Jason A. Gorski
Electro
Many, if not most, of the sample projects require Electro. Electro was created and is maintained by Robert Kooima of the Electronics Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). It is a scene-graph based application development environment which uses the Lua scripting language. It allows for rapid prototyping of games/animations. We were encourage and often required to use Electro for our projects because it has built-in capabilities for running on both standard computer monitors and the enormous high-resolution tiled displays housed at EVL.
Electro uses SDL and ODE to provide decent positional audio, physics dynamics, and shader capabilities. Due to the development phases of Electro, my projects often rely on a specific build in order to work. The build that is required is specified on each project’s page.
Another advantage to Electro is that it includes the ability to access a runtime console which can be used to call any function that has been loaded, print out variable values, and more. To access this prompt simply hit F1. Any function/variable defined by the program may then be accessed.
Electro can be found here:
http://www.evl.uic.edu/rlk/electro/
Twaka
Twaka was created by Andrew Johnson of the Electronics Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Twaka is used to provide real-time motion capture data to Electro. This enables applications designed to use Electro’s real-time tracking capabilities to be run and controlled without the necessary tracking equipment.
Twaka can be downloaded here:
Frameworks
