[vtkusers] VTK in a MultiTouch Environment

[Christopher Denter]

Hello,

my name is Christopher and I'm a CS student currently searching for a  
topic for my bachelor's thesis. One topic that I'd find particularly  
interesting is an application that visualizes rendered volumes and  
allows the user(s) to explore the set of data by using multitouch  
gestures.
For an example of how this may look in practice, please see this  
remarkable video: http://www.vimeo.com/6866296

For the rendering part, I would like to use VTK so I don't need to  
write the volume rendering myself.
The actual GUI and interaction would be made with PyMT [0], a python  
library that allows you to write multitouch applications with ease.

There are two main problems here that I already see:
	a) Is it possible to take the rendered volume and use it in my PyMT  
application (which has an OpenGL context itself)? Of course, this  
needs to be fast enough to allow for actual interaction with the user.  
If yes, how would I do that?
	b) What do I need to do in order to translate finger gestures into  
VTK commands like 'rotate the volume' or 'show everything up to that  
particular slice'? Is that even possible properly?

I understand that (as chapter 13 of the user's guide explains) you can  
subclass vtkRenderWindowInteractor and friends, but those seem a bit  
mouse and keyboard centric (because you need to override methods such  
as onMiddleButtonDown()). However, both mouse and keyboard is  
something you do not usually have in a multitouch environment (as you  
can clearly see in the above video).

I would be really happy if it would be possible to realize the  
application sketched above. Thoughts on achievability are also very  
happily accepted. Keep in mind that this will be a bachelor's thesis  
with 3-6 months (of non-exclusive working time spent) and not a  
doctoral thesis.

In the hope that my questions can be answered and with best regards,
Christopher

[0] http://pymt.txzone.net