[info] [croquet-dev] Grayed out menu ites in SimpleDemo

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Mark P. McCahill" <mccahill at duke.edu> -----

From: "Mark P. McCahill" <mccahill at duke.edu>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:42:09 -0500
To: croquet-dev at duke.edu, rich.lynn.white at gmail.com
Subject: Re: [croquet-dev] Grayed out menu ites in SimpleDemo
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.753)
Reply-To: croquet-dev at duke.edu, "Mark P. McCahill" <mccahill at duke.edu>

Grayed out items are generally placeholders for things that worked in  
previous versions of the SDK demos but have not been ported to this  
version - but there are also some anticipated future functions there.

For the "motion capture" option to be of use, you would need to be  
running with a BVH motion capture enabled avatar. One thing we really  
really need are a few gesture/animation enabled avatars that are  
licensed so that we can distribute them freely with the Croquet SDK.  
So the code is there to do this stuff, but the avatar models are not.

The "view web page" item is grayed out because this version of the  
software doesn't have straightforward web support built into it. This  
is because there are really two ways to get a web browser into the  
shared collaborative space. One approach is to use and external sever  
to run the web browser and screen scrape that web browser for display  
in the space (via VNC). Here, someone has to provide that external  
server resource, and so in practice you would want to connect this to  
some sort of external compute environment resource reservation system  
like NCSU's VCL system. The reason to like this approach is that the  
screen scraping can work for pretty much any application, rather than  
just web pages.

The other approach to getting a web browser into the shared space is  
to run the web browser code locally and render the output into the  
shared space - there is a really really minimal web browser in the  
squeak environment, but that doesn't support the plugins that web  
site use. A better approach here is for someone to port something  
like the full featured Webkit browser into the environment as Merik  
Voswinkel pointed out last week on this mailing list.


On Jan 15, 2008, at 12:19 PM, rich.lynn.white at gmail.com wrote:

>Are the grayed out menu options in the SimpleDemo anticipated  
>functions or are
>they functions that rely on additional components that I may not  
>have loaded?
>The image below is a quick visual if that helps.
>
>http://www.flickr.com/photos/7576361@N03/2195446556/
>
>Thanks for any assistance !
>
>Best Regards,
>Rich
>
>===

Mark P. McCahill
Architect, Computing Systems
Duke University - Office of Information Technology
334 Blackwell Street, Suite 2107
Durham, North Carolina 27701
USA

mccahill at duke.edu
+1 919-724-0708  (mobile)
+1 929 668 2964  (fax)


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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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