[vtkusers] VTK in a MultiTouch Environment

[Berk Geveci]

Hi Christopher,

Please keep us in the loop as you make progress in this work. It would
be great to publish it somewhere.

-berk

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Christopher Denter
<dennda at the-space-station.com> wrote:
> 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
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