanks for reading,

Miguel Antunes
Tiago Serra
Tony Gonçalves

http://vimeo.com/hci

--
Tiago Serra

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good
madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks
you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw
or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the
next year, you surprise yourself."

[Nathanaël Lécaudé]

A couple of thoughts :
2 finger tap is already there.
Layout widgets are already there (though they could probably be enhanced.
Sound synthesis : did you look at the examples in examples/sinemixer ?
Network : In theory pymt should already be able to receive from
multiple clients. (just bind your network interface to pymt in the
config file)

Nat (Flipo)

2009/3/13 Tiago Serra <serra...@gmail.com>:

[Paweł Sołyga]

NUI Group has applied to GSoC 2009 and since NUI Group has GSoC
experience we would love to give some slot/slots to pyMT if we get in.
We are an umbrella organization that's also one of the reasons why we
got 7 slots last year.

I would suggest that you guys add pyMT section to NUI Group GSoC 2009
ideas wiki page so that students are aware that NUI Group also
supports development of pyMT during GSoC.

http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009

Let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Pawel Solyga
NUI Group

[Tiago Serra]

Ok Nat,

I just edited http://wiki.nuigroup.com/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009.

pyMT developers: Please edit as you please with the stuff that you
feel is most important to the project.

Thanks

[Mathieu Virbel]

Some point i would like to discuss :
- for gesture: precise that gesture must be orientation less. We
already got gesture detection. For multitouch, gesture based on vector/
angle detection will be a new feature over the world, because nobody
do it for now ! (recognize a circle or a cross, whatever the
orientation !)
- for high-level event gesture (zoom etc...), i don't known if it's
pertinent for pymt. Scalling gesture are handled by pymt across the
Scatter widget. Do we need this too ? (having event like on_zoom ?)

I see this idea for gsoc too :
- the sharath things about collaboratif desktop (over network) /
sharing widget system
- pymt-desktop application ? (image manipulation, mail, rss, web
navigator over pymt with multitouch support ?)
- an integrated multitouch web browser ?

On 16 mar, 16:20, Tiago Serra <serrati...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok Nat,
>
> I just editedhttp://wiki.nuigroup.com/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009.

>
> pyMT developers: Please edit as you please with the stuff that you
> feel is most important to the project.
>
> Thanks
>
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Nathanaël Lécaudé
>
>
>
> <n...@studioimaginaire.com> wrote:
>
> > A couple of thoughts :
> > 2 finger tap is already there.
> > Layout widgets are already there (though they could probably be enhanced.
> > Sound synthesis : did you look at the examples in examples/sinemixer ?
> > Network : In theory pymt should already be able to receive from
> > multiple clients. (just bind your network interface to pymt in the
> > config file)
>
> > Nat (Flipo)
>

> > 2009/3/13 Tiago Serra <serrati...@gmail.com>:

[xelapond]

+1 for Multi-Touch Web Browser and orientation-indepentant gestures.

I am already working on an RSS reader, so thats probably not the best option for GSOC.

[Sharath Patali]

I would like to propose a Image Manipulator+Drawing sandbox, something like a subset of photoshop, i'll give more details with the proposal

[Rich E.]

Hey, sorry this is so late, exams and what not :(

I am interested in working towards a table-top, multi-touch based
sequencer that could be used for either video or audio editing,
effects etc. I'd like to submit a proposal towards this, but it would
be nice to get some feedback on the idea first.

I figured that, at least on the highest level, python would be a great
language to implement the sequencer. With everything I am finding
already underway with TIUO/PyMT and whatnot, it would be great to see
tabletop music compositions.

Rich Eakin
SMC Master Student, UPF-MTG

[Nat]

It is funny you mention this, this is the exact software I am planning
to do. Fortunately for you, I'm not a student anymore so can't apply
for gsoc ;)
I've been editing audio/video for years and my main interest is to
figure out how a multitouch interface could enhance the editing
experience.
My idea was to make a mockup of the software in PyMT to test
interaction (how do you deal with the timeline, fades, events, tracks
etc.)
To do a full featured media editor, I don't think PyMT is a good
solution though, as making such a software is a highly complex task.
It can make a very nice prototyping platform however.

I'm sure we could collaborate and share ideas, let me know.

Nat (Flipo on IRC)

[Rich E]

I´m glad to hear that others are thinking on this..

For me personally, I want to try music composition with a multi-touch
interface - sequence based instead of improvisation. I think
prototyping such a thing in python will be much more productive in the
long run rather than attempting something in C++ from the get-go. And
I would certainly rather focus on just getting the sequencer right (as
I don't like common sequencers) at first without worrying about the
complexity of a multi-channel media player - OSC is an easy way to
hand these tasks to other existing apps.

But there are lots of things to approach first, much that overlaps
with other types of media that needs to be sequenced - in your case
(Nat) all but the fades that you mentioned are needed in a general
framework, and even that could be considered ´an effect´.

Also, I was hoping to work towards creating a better graphical
interface rather than the traditional rows of rectangles when
organizing the events in time.

I am fairly new to the PyMT package although I have been using
python/pygame for a while now. I was hoping others might be able to
mention anything, if it already exists concerning a sequencer based
around the PyMT or other TIUO-based software. Looking through the
examples, it is quite impressive what already has been achieved, but
so far I have not come accross a good sequencing toolkit, with or
without multi-touch capabilities.

Most importantly, I want to propose something that will get accepted :)

Rich

[Rich E]

... and after reading the next message on this list, I see there is a
sequencer example included with PyMT :) I'm install ounk and then
i'll have to look at that.

[Nathanaël Lécaudé]

Yes, feel free to ask me any questions.

I was a developer on TamTam for the OLPC project (which was in Python
+ GTK) so I'll be glad to help out !

Nat

2009/3/31 Rich E <reaki...@gmail.com>: