Argos

Welcome!

This blog was created as a place to track status, progress, issues, and ideas for my (Me = Dimitri Diakopoulos) Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2009 project. Now post-GSoC, Argos is still in active development where this site will act as a project homepage. Below you’ll find some history on GSoC, some motivations and goals of Argos, and lastly some acknowledgments.

For those unfamiliar, the Summer of Code was started in 2005 by the Google open-source program. The idea is to connect student developers with major open-source companies, and over the course of a 10 week period, work with the company to contribute or improve various aspects of their offerings – all subsidized by Google.  My proposal was to the NUI Group, which you can read here.

The NUI Group is an informal collection of researchers and enthusiasts interested in new paradigms of human computer interaction. So far, their efforts have primarily been aimed in the multi-touch domain, a technology that combines computer vision, gesture recognition, tactile computing, info-viz, and many other domains of research.

As a musician, I can see many contexts where the multi-touch paradigm can mediate the production, composition, or performance of music. Since no major audio or music creation application natively supports multi-touch (or where the UI is designed to facilitate such), the next best option is to use MIDI or OpenSoundControl to direct internal parameters of the software using an external interface. To this end, there have been no open-source solutions to create multi-touch enabled interfaces conveniently (for a musician) and in an extensible fashion (for a software developer).

openFrameworks (oF) is a cross-platform C++ framework for realizing creative applications. For an artist, oF abstracts a lot of the platform-dependent code such as rendering and event-handling, and allows a programmer to concentrate primarily on their creative pursuits. oF is currently in a pre-release stage, quickly assembling many talented developers interested in seeing the project mature. Through the use of ‘addons,’ which are not core to the functionality of oF, items like hardware communication, audio synthesis, and vision tracking can be integrated into an application.

Argos will be an application built in oF using a custom widget library to provide a drag-and-drop approach to building interfaces. It will have a number of features: a connection pane for MIDI/OSC connectivity, a UI-control browser, grid-based layout system, and ZUI functionality though the use of an in-concept views system. The builder is dual-function in that the user can lock the interface after editing and directly use the GUI.

During GSoC, I worked with my NUI Group mentor Seth Sandler, who created the open-source vision-tracker tBeta (now titled Community Core Vision, CCV) as a GSoC student last summer, and who is also a fellow musician.

Acknowledgements: Memo Akten for his design of the Interactive Object; Todd Vanderlin for his work on ofxSimpleGUI; and the Jazz Mutant Lemur team for their pioneering vision of a musical interface builder. The entire Argos project is indebted to the open-source community that has formed around openFrameworks.

Thanks for reading!