First, I got the headset. Very nice.
Second, there is a company, sixense, that looks to be making some very good immersive hardware and a free(?) api. This might be very good for the pointing test. And they have some nice sound (midi) code too. It’s somehow tied up with Intel’s perceptual computing effort. I learned about this from a slashdotted article about the Holodeck Project.
Not much to report today, except that everything worked the way it was supposed to.
So the next step is to get three more amps, six more actuators, and some kind of headgear. And maybe some kind of rigid helmet to attach the actuators to? I’m thinking I can use one of my old bike helmets to start with.
Anyway. Progress!
So, after following the link from yesterday’s post, I put the following call in, just after main().
System.setProperty("j3d.audiodevice", "com.sun.j3d.audioengines.javasound.JavaSoundMixer");
It all compiles fine and runs! I get the following warning:
*** *** WARNING: JavaSoundMixer: Streaming (uncached) audio not implemented ***
But since at this point I’m only interested in looping sounds anyway, this should be just fine. Nothing like a 13 year old code base that still works. A toast to Sun.
And we get 3D graphics to boot:
Now I need to get the Dolby unit installed and running, and hook up the amp to my collection of tactile transducers. Tomorrow?
Being a creature of habit, my thought was to go to J3D and use their api, which is quite nice, though essentially unchanged since 2000. It was split off of the main development line when Oracle came in and was then moved off to Java.net – more specifically, java3d.java.net.
Since I have the “The Java 3D API Specification 2nd ed”, I downloaded the latest version (1.5.2) and installed it, pulled out the audio examples from the book’s CD (I know, how quaint), loaded everything into eclipse and built the three examples and their support classes.
Things were not happy when I tried to run though. I got an error saying that I shouldn’t use the 32 bit libraries on a 64 bit machine. Problem is, I have an Intel chip and the dll is for AMD chips. So I uninstalled the 32 bit code and tried out the 64-bit. By golly it compiles and runs. The only problem is the following:
java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: No AudioDevice specified at com.sun.j3d.utils.universe.Viewer.createAudioDevice(Viewer.java:986) at SimpleSounds.init(SimpleSounds.java:232) at com.sun.j3d.utils.applet.MainFrame.run(MainFrame.java:267) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722) Java 3D: audio is disabled
Now, I know I have audio on my gaming-level development box, so that’s disturbing. This forum post looks promising. I’ll give that a try tomorrow. Failing that, I can go to the LWJGL, which has hooks to OpenAL. That appears to have more activity, and I like the LWJGL folks, they write good code. They even have tutorials!
In addition, I’ve ordered a Vantec USB External 7.1 Channel Audio Adapter, and an Audio Mini Amplifier to try hooking up various sound sources to my collection of tactile transducers from Parts Express.
Phlog 