Should my PPT Machine have a Vizard license? (Urgent)

[Brandyn]

I'm trying to finish up a project involving our PPT system at Michigan Technological University, purchased through Robert Pastel. It seems that the system has a trial version of Vizard on it, and as far as I know I can't easily access the camera data without using vizard (as a matter of fact I have a python script sent up to packetize it and stream it, but it relies on the viz import and therefore I can't use command line python).

It looks like the trial just expired, and that puts me in a bit of a bind concerning completion of this project. I am led to believe that if Vizard is required for accessing the camera data, that a license would be standard on the machine. Is there any way we could resolve this? If not, do you have any solutions I could pursue for a limited time deployment? We do all our Vizard rendering on a different machine, but without the tracking data it's not very useful.

[mspusch]

hi Brandyn, this problem should be easy to solve. normally, you should not need Vizard on the PPT computer, but it sounds in your case it was used to send packets of data to another computer.

please contact worldviz support about this (support@worldviz.com), and they will issue you a Vizard LITE license for the PPT computer.

[Brandyn]

Thank you for the suggestion. You had mentioned that you would normally not need a Vizard license on the PPT machine. Is there a different way to access the ppt plugin from python other than through the vizard interface?

[wayne]

Hi there Brandyn,

We install a trial version of Vizard onto our PPT machines so that you have the ability to try it out, but it is definitely not needed to run PPT in any way.

PPT exports its data in a variety of ways, such as a serial cable, VRPN over Ethernet, and shared memory. Using the serial cable, you have a separate machine running Vizard which reads the data in and then makes it available to the Vizard application. Using VRPN, any application can read the data from the PPT machine. Shared memory is designed to talk to Vizard running on the same machine.

Is your application that reads the PPT data a Vizard application, or is it something else? This is definitely something we can work out for you, please email me directly and we can discuss what you are trying to do and the best way to solve the problem.

regards,
Wayne