Welcome to the Real World – Kinect in Squeak
21 January, 2011
The newly-launched Microsoft Kinect has been causing a lot of excitement in hacker circles since its recent launch, due to its open interfaces, and the Smalltalk community has already got some great uses of this device.
The Kinect is a device, intended to be used as an accessory for the X-Box, which interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light, allowing live controller-less interaction by interpretation of movement and posture. This makes it a great complement to existing project teams working in Smalltalk.
Ricardo Moran was a member of the team from the Grupo de Investigación en Robótica Autónoma at CAETI in Argentina who won the 2010 ESUG Innovation Technology Awards with Physical Etoys, their Arduino-based interface to Squeak which allowed them to monitor and control robots as they drove round the conference hall. They spent their prize money wisely, buying a Kinect! Building on the work done by Stephen Howell in getting the Kinect working with Scratch (a visual programming environment developed at MIT), they have now shown how to use the Kinect to control activities in Etoys, using the existing OSCeleton framework to provide the skeleton interpretation interface. Their approach is documented in more detail on their blog.
Another approach to integrating data from the Kinect is that taken in Nikolay Suslov’s separate and equally impressive implementation which uses the lower-level OpenKinect driver to access the raw colour and depth information and pass this into his bespoke Krestianstvo images, where he then does the detailed video processing and interpretation in Smalltalk, which reduces his reliance on external, platform-specific code. His blog gives more details of his implementation as well as source code, and pre-built images.
Cuis 3.0 released
15 January, 2011
Juan Vuletich has just announced the release of version 3.0 of Cuis.
Cuis is a free Smalltalk-80 environment originally derived from Squeak by Juan with a vision of creating a simple and powerful environment by stripping out the layers of complexity that have accreted as Squeak has been developed over many years. In particular, this has meant major re-design of Morphic code in Cuis.
Version 3.0 includes the core of a new architecture for cleaner separation of view and model for text morphs, as well a first version of a powerful theming framework developed by Casey Ransberger, giving simple control over every aspect of the appearance of the Cuis user interface. A number of sample themes have already been developed to demonstrate the power of this framework: DarkTheme as shown above demonstrates dark, translucent windows for late-night Linux hackers.
Download the Cuis 3.0 package for yourself to see the new code in action – it runs happily on existing VMs.
Bringing Multimedia (back) to Squeak
6 January, 2011
Sean DeNigris has been doing some great archaeology recently, and with help from some of the original Sophie team, he has managed to get some of Sophie’s rich multimedia capabilities working in mainstream Squeak images.
Sophie is a multimedia editing environment that was originally written in Squeak, although more recently it has been rewritten in Java.
The screenshot above shows a video being played by the QuickTime plugin, and being presented as a morph in Squeak. Sean shows in his blog post how to get this up and running in a few minutes in Squeak on OS X. There’s also a great discussion on the squeak-dev mailing list.
There’s still lots of gems to be uncovered in the Sophie code base, but this is a great starting point!
