Exposing an intersense cube via VRPN

[nihohit]

Hi,

I'm trying to set up PPT's MoCap plugin, but I'm a bit confused.

The way we are setup is that we have two machines, call them A and B - one with the Intersense cube attached to it (well, the cube is on a helmet attached to the machine) and the other running PPT Studio. The two machines are connected via ethernet.

As far as I understand, I need to have a VRPN server running on machine A so that the VRPN Input plugin on machine B can read from it. Is this correct?

If so, how do I expose this functionality? Machine B does have Vizard, if I'm missing something there. Otherwise, I have tried to download the actual VRPN server from here: http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/vrpn/ but I've found a dearth of data on how to configure that server so as to expose the Intersense cube. Does anybody here know?

Thank you.

[Jeff]

With the VRPN plug-in in Vizard you can create a server to stream the Intersense data:

#Add VRPN extension
vrpn = viz.add('vrpn7.dle')

#Create a server
server = vrpn.addTrackerServer('VizardTracker')

#Get the Intersense tracker
isense = viz.add('intersense.dle') 
tracker = isense.addTracker()

#Set tracker that server uses
server.setTracker(tracker)

In PPT, specify the VRPN server when you configure the VRPN input plug-in. Here that would be:

VizardTracker@Render-PC

where Render-PC is the name of the machine running Vizard.

If the script is not running and streaming data you'll see error messages in PPT Studio when the VRPN Input plug-in is added.

[nihohit]

Thank you very much, that solved the problem.

Is there any way I can run this server "in the background", so that I don't get errors on the ppt machine whenever my main script isn't running?

Currently, it looks like worldviz can only run one script at a time.

[Jeff]

If the error message is showing up in PPT Studio before running the script it's not a problem. You probably want to clear the message after the script starts so you can see if anything happens while it's running.

[nihohit]

Well, no, the error showing up is that it's not receiving intersense input - not surprising.

Doesn't that hurt the initial calibration I did in MoCap if the server keeps going on and off?

[Jeff]

That should be fine. The initial mocap calibration will not be affected if the stream is interrupted.