Different routes

Since we have re-started development on our baby project it has become apparant that we are now getting to the narrow end of our steep-learning curve - perhaps our baby project is becoming a teenager maturing, the question we continue to ask ourselves is: Where do we go from here ?

To this end we have looked into which platform we will develop on; how we are going to implement our 'magic mirror window' and how we are going to construct our beta interactive prototype.

Processing is a rapid-prototyping java api and ide, which provides easy access to 3D graphics and basic visual programming whilst providing advanced functionality through the standard java packages. At the moment our development experiments favour this platform for it's extra versatility in a short time-span.

However, even with the advantages provided by Processing the implementation of our prototype poses a number of challenges to our success: Tracking the movement of a user's head (without peripherals) requires a lot of horsepower; rendering a scene in 3D requires some more horsepower and pre-rendering the scene we want to display requires a lot of donkey-work. So in short we need two or more Horses and a Donkey and our computers can only *do* Gigahertz…

Gareth Williams - Interactive Developer