[AG-TECH] 3D placement in RAT

[Robert Putnam]

Dear Andrew,

You've pretty much described the system that I'm working on.  (It uses
rat's built-in 3D positioning as well as the highlighting of vic window
borders to give users an indication of who is speaking at a given time.)  I
demonstrated it at SC'03 back in November and hope to unleash it on the AG
community within the next couple of months.


Robert Putnam
putnam at bu.edu
(617) 353-8295

   Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 15:07:28 -0800 (PST)
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   I have been using the 3D effect in RAT and am quite pleased with it with
   our 14-foot screen - the 3D positioning gives a useful cue as to who is
   talking. I recompiled Rat with the default set to Identity rather than
   HRTF as it gives a better effect.

   What I'd like to do is turn on 3D by default, and get easier control of
   the azimuth. I had thought there was some magic going on between RAT and
   Vic to set this, but on looking at the code I think the control is going
   between rat-ui and rat-media, and the azimuths are being set randomly
   (spread out over N participants between azimuth-min and azimuth-max, I
   think)

   Ideally the azimuth would be set to correspond with the placement of the
   video window on the screen. I've no idea how to do this, and besides for
   sites with more than one camera how can the software know which picture
   has the person in it. I guess a config file read by both Vic and Rat might
   work for repeated conferences, with something along the lines
   of "video from a.b.c.d Main goes at +20+200, Presenter goes at +20+600
   and audio from a.b.c.d has azimuth -42"

   Failing that, it would be nice to have sliders for azimuth on the main Rat
   GUI next to the per-site volume ones, but my Tcl isn't quite up to it. I
   may hack on it nevertheless.

   Another thing that might be nice would be to provide a visual cue
   (changing the banner colour of the Vic window) for who's talking, and/or
   maybe a visual cue in the Rat participant list. I think the diamond shows
   RTP loss or something but it's not obvious, and not obvious who's talking.

   (as you might guess I'm one of those people who is useless at remembering
   voices and faces, and would really like a highlighted note "Joe Blow -
   Acme Inc." light up when he's speaking, instead of a Vic window saying
   "Acme" and a Rat line saying "Joe", or maybe "192.168.3.4" .... )

   -- 
   Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
   Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376
   security at triumf.ca