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Linux 3D Input Driver Project Started
zratchet writes "Mikey Lubker reports in his blog that a new project has been started to create drivers for 6-degree-of-freedom 3D input devices. The project hopes to support SDL_Input, XNA, DirectInput, and other major controller API's including game consoles and embedded systems, including controllers for home entertainment systems, robots, modeling clay, games, home automation, and more.
Check out the project here and the (soon to be) tech-demo Snowball Surprise: Adventures in Avatarctica."
That "tech demo" looks a lot like Tux Racer.
Doesn't a wheel mouse already have 3 dimensions of input (x, y, z axis)? What exactly is a "3d controller?"
Aren't these things better announced when they reach at least 0.1a, or something? If I announce a project to port all of DirectX to Commodore, do I get my own Slashdot article? Even if I never do anything with it?
Sorry... just doing some morning trolling.
Two mice provide 4-D of smooth motion. And you get another 2-D of coarser motion with scroll wheels. This would have applications beyond games as I have seen (but can't find) experiments in the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) literature on the superiority of dual-cursor interfaces.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I wrote a cool little tool to give 6-degrees input from a single webcam. It tracks the three points of a triangle, and calculates X-Y-Z-tilt-rotation-elevation based on that.
The logarithms to do the calculations are solid - all you need is a better mousetrap than I have for finding the three triangle points in a single image frame (should be very straight forward - mine works but is slow).
Is this old hat, or would there be good value to open-sourcing it? I'll likely never commercialize it on my own.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Any support for these 3D input devices? I mean, there are Linux drivers, but as of yet no open source drivers (to my knowledge) for these devices.
My blog
using the magellan kernel module I get my spacemouse to work.
What's the problem? I've been playing WC:PR with it quite nicely.
See my blog for my free opinions.
Are there any details about that controller? This seems like hot air without any pictures descriptions, feature lists or whatever.
Everyone and his cat can register a sourceforge project...
I's bit poor to post this on slashdot IMO
I figure I'm going to need 30 or 40 more degrees of movement.
I'm looking for solid logarithms as well.
Any suggestions?
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
The problem is that the magellan kernel module is closed-source and binary-only, like the nVidia driver. Maybe that's good enough for you, but isn't good enough for me.
My blog
Name 5 games that use input devices even remotely close to this that run on linux.
/.games?!1one
Also, why is this in
Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss.
I'm daft today - read "algorithms" instead of logarithms. :)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
it is? I was quite sure that it was part of the vanilla kernel and as such GPL.
See my blog for my free opinions.
I once worked with a device for 3D position sensing that used a spark, which generates a short sound impulse, and 3 orthogonal microphones. The arrival time of the sound was used to calculate the position. For best accuracy, you need to calculate the speed of sound based on air temperature.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Windows only, but works very well.
http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
There isn't one in the vanilla kernel. Nor is there one in the Red Hat kernel for Fedora Core 3. Like I said, if there's an open source driver, I haven't seen one.
My blog
Do they have 3D chicken input? The National University of Singapore seems to be putting a lot of work into it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I take that back... It IS in there. Nevermind. (goes off grumbling...)
My blog
Never having touched such a thing, but if its USB, doesn't the normal HID driver work?
If you are a 3D gamer, you must try the controller at least once. You might never go back to keyboard and mouse!
I've included the top links for info on its drivers, use, and interface.
*phew* already thought my DNS was hijacked and redirected kernel.org to somewhere else :)
See my blog for my free opinions.
I used to work down the hall from Spaceball (Technologies? I forget the full name), in Lowell MA. They had a product called the Spaceball which was a sphere mounted on a base, that you could twist around any of the three axes, and push in the direction of any of the three axes..
So it didn't actually twist much - it sensed your desire to rotate it (the ball stayed in pretty much the same position).. And it didn't move much in either direction either, but it knew when you were lifting it, or pushing it left, or pulling it back, etc.
Anyway, those are your six dimensions.. rotate x,y,z, translate x,y,z.
They made some game controller of it later, but the original was used in high-end cadcam applications etc. Cool device!
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
No offense to the Linux community or Linux in itself but often I come on Slashdot reading about the next great Linux evolution and I end up looking at some high-school grade projects. The tech demo is bad, really bad, I'm sure a N64 would do better. You can say it's because the guys are programmers not artist but the lack of any decent 3D trick tells me this tech demo show an outdated tech. No offense, I'm not taking on Linux in itself but this project. It looks bad and there is no reason to hype it up. When I say it happens too often well it's true, you guys get easilly hyped on potential not result. A lot of software has potential in Linux, Linux has potential, now it just need to deliver on that potential. Hyping a bad product can actually lead to a slower adoption, think about it.
Then again it's good to see some people actually tackle those issues, who knows, maybe next year we'll be looking at the Firefox of 3D...
Linux already supports the:
And most likely also the newer SpaceBall variants, because they all use USB HID.
All the drivers are GPL and included in the standard kernel release. The CyberMan2 is very cool for playing Descent2 on Linux.
I know it. I wrote the drivers.
It seems the project is more about developing and marketing a new 6dof in a world where all gaming-oriented 6dofs (the SpaceOrb, available on e-bay for a few bucks, the CyberMan / CyberMan2) failed miserably.
Will it support coordinate measurement machines as an input device?
/ CAT-596.shtml
http://www.renishaw.com/client/category/UKEnglish
That was a great controller however I never got my 99 bucks out of it thats for sure. It was supported by a few games (Notably Mechwarrior 2, which it was the perfect control for)...but eventually it got abandoned after about a year. Logitech quietly dropped all support for it. Same happened with several of my Gravis products. The pheniox was a great stick but they never shipped a control software suite for anything beyong win 3.1 for it. I wish companies would once source the software or at least release the specs when they drop products that need special support. Maybe this project will bring new life to some of these.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
What I really need is a driver that uses all the buttons on my Logitech mouse!
It's got (counts) 10 microswitches.
No, this is not a troll. I do want to use all the buttons!
GIMME MY BUTTONS!
--
BMO
And now I'm too old to learn them properly. Pah! I don't need them anyway.
I've got a brand new Competition Pro USB stick and play games as I did 15 years ago.
Excuse me while I have a game of Bubble Bobble.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
... towards free cybersex. Long live Linux !
The inventor of both these devices is a guy by the name of John Hilton (an Australian) who invented them in the 1980's. His original design was a monster and he soon came up with a method to put the levers all into a ball.
There was a competing German product in the early 1990's, well, logitech bought the German company and then followed by buying the Spaceball products.
The Spaceball consists of 6 levers with sensors that measure minute deflections. From the deflections you can determine the force and torque applied to the ball. The force and torque are continually read and sent to the application and this is converted to 3D translations and rotations of either the view point or the viewed object. This simulates moving the viewpoint (fly through) or moving the object (object grabbing).
Spaceball was originally supported on SGI's IRIX 3.2 (? maybe 3.3) with an extension to the kernel. In IRIX 4, SGI started using X11. The X11 support was developed at SGI by Erik Fortune (using the X Input Extension (also the author of the X Keyboard Extension - XKB). Erik is now working for Microsoft in Redmond and you will probably never hear from him while he works there because of Microsoft policies.
It would be a good thing to have a more standard support for these devices.
VRPN has a wide support for a lot of 6DOF tracker and is commonly used in VR/Immersive system
http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/vrpn/
it's userland C++ classes
You mean something like this?
no puzzle for me
I think ARToolkit could be used for input.
It uses a webcam to calculate position of
a physical marker. It could be used for
some cool method of controlling a game..
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/
And I wrote the last version of the DOS driver and the DOS/Windows interface code for the SpaceOrb 360.
:(
We finished the code then they let most of the group go.
Insensitive clods.
I don't think this is a good idea, developing support for the controllers (not just yet), unless this is a school project. Then it gets you a grade. (good one, I hope)
I looked at the 'Snowballz' game and it looks pretty bad. I've seen better games on N64 and Windows 3.1. I've seen some 3D 'snowball fight' flash games that are better than this. And they are here, now and playable on Macs, PCs and Linux alike.
I have been using Linux 10+ years now and and have been pushing it at work for almost as long. I came over for more stability and way cool customizable desktops. I had it for my desktop at work and walking by people were jumping to get that for themselves.
I put the lastest gamez on a Windows platform with kickass controllers and then put a duplicate machine next to it with Linux, controller and '3D Snoball Adventures'. Then I get an avid gamer and lead them up this set up and say, 'fire away!' The Linux game will not just not get played, the box will be yanked out of the way and thrown out the window.
The goal is to make a game far superior to a Windows game. No one is going to say, "oh, well, all buttons work on my controller so I am going to stick with this suck ass game." People will say, however, "not all the buttons work on my controller, but this game is soooo eye-candy addicting, I haven't put it down for 17 hours!..."
In addition, the console market is looking to wipe Windows games off the slate, so I don't see how Linux/OSS gaming can possibly catch up. I am not a game programmer yet, but I am pretty sure Microsoft and Sony are providing the developers with awesome 3D apis, DirectX like. Don't tell me that Microsoft sucks. They do in a lot of areas, but Halo is pretty damn addicting and good looking and playable for a vast majority of people. They must have something in their apis that is working at the moment.
Dump the controller development and go for Nvidia/Ati libraries.
What does DirectInput have to do with Linux again?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Say if I want a deathmatch against Buckaroo Banzai?
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
With a tetrahedron, you'll be able to figure out whats happening. It would be more accurate than checking circle sizes.
With 2 mice apple users would finally be able to left-click and right-click!
Seriously though 4D input is nothing special - it's in every FPS game, mouse for 2 of the rotational degrees and WASD or the arrow keys for 2 spacial directions. Plus you get jump/crouch (or up/down if swimming/flying) control from 2 more keys/mouse buttons, so that's 5D and it's been around since Quake. Not quite the same as dual-mouse of course but using a mouse for translation in an infinite space (as opposed to one bounded by the edges of the screen) is less comfortable than keys since you have to keep lifting the mouse and pulling back. I can imagine dual-mice having some uses though - you could create a pretty interesting shooter like that.
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