 The Story Thus Far...I've been researching the Wii remote a bit and seeing what kind of open sourse / free software has been released for it, and luckily its fairly abundant. There seem to be drivers for all OS (which is nice if i hope to do something platform independant) and theere are a few monitoring type software packages I can use for testing the motion sensing & the buttons. I think this part of the thesis will work out well, I just need to see how sensitive the remote really is.
The physics however seems very problematic. Maya 8.5's new system is very nice, but I am still not convinced i can make it work for the system I would like. Another alternative (which may be easier) would be to write my own plugin that is independant of Maya. There are also some API (AGEIA's comes to mind) that allow physics in maya, so I will look more into those.
I've found a particualr implementation of depth of field that is very well done, and I think that I will be using that research. It's not the most exact, but it does give a very good indication on out of focus objects.
There seems to be no reference on replacing Maya's preview renderer. I've been suggested to talk to Alias/Autodesks support on the matter.
Another thing that I've yet to figure out is how i would handle already rigged cameras and whether or not I would want to add a crane or track style camera to mayas current system. I think it would be worthwhile, even if it wasnt a part of the thesis, so we'll see.
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Thesis Work
