Sphactor: Actor Model Concurrency for Creatives
This research is related to enabling novice users to utilize computer technology. In general we can say that every novice user finds it hard to utilize modern technologies. Especially very contemporary popular technologies such as Mixed Reality require a user to know programming to fully operate the technology. While novice users are very interested in these technologies, they usually do not posses the necessary skills and can find these technologies to be intimidating.
As an example; within the university students want to work with motion capture technologies. However as soon as they want to do custom things with the sensors they need to work with the manufacturer’s C++ SDK. This is often beyond their current skill level and it would take a significant amount of time and effort to get them there by themselves. Moreover, it is beyond the current curriculum for these students to get them to the required level of programming proficiency. To overcome this hurdle we have created a simple software tool which translates the motion capture data to Open Sound Control (OSC). The reason we translate to OSC was due to the fact that all tools operated by our students can receive OSC out of the box. By doing this we noticed the barrier for operating the motion capture technology was lowered sufficiently for students to become very creative with the possibilities of capturing motion. As this is was the intended goal of the exercise for our students we began plotting how we could expand this to more technologies. Extrapolating what would be needed to do this more showed an immediate jungle of tools emerging with a maintenance challenge to keep it running on students machines. Therefore we wanted to develop an environment in which we could connect any number of systems. We envisioned this as an intermediate software layer in which we could plug any technology. Ideally this could plug into other tools instead of being its own tool.
Besides lowering the barriers for newcomers we want to embed a didactic view on utilizing technologies. As we want our students to move from solely ‘using’ to also ‘operating’ and programming technologies, we would like to give them a sustainable learning path. We often see tools that are comfortable for students to use but limit them in the long run when the student wants more than the tool can provide. Finally we notice that current student’s computers are equipped with multiple processors but the tools they operate sporadically utilize all these processors. We therefore researched how utilizing multiple processors could be integrated from the start. In this research, we develop a first prototype with the specific intent to address the above mentioned situations while also providing us with intermediate technology we can improve on. The prototype is referred to as ‘Sphactor’.