Kinematics, physical simulation and Brother Lee Love
Over at Rebang there is a post and video of some of the work Lucasarts are doing with their Kinematic and situationally aware character engines. For those of us who are software engineers, gamers and a little bit artistic we appreciate the depth of work that goes into producing systems like this.
Recently we have had several conversation relating to the lack of this sort of physics modelling in Second Life. Many of the more techie of us are busy building little skeletons and physics models that in normal game engines would be part of the middleware.
Now there is some element of intellectual challenge and coding and design art to this. However if we had the middleware for better simulations and physics modelling we could then spend the time on the valuable applications.
One example is a slow burn sideline project sparked by some of my collegues. One of being able to use sign language in Second Life. The basic avatar is not equipped to deal with the subtle movements required. So I have started to build some hands. Of course this then has led to having to start to build a joint structure. Anyone who has used poser of avmitor will know how usefull if is to be able to just position arms and legs allowing for the actual joints, aka kinematics
The hands also can have another use, for those of you who remember kenny everett’s TV
shows
February 17th, 2007 at 20:34
That’s a great idea… exploring alternative means of communications used by disabled people in a virtual reality simulator. How far did you get with the hands? Do you have a video of them doing the alphabet for instance yet?
February 18th, 2007 at 15:21
The hands and this approach was very early. However we have a few people who are following this up. I was initially seeing how much work it was to do.
We have two options, manual position the elements for specific signs, or build a jointed mechanism that can deal with anything.
I would prefer the latter as we could then learn through haptics and sending real life messages in.
May 1st, 2007 at 14:20
[...] A little while ago I wrote about creating some very large hands and fingers in Second Life in order to investigate sign language. I had some static hands and I was trying to find time to write a script to help animate them, so they could take positions for various signs. At the ITE expo I came across the stand for the Pupeteer scripts by Todd Borst (his shop is landmarked on his profile in SL) Picture from snapzilla [...]
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