Tobii Isadora Maya

Elhem

Hi everybody,

I created some 2D fluid animation using maya and I would like to achieve the interactive installation using Isadora.

The combination Maya - Isadora does it work? If yes how? Do I have to convert the .mb format of maya?

I would like to use an eye tracker to modulate the content of the animation. In maya we can jump from a frame to another and I want to make this jumping in time possible with the eye tracker.

Is tobii a good choice and does it work with Isadora? http://www.tobii.com/de/eye-experience/buy/

I would like to know if it was possible to contact you by mail, so I can send you, if you're ok with that, one of my animations created with maya so you can have a better vision of it?

I'm a visual artist and I started being very interested in Interactive art recently, that's why my questions may seem a little bit silly.

Thank you for your answer!

Skulpture

Hi,

Quite a lot to discuss here.

1) I have never heard of the tobii before. I can't confirm that it will work or not. Maybe someone here will know?

2) Izzy can't load maya/.mb files so any fluid type visuals would have to be done with existing actors, freeframe or quartz composer on mac.

3) Maybe you can run the software in maya stand alone?

4) Do you need isadora to do any additional live effects?

primaldivine

Tobii is a Windows only eyetracking camera that sits on top of your monitor screen. It seems to be still in development, though a small number of early apps exist for it.
To use it with Isadora means writing an app to send the data in a format Isadora can accept. MIDI, OSC, Serial etc.
Ditto for Maya...

nick

http://www.tobii.com do have a long history in eye tracking - I have used some of their AAC devices with people in the past.

I haven't looked at this for a few years now, but all the units I have used needed calibrating with an individual to work well - depends how precisely you need to know where they are looking.

There are a couple of free apps that aren't as robust but may be worth trying

http://cameramouse.org

http://www.tecnologiasaccesibles.com/en/headmouse.htm

and if you want to hack one

http://www.eyewriter.org

Fred

Kyle macdonald (if you are getting into interactive stuff then it is a name you should know) has made this addon for openframeworks https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ofxCv, it has been ported to a variety of platforms including vvvv, and I think processing (it was a WIP last time I checked but active) but not to Isadora, it has some good and basic face fature tracking. For more detailed eye position information you can try using this library, again it is for openframeworks https://github.com/kylemcdonald/ofxFaceTracker it has the eye tracking stuff ready to go as long as you can get the user into the right situation (as with all of these solutions- ie have their eyes clearly visible from a god angle in the camera) ,the eyewriter project linked above is kind of dead and you will go crazy trying to get it going as it relied on a lot of custom code that you will not find easily.

Isadora will be able to play back content (it is great for movies), but no other software will play your maya files, mayas rendering pipeline is unique and if you wanted this to be interactive you need to re-create it in an interactive environment. Typically for this kind of application people use unity or unreal game engines and then remote the system with OSC, or make the visuals using shaders and pure opengl/glsl and run them inside OF, or processing. As yet Isadora lacks the capability to support this as well as lacking a community of custom actor designers and a simple system for integrating external libraries into custom actors.